On the subject of climate change, I get a little irritated (to put it mildly) at folks who still insist it doesn’t exist or that it’s a “liberal conspiracy” or some other silliness.
I’ve been watching it happen all my life. Any one who looks out the window now and then should be able to put it together for herself.
Or just deduce it, for Pete’s sake! Such as:
One of the newest “tensions” in international politics lies around control of the Artic Circle, because of all the new shipping lanes that have opened up and the changes in economy this brings. New shipping lanes; the ice melted, and what ice is left is continuing to melt. (Not to mention the now-usable land that was previously covered in ice but can now hold military and naval bases and missile silos and such.) Fact.
The American navy knew for decades about the melting artic ice, but kept it as a national secret because of the needs of submarines patrolling under the ice. Fact.
A massive percentage of the Earth’s land is now covered in black blacktop / macadam. The ground underneath would normally absorb some of the sun’s radiations and reflect some, especially if covered in foliage, which would also be taking that energy to breathe in CO2 and exhale O2, taking CO2 out of the air. Blacktop absorbs heat and then radiates it slowly back around it as nothing but heat. Fact.
The number of car engines in the world (billions!) that produce not only CO2 (and many far more nasty compounds) as exhaust but also incomprehensible amounts of heat! They are internal combustion engines, yes? We burn petroleum to turn an explosion into a clumsy and inefficient mechanical impetus: that is, move the car. Fact.
The burning of petroleum takes carbon that has been locked up geologically for millions of years and puts it into the air as CO2, simultaneously binding what was free oxygen (you know, the stuff we breathe?) in the process. So Carbon that was “never” (in human terms) in the air before is now in the air, and what was useful oxygen has been bound up into stuff that is not useful for animal respiration(1). Fact.
The denuding of the lands (cutting forests, paving over paradise, all that sort of stuff) reduces the biosphere’s (definition: biosphere means “our living room”) ability to recycle, shed, and use heat, store energy for future use, etc. And this still continues. The total acreage of living forests is reduced by many acres every second. Fact.
The argument that “this has happened before” — meaning that in times past there have been enormous upswings in CO2 levels in the air, is specious. Yes, CO2 runs in cycles, up and down — but never, ever, in any of the evidence left behind have we found anything even remotely as high as current CO2 levels and these are still rising! Fact!
Further, CO2 isn’t even the primary problem any more: we’ve moved into a secondary phase, where melting, such as of the Tundra areas, is causing organic material (grasses, swamps, etc) that were frozen for millennia (to the best of our knowledge) to now thaw and start to rot. This releases billions of tons of Methane every day. Methane, though shorter lived than CO2 (sunlight will in time break down methane; CO2 can only be “breathed in” by plants and converted biologically back to oxygen and carbon, as carbon compounds [oddly enough]), but Methane is a fabulously “better” green house gas than is CO2. Methane is far more worrisome than is CO2. Fact.
The methane problem is much harder to imagine a solution for than is the simple burning of petroleum. All we have to do with petroleum is stop using it (easy to say… hard to do, I know). But that will no longer stop the secondary effects, of which this staggering new increase in Methane is only one. Fact.
Of the last 21 years, 20 of them have each one been the new “hottest year on record” world wide. Fact.
I could go on for quite a bit longer yet…
So, if you can’t look out your window and see climate change happening (though how that can be — unless you are still very young and haven’t seen enough years go by yet to notice it for yourself — I don’t understand. Just look darn it!), you should at the very least be able to deduce it. This “industrial” life style Western Civilization (to use a term loosely) introduced us to is only a few centuries old, but that is centuries of industrial output and we are the inheritors of those consequences.(2)(3)
Ok… fine. Let’s accept the fact, and then move on the more fundamental question:
Does it matter?
Yes. It does.
To the best of our knowledge to date, the planet has never been in this position before, this much CO2 increase with this much plant / vegetation decrease, with this much stored energy (from burning things as well as general destruction) being released at the same time, not to mention the rate of CO2 increase is wholly unprecedented(4). In fact, the generation of heat from the burning of coal, petroleum, wood, and such is probably a much bigger factor in climate change than is CO2 emission, though it isn’t talked about at all.(5)
Here’s the bottom line: it is estimated, by the best data to hand, that as little as a 3 degree (6) rise in average temperature world wide would make the planet uninhabitable. It appears that since 1890 we have already raised the average temperature by 2 degrees. That suggests that simply one degree more would be terminal.
We’re already at about 2 degree (Celsius) global average temperature increase.
One more and it may be very bad…
Well, not really. Some people on the internet and such are saying 2 degrees now, but really it’s only about 1.2 – 1.5 degrees (centigrade, not Fahrenheit) — maybe, best estimate, and going from 1900 as a reference point. Also, some folks – on the other camp – say we don’t have enough data yet to say how much temperature has gone up. Well, not really. We actually have a lot of data, including ice bores that manage to capture atmospheric data for the last several thousand years, geologic (soil, as well as rock) data spread over (for instance) Europe giving fairly accurate data over the last few hundred years, and such. Certainly more data is better, and as more data is obtained the picture becomes clearer.
And bleaker.
I suspect the estimate of “3 degrees centigrade and then poof” is incorrect, but probably not by much. (Maybe five degrees. Maybe.) The fact remains, though, that the biosphere can take only so much without experiencing drastic changes and domino-like collapse (i.e., massive change) of systems.
Does that sound like a very small temperature change? I mean, the outside temperature might change by 30 degrees in a single day, right? Or it might be 10 degrees below zero in winter and 110 in the summer, right? So what’s the deal with a few degree rise? (Those numbers are Fahrenheit, of course. If that was centigrade, you’d have died right there!)
It means average temperature, not just the temperature in your own city, valley or mountain retreat. Taken this way, it’s a measure of the total energy stored in the atmosphere and the surface layers of the ground, mountains, lakes and oceans. Making the entire planet, the whole ball of wax, raise its average temperature by one degree (Fahrenheit or centigrade) is a lot of energy (a centigrade degree is larger than a Fahrenheit degree, but not by that much). A lot, a lot, a lot… I can’t say it enough. I could write out some figures, and then try to put it all in terms such of the number of Hiroshima Nuclear Bombs represented by that amount of energy — a single degree rise in average temperature — but even that number would be hard to grasp(7).
UPDATE: As I write this, by the way, did you know that an ice block 70 times the size of Manhattan just broke off from Antarctica? That just doesn’t happen… normally. Antarctica is melting. Some people have looked at satellite photos of Antarctica that show it is spreading out and say, “See! It’s getting colder, not warmer.” But that is not what’s happening. Imagine, instead, a block of ice cream melting in the sun. It spreads out first. Seen strictly from above, not taking the height into account, you might think it was growing. With insufficient data you come to an early — and incorrect — conclusion and step in the melting ice cream. Fact.
Alright, let’s be blunt now: I believe that America’s Congress is dragging its heals on this issue for two reasons: 1) they see it as damaging business and job interests to have to go green, and 2) they’d have to immediately convene a committee to establish “whose fault it is” and apply appropriate blame and punitive fines and such. Congress is like that. Piffle.
The answer to number one is that “going green” would create so many new industries and so much new economy, jobs and fortunes that no one should be worried about the economic impact; they should, in fact, be rushing forward to capitalize on the green rush, and as for the second, guess what? It’s everybody’s fault. All of us. We all did it, and we are all of us still doing it.
We all did it. All of us.
No one person or outfit is to blame more than any other(8).
So get off the dime, forget whose fault it is, forget about preserving the very mind-set and attitudes that created the problem in the first and just fix it!
Get rich by fixing it, if that’s what it takes to motivate you!
Otherwise, in 10 million years a new dominant life form can inherit the Earth, which might have returned to “normal” by then, or might have adopted a different normal. Either way I’ll tell you what, that new dominant life form won’t be derived from mammals as we know them today. Maybe cockroaches. Yuck… don’t let that happen!
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(1) By the way, if we’d gone with corn oil and/or other vegetable oil or alcohol fuels for vehicles right from the start, that would have been using carbon that was already in the air, recycling it via the biosphere, not introducing new carbon from under the ground, and also not releasing all that stored energy from all that petroleum — heat! — and we wouldn’t be experiencing this problem at all. If alcohol or vegetable oil had won the argument 100+ years ago. Alas.
(2) The 1973 movie Soylent Green was meant to show some of this “dire gloom and doom” prognostication. It was overly “hopeful” about how quickly all this would happen, though. It was set in 2025 (? more or less), and we aren’t that badly off — yet. It is happening, but more slowly. However, there is one point the movie put over quite accidentally that truly is worrisome. In the movie it was meant to be awful to the 1973 audience when Charlton Heston’s character announces “it’s still over 90 out there.” How often is it “still over 90 out there” these days and we don’t even bat an eye at it? Back in 1973 this was alarming? Yes, it was — for the particular location where the movie action is set, yes. Now it’s “just normal.”
(3) Also, another point: the pundits on both sides of the debate tend to view Human industry as a thing only one to two centuries old. Nonsense. Humans have been burning entire forests, using petroleum, exploding things and such for millennia. Northern Africa used to be grass land; Humans made it a desert, thousands of years ago. It’s in the last two hundred years (since approximately the time of the American Civil War) that “industry” crossed into some uber-energy-wasteful zone. My point is that Humans freeing the Earth’s stored energy (petroleum, coal, trees, etc) and releasing it into the air has a very long history.
(4) There’s another very alarming thing happening. Because of the warming around the equatorial zones, air conditioner manufacturers are seeing dollar signs in their eyes, and actually announced (a couple years ago) joyfully an anticipated 2 billion new air conditioner sales over the next 10 years. This is extremely alarming! All that’s going to do is make the situation worse. Much worse! Air conditioners are frightfully inefficient and energy wasteful. They don’t actually cool anything; they move heat around while creating more heat at the same time. That’s a lot more heat being generated in what is already the hottest part of the planet and nearly uninhabitable as it is. Yes, I admit, it’s a problem; generating more heat is not the solution, though. And so, the rate of CO2 production rise continues to increase; it is not going down. Bad.
(5) The climate change debates suffer greatly because the various spokes-folks fail — all of them — to take in the entire picture, to talk about the whole planet as a system and Humanity’s actions as a system. When you take in just a single piece, such as CO2 emissions, it’s too easy to gather together facts and “facts” to dismiss that one thing. It’s only when you look at all of it that it becomes quite overwhelming and inarguable.
(6) That’s a 3 degree centigrade rise in temperature. In Fahrenheit that comes to 5.4 degrees. A single degree centigrade is 9/5 of a degree Fahrenheit, or 1.8 times a Fahrenheit degree. Centigrade takes the “phase points” of water (at sea level — which is rising concept these days!) of freezing and boiling and calls those 0 and 100 respectively. Fahrenheit was based on far more esoteric and vague concepts. Centigrade is rational, however, when the climate change folks are speaking of “3 degrees and bang!” they mean centigrade degrees. Small difference, but it is a difference.
(7) By the way, I once calculated what the LA Basin (LA County, USA) consumes in energy each year and how many “Hiroshima sized A-bombs” that would amount to, and it was approximately 300 such bombs each year, in terms of the total amount of energy used and released to the environment. All energy released, by the way, ends up as heat. Cars, air conditioners, refrigerators, lights, calculators, phones, power generators, street lamps, the light coming off your TV, even the trivial little LEDs that stay lit only to show you that a thing is “turned off,” all of it ends up as heat. That’s a lot of heat. Air conditioners ultimately just make everything warmer, because they generate more heat than they pump around. (They don’t actually cool off anything. They can’t.) Even water running down-hill in pipes to get into the LA Basin will be releasing energy into the environment — gravitational potential, but energy is energy, heat is heat. Besides, it was pumped uphill in the first place, to get over the grapevine (as it’s called) for example. LA, and any large city, uses more energy and causes more heating of the environment, than most folks realize.
(8) More or less. I could cite the early energy wars in America and how exactly the auto industry got switched from corn oil / alcohol — a renewable resource that recycled existing CO2 in and from the air — to petroleum — a nasty resource — and how all that happened, what and whose vested and selfish interests were involved, etc. But really, we are all of us guilty here. Ignorance does not apply.