Updates Continued (Climate)

Updates Continued (Climate)

   A recent article in The Atlantic continued on the difficult and divisive talk of climate change, one simply titled, How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen.  Written by science writer, Charles C. Mann, he wrote what many of us were (or are) thinking: How is one supposed to respond to this kind of news?  On the one hand, the transformation of the Antarctic seems like an unfathomable disaster.  On the other hand, the disaster will never affect me or anyone I know; nor, very probably, will it trouble my grandchildren....Americans don’t even save for their own retirement!  How can we worry about such distant, hypothetical beings?...Worse, confronting climate change requires swearing off something that has been an extraordinary boon to humankind: cheap energy from fossil fuels.  In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon.

   Even the scientist Sanjayan (he currently hosts the excellent PBS series, Earth A New Wild, said this in last years Nature Conservancy magazine:  I understood the causes and consequences of climate change --intellectually at least-- yet something always nagged at me.  Like so many other things that we take on faith or professional credentials, sometimes my conversation and conviction on the subject felt more ritual than real...Scientific consensus showed me that carbon dioxide is rising quickly, and its effects are now being detected around the planet.  But as an optimist, I often struggled with something that was hard to sense in any daily way and whose effects were confounded by the chaos of weather.  I agreed that climate change was happening, but I didn't necessarily feel it.

   Still, last year saw yet another decline in wheat production (2% per decade for the past 30 years now) and 2014 was on track to become the hottest year on record for the past 135 years (final results aren't in yet but it is looking to be one for the record books).  Even worse, sensors in Antarctica (the West Antarctic Ice Sheet) show serious loosening of the glaciers from the ground, a slide that research suggests "has passed the point of no return."  That sheet alone has already (yes, already) "contributed nearly 10 percent to the recent increase in global sea levels," says an article in Discover.  Now scientists are trying to plan for what might happen should such a massive weight be lifted from the poles (sensors have also been placed in the South Pole at various locations to measure if the land is rising as the weight of the ice lessens).

   Similar studies are being conducted in India, home to nearly 10,000 glaciers (who knew?);  Switzerland is a big sponsor of the research but perhaps the largest groups of researchers there are from China (the water from the glaciers support an estimated 800 million people...lose that water and the changes could be catastrophic, both to agriculture and to industry).  Studies are also going on in New Zealand with its 3000+ glaciers just on the south island.  Ocean currents have slowed the process of rapid temperature change but new reports indicate that we might be lulled by a lull, for projections are for the past ten years of a slowing of rising temperatures to suddenly give way to steadily higher temperatures and increased droughts (the current cycle of strong trade winds and currents is expected to end in 2030).

   Another possible worry is the ocean reaching its limit of absorbing carbon dioxide (currently, 90% of the earth's heat is absorbed by the ocean, but that is primarily due to carbon "sink, a term used to describe the ocean's ability to take in and balance the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere).  This could lead to additional El Nino-type patterns caused by warming in the Pacific Ocean.

   All of this was enough to cause 400,000 people to march through Manhattan in late September (some 161 other countries also held demonstrations to bring attention to our changing climate), a reaction to a climate-change summit held in New York.  Yet when the Pew Research Center asked people in 44 countries what was the greatest global threat, climate change didn't even make the top 5 answers (#1 was nuclear weapons and #2 was inequality).

   So back to the top and Charles C. Mann's article:  As my high-school math teacher used to say, let’s do the numbers.  Roughly three-quarters of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions come from burning fossil fuels, and roughly three-quarters of that comes from just two sources: coal in its various forms, and oil in its various forms, including gasoline.  Different studies produce slightly different estimates, but they all agree that coal is responsible for more carbon dioxide than oil is—about 25 percent more.  That number is likely to increase, because coal consumption is growing much faster than oil consumption.  Although coal and oil are both fossil fuels, they are used differently. In this country, for example, the great majority of oil—about three-quarters—is consumed by individuals, as they heat their homes and drive their cars.  Almost all U.S. coal (93 percent) is burned not in homes but by electric-power plants; the rest is mainly used by industry, notably for making cement and steel.   Cutting oil use, in other words, requires huge numbers of people to change their houses and automobiles—the United States alone has 254 million vehicles on the road.  Reducing U.S. coal emissions, by contrast, means regulating 557 big power plants and 227 steel and cement factories. 

   Even moving into China and other countries,  the U.S numbers alone are 254 million people being asked to comply or having 784 industrial plants comply (burning coal, as I wrote about earlier, is a huge emitter of mercury into the air, mercury which floats and is either inhaled by our lungs or which lands in our soil and emerges in our crops and animal feed).   254,000,000 vs. 784.  Subsidizing light bulbs and car engines is fine, but perhaps subsidizing changes to our huge factories would prove more soothing to both our wallets and our worries.  And rising oceans or not, we would have at least started.

   Not so fast say the banks, for too much has been invested in just getting and processing fossil fuels, as announced by The Guardian in England.  But a paper just out from Stanford University paints a more serious concern, that of climate change creating increased drought conditions, with little relief in sight:  More frequent warm years also increase the likelihood of multiyear droughts in the future.  According to the team's analyses, the current California drought, now entering its fourth year, is one of the longest consecutive periods in the historical record during which conditions were both severely dry and severely warm.  The climate models also indicate that such conditions will become even more common if global warming continues in the future, as the state enters a regime in which there is a nearly 100 percent risk that every year is warmer than conditions experienced during the 20th century.

   I'll be talking about our water situation and drought conditions in future postings.  But next up, antibiotics...the measles outbreak might be just a flea in a bucket.