“To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.”
-Theodore Roosevelt
Climate change is back big in the media in the last couple weeks and probably not in the way that the staunchest defenders of the theory would prefer. This is despite the news actually being good for the planet and the human race in general. It turns out that the increasing temperature of the world has hit a plateau, at least for the time being. The average global temperature has actually stayed constant for the last 15 years despite all of the models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying it should be increasing.
The Fifth Assessment Report by the IPCC that is coming out soon claims it is a temporary lull, that the earth is still warming, that it is almost definitely a result of human activity, and that it was just a lack of full understanding of the earth's processes that caused them to overestimate the speed at which it would warm. Essentially, they underestimated the way the ocean would absorb heat from the atmosphere. The report is basically claiming that the debate is over and the only thing still left to ponder is whether it makes more sense to spend resources trying to prevent climate change or whether they should be used to try to prepare the most vulnerable areas for the problems it will be causing.
Skeptics are using this as a chance to say that global warming is simply a big hoax to justify expensive green policies that centralize power and funds with the UN. The large number of scientists who support the theory are said to just be a prime example of herd-mentality and dogma trumping science. For example, James Delingpole at The Telegraph accusingly writes:
"The scientific reality – that global warming has paused for 15 years; that climate sensitivity appears to be far smaller than the scaremongering computer models predicted – cannot be allowed to derail all the expensive and intrusive programmes (from wind farms to green investment banks to hideous, flickery, dull low energy light bulbs) which have been introduced in order to "combat climate change."'
He rightly points out that the third, fourth, and fifth IPCC reports have been repeating a very gloomy tale of how we're all totally screwed by our C02 emissions even while the earth's temperature was straying from the predictions of the models by staying constant.
Also being pointed out is that The Associated Press received leaked documents stating that the US government and those of several European countries have been trying to pressure climate scientists into downplaying the lack of temperature increase in the newest report. The AP reported that “Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted, saying a time span of 10-15 years was misleading in the context of climate change, which is measured over decades and centuries.”
Considering that there is an international agreement that there will actually be a meaningful international agreement regarding climate change set out by 2015, it's easy to understand why some people would want this fact ignored. However, that doesn't justify trying to pressure scientists to misrepresent the facts even if they agree that it's a temporary lull and shouldn't carry disproportional weight. Good on the scientists who worked on the report for not leaving out this Inconvenient Truth. Ha, see what I did there? Gore reference yo.
Anyway, I personally feel that our emissions likely are heating the earth to some degree. I have no real idea how much but the greenhouse theory seems to make sense and it's hard to imagine our constant polluting will have no negative consequences. It's clear that we're definitely responsible for increasing the amount of C02 in the atmosphere which has jumped from 280 parts per million during pre-industrial times to 400 ppm as of this year. To those people who like to use the argument that this is a good thing because carbon dioxide is plant food, I assume you will think it equally good when I drown you in ravioli because too much of a necessary can never be bad apparently.
Either way, these findings are definitely being touted as a victory over alarmist environmentalists and will provide political cover for simply continuing business as usual. Which is a problem even if turns out that climate change isn't.
Simply put, I feel that climate change is essentially a red herring and should not be the primary issue focused on by environmentalists. Whether or not the earth is heating by a tiny amount is hard to prove is happening, hard to prove actually matters, and simply does not cause most people to care in the same way other environmental issues do whose affects are more blatant. The fact is that we are living on a big rock that spins around a massive constantly-exploding nuclear reactor in space. The cycles of the sun will have a big affect on the planet's temperature regardless of what we do as will natural cycles of the earth. Using only the temperature of the planet as our benchmark for how we're doing in our stewardship of the planet is a bit ridiculous from this perspective. It seems that spending our energy trying to force through policies that we hope will reduce that number seems like it must hurt our efforts on other aspects that may be more important.
There are two main issues that I think we should be emphasizing instead if we want more public support for environmental legislation.
1. Loss of natural life and biodiversity: Humans have unfortunately become the sixth wave of mass extinction in the last half-billion years which puts us in direct competition with a massive chunk of space-rock that slammed into the earth and resulted in a dust cloud that blocked out the sun. The natural "background" rate of extinction is supposed to be roughly one to five species per year who die since they didn't evolve to meet changing circumstances. It's now estimated that we're losing 1,000 to 10,000 more species per year than would happen naturally with dozens disappearing daily.
Most of this is occurring due to habitat destruction and introducing foreign species into areas where they are not supposed to be and that cannot handle them. Due to the interconnectedness of players in ecological systems, a snowballing effect is likely as species who are food for other species disappear. Roughly 50% of our primate brethren are at risk of extinction and of the 12,914 species of plants that the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has been able to assess, about 68% of them are at risk of dying away. This is even more unfortunate than just forever losing cool types of life that took millions of years to evolve. It's important to remember that much of our medicine and consumer products come from these species and we have no idea what amazing biological chemistry is being lost.
The loss of plant life is also a huge problem considering that photosynthesis is needed to transform the excess C02 from our burnt fossil fuels into breathable oxygen. Since the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago, the amount of forest coverage of the earth has been reduced from 45% of the earth's land area, or 6 billion hectares, to 31%, or 4 billion hectares. Although some of this loss was due to natural climate fluctuations, in the last 5,000 years, there has been a loss of about 1.8 billion hectares or an average of 360,000 per year. We've managed a slowdown on this front in the last decade as countries develop but we're still moving in the wrong direction. Remember, if we have enough plants going, we can basically dump as much C02 into the atmosphere as we want. It's kinda the equivalent of chowing down Big Macs between weightlifting sets. Still not pretty but can work.
Unfortunately, the oceans are doing equally poorly. We're eating on average 17 kg of fish per year per person, about 4 times what people ate in 1950. About 85% of global fish stocks are depleted, overly-exploited, or in the process of recovering from being overly exploited. Bottom trawling, the process of dragging heavy nets along the bottom of the ocean to avoid missing anything, have ripped up the ecosystems that support underwater life and has turned big areas of the Mediterranean and North Sea into lifeless deserts. Horribly enough, on average, 20 pounds of ocean life are caught, die in nets, and are then discarded for every pound of shrimp caught for consumption. That doesn't sound sustainable to me.
2. Ocean Acidification: Contributing to our sea problems is this next point, the acidification of our oceans via the absorption of C02. Personally, I find this to be a good rebuttal when discussing climate change and someone denies it is happening or will matter or that C02 is causing it. Simply put, it doesn't matter because ocean acidification is happening and will have serious consequences on its own.
Check out this site for a cool photographic comparison between coral growing normally and coral growing in an environment where C02 is overly-abundant due to leaks in the ocean floor. If you didn't click it, basically the C02-saturated ocean environment looks gross and unhealthy. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, ocean acidity has increased about 30%. This is because the burning of fossil fuels releases C02 into the atmosphere and about a quarter of that, roughly 8 pounds per person per day, is absorbed by the ocean. That's about 20 trillion pounds per year and means that the ocean will saturated with enough carbon dioxide to have all coral look like the unhealthy sample in 60 to 80 years.
The changing sea chemistry is happening much sooner than expected and the decreased pH level has already started causing problems. It has killed billions of oysters, mussels, and is softening clams and killing baby scallops. In addition, it is dissolving plankton which could have huge consequences since plankton is responsible for a large amount of the earths C02-to-oxygen converting. Basically anything that relies on having a shell is in trouble.
The weakening of calcium carbonate caused by acidification also results in coral bleaching and means that coral has trouble growing naturally or reforming after being damaged by bottom trawling. This results in less of the fish who rely on these coral reefs. In addition, acidification, increasing ocean temperatures, overfishing and destruction of predatory fish habitats have also had the weird and concerning effect of causing the Rise of the Jellyfish.
Jellyfish are problematic in that they are immune to acidification and can eat things much higher on the food-chain than themselves. When a species of them, Mnemiopsis leidyi, was accidentally released into the Black Sea in the 80s, it rapidly consumed almost everything and wound up being 95% of the biomass in the area. Problems with the booming jellyfish populations have already been noted:
"(In 2011), nuclear power plants in Scotland, Japan, Israel and Florida, and also a desalination plant in Israel, were forced to shutdown because jellyfish were clogging the water inlets. The entire Irish salmon industry was wiped out in 2007 after a plague of billions of mauve stingers – covering an area of 10 sq miles (26 sq km) and 35ft (11m) deep – attacked the fish cages. Two years later, a fish farm in Tunisia lost a year's production of sea bream and sea bass after jellyfish invasions. Perhaps the most extraordinary blooms have been those occurring in waters off Japan. There, refrigerator-sized gelatinous monsters called Nomuras, weighing 485lb (220 kg) and measuring 6.5ft (2m) in diameter, have swarmed the Japan Sea annually since 2002, clogging fishing nets, overturning trawlers and devastating coastal livelihoods. These assaults have cost the Japanese fisheries industry billions of yen in losses."
Nuclear jellyfish. Clearly a fairly serious problem. It's not pleasant to ponder that we may be returning to the Precambrian era when the oceans basically only had jellyfish in them.
Although there are certainly other environmental aspects that need looking at, I feel these two can be major rallying points since they are so clear-cut. On one hand, putting more money towards planting trees and preventing deforestation seems like something everyone can get behind since it will reduce atmospheric C02 in addition to generate beautiful habitats for animals. On the other hand, transitioning the argument away from being that C02 possibly causes the world's average temperature to rise to being that C02 definitely turns the ocean into an acidic, jellyfish-haunted wasteland seems like a smarter way to go about things.
And remember, none of this is to say that I don't believe the earth is getting warmer or that climate change is not a real thing that we're at least partially responsible for. Last year, 15,000 warmest temperature records were broken in the US in March alone. That sounds pretty severe to me.
All I'm suggesting is that the message used to get the point across to the masses move away from abstract and complicated climate temperature science towards more complete view of the earth's health as a whole with an emphasis on things we can see and that people can emotionally relate to. Trying to make necessary policies that need to be enacted ASAP based solely on a theory of rising temperatures during a period of non-rising temperatures is simply not gonna work.
The battle for people's opinions is a fickle one. When the red herring aren't biting, jellyfish may prove an easier catch.
AS
-Theodore Roosevelt
Climate change is back big in the media in the last couple weeks and probably not in the way that the staunchest defenders of the theory would prefer. This is despite the news actually being good for the planet and the human race in general. It turns out that the increasing temperature of the world has hit a plateau, at least for the time being. The average global temperature has actually stayed constant for the last 15 years despite all of the models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying it should be increasing.
The Fifth Assessment Report by the IPCC that is coming out soon claims it is a temporary lull, that the earth is still warming, that it is almost definitely a result of human activity, and that it was just a lack of full understanding of the earth's processes that caused them to overestimate the speed at which it would warm. Essentially, they underestimated the way the ocean would absorb heat from the atmosphere. The report is basically claiming that the debate is over and the only thing still left to ponder is whether it makes more sense to spend resources trying to prevent climate change or whether they should be used to try to prepare the most vulnerable areas for the problems it will be causing.
Skeptics are using this as a chance to say that global warming is simply a big hoax to justify expensive green policies that centralize power and funds with the UN. The large number of scientists who support the theory are said to just be a prime example of herd-mentality and dogma trumping science. For example, James Delingpole at The Telegraph accusingly writes:
"The scientific reality – that global warming has paused for 15 years; that climate sensitivity appears to be far smaller than the scaremongering computer models predicted – cannot be allowed to derail all the expensive and intrusive programmes (from wind farms to green investment banks to hideous, flickery, dull low energy light bulbs) which have been introduced in order to "combat climate change."'
He rightly points out that the third, fourth, and fifth IPCC reports have been repeating a very gloomy tale of how we're all totally screwed by our C02 emissions even while the earth's temperature was straying from the predictions of the models by staying constant.
Also being pointed out is that The Associated Press received leaked documents stating that the US government and those of several European countries have been trying to pressure climate scientists into downplaying the lack of temperature increase in the newest report. The AP reported that “Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted, saying a time span of 10-15 years was misleading in the context of climate change, which is measured over decades and centuries.”
Considering that there is an international agreement that there will actually be a meaningful international agreement regarding climate change set out by 2015, it's easy to understand why some people would want this fact ignored. However, that doesn't justify trying to pressure scientists to misrepresent the facts even if they agree that it's a temporary lull and shouldn't carry disproportional weight. Good on the scientists who worked on the report for not leaving out this Inconvenient Truth. Ha, see what I did there? Gore reference yo.
Anyway, I personally feel that our emissions likely are heating the earth to some degree. I have no real idea how much but the greenhouse theory seems to make sense and it's hard to imagine our constant polluting will have no negative consequences. It's clear that we're definitely responsible for increasing the amount of C02 in the atmosphere which has jumped from 280 parts per million during pre-industrial times to 400 ppm as of this year. To those people who like to use the argument that this is a good thing because carbon dioxide is plant food, I assume you will think it equally good when I drown you in ravioli because too much of a necessary can never be bad apparently.
Either way, these findings are definitely being touted as a victory over alarmist environmentalists and will provide political cover for simply continuing business as usual. Which is a problem even if turns out that climate change isn't.
Simply put, I feel that climate change is essentially a red herring and should not be the primary issue focused on by environmentalists. Whether or not the earth is heating by a tiny amount is hard to prove is happening, hard to prove actually matters, and simply does not cause most people to care in the same way other environmental issues do whose affects are more blatant. The fact is that we are living on a big rock that spins around a massive constantly-exploding nuclear reactor in space. The cycles of the sun will have a big affect on the planet's temperature regardless of what we do as will natural cycles of the earth. Using only the temperature of the planet as our benchmark for how we're doing in our stewardship of the planet is a bit ridiculous from this perspective. It seems that spending our energy trying to force through policies that we hope will reduce that number seems like it must hurt our efforts on other aspects that may be more important.
There are two main issues that I think we should be emphasizing instead if we want more public support for environmental legislation.
1. Loss of natural life and biodiversity: Humans have unfortunately become the sixth wave of mass extinction in the last half-billion years which puts us in direct competition with a massive chunk of space-rock that slammed into the earth and resulted in a dust cloud that blocked out the sun. The natural "background" rate of extinction is supposed to be roughly one to five species per year who die since they didn't evolve to meet changing circumstances. It's now estimated that we're losing 1,000 to 10,000 more species per year than would happen naturally with dozens disappearing daily.
Most of this is occurring due to habitat destruction and introducing foreign species into areas where they are not supposed to be and that cannot handle them. Due to the interconnectedness of players in ecological systems, a snowballing effect is likely as species who are food for other species disappear. Roughly 50% of our primate brethren are at risk of extinction and of the 12,914 species of plants that the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has been able to assess, about 68% of them are at risk of dying away. This is even more unfortunate than just forever losing cool types of life that took millions of years to evolve. It's important to remember that much of our medicine and consumer products come from these species and we have no idea what amazing biological chemistry is being lost.
The loss of plant life is also a huge problem considering that photosynthesis is needed to transform the excess C02 from our burnt fossil fuels into breathable oxygen. Since the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago, the amount of forest coverage of the earth has been reduced from 45% of the earth's land area, or 6 billion hectares, to 31%, or 4 billion hectares. Although some of this loss was due to natural climate fluctuations, in the last 5,000 years, there has been a loss of about 1.8 billion hectares or an average of 360,000 per year. We've managed a slowdown on this front in the last decade as countries develop but we're still moving in the wrong direction. Remember, if we have enough plants going, we can basically dump as much C02 into the atmosphere as we want. It's kinda the equivalent of chowing down Big Macs between weightlifting sets. Still not pretty but can work.
Unfortunately, the oceans are doing equally poorly. We're eating on average 17 kg of fish per year per person, about 4 times what people ate in 1950. About 85% of global fish stocks are depleted, overly-exploited, or in the process of recovering from being overly exploited. Bottom trawling, the process of dragging heavy nets along the bottom of the ocean to avoid missing anything, have ripped up the ecosystems that support underwater life and has turned big areas of the Mediterranean and North Sea into lifeless deserts. Horribly enough, on average, 20 pounds of ocean life are caught, die in nets, and are then discarded for every pound of shrimp caught for consumption. That doesn't sound sustainable to me.
2. Ocean Acidification: Contributing to our sea problems is this next point, the acidification of our oceans via the absorption of C02. Personally, I find this to be a good rebuttal when discussing climate change and someone denies it is happening or will matter or that C02 is causing it. Simply put, it doesn't matter because ocean acidification is happening and will have serious consequences on its own.
Check out this site for a cool photographic comparison between coral growing normally and coral growing in an environment where C02 is overly-abundant due to leaks in the ocean floor. If you didn't click it, basically the C02-saturated ocean environment looks gross and unhealthy. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, ocean acidity has increased about 30%. This is because the burning of fossil fuels releases C02 into the atmosphere and about a quarter of that, roughly 8 pounds per person per day, is absorbed by the ocean. That's about 20 trillion pounds per year and means that the ocean will saturated with enough carbon dioxide to have all coral look like the unhealthy sample in 60 to 80 years.
The changing sea chemistry is happening much sooner than expected and the decreased pH level has already started causing problems. It has killed billions of oysters, mussels, and is softening clams and killing baby scallops. In addition, it is dissolving plankton which could have huge consequences since plankton is responsible for a large amount of the earths C02-to-oxygen converting. Basically anything that relies on having a shell is in trouble.
The weakening of calcium carbonate caused by acidification also results in coral bleaching and means that coral has trouble growing naturally or reforming after being damaged by bottom trawling. This results in less of the fish who rely on these coral reefs. In addition, acidification, increasing ocean temperatures, overfishing and destruction of predatory fish habitats have also had the weird and concerning effect of causing the Rise of the Jellyfish.
Jellyfish are problematic in that they are immune to acidification and can eat things much higher on the food-chain than themselves. When a species of them, Mnemiopsis leidyi, was accidentally released into the Black Sea in the 80s, it rapidly consumed almost everything and wound up being 95% of the biomass in the area. Problems with the booming jellyfish populations have already been noted:
"(In 2011), nuclear power plants in Scotland, Japan, Israel and Florida, and also a desalination plant in Israel, were forced to shutdown because jellyfish were clogging the water inlets. The entire Irish salmon industry was wiped out in 2007 after a plague of billions of mauve stingers – covering an area of 10 sq miles (26 sq km) and 35ft (11m) deep – attacked the fish cages. Two years later, a fish farm in Tunisia lost a year's production of sea bream and sea bass after jellyfish invasions. Perhaps the most extraordinary blooms have been those occurring in waters off Japan. There, refrigerator-sized gelatinous monsters called Nomuras, weighing 485lb (220 kg) and measuring 6.5ft (2m) in diameter, have swarmed the Japan Sea annually since 2002, clogging fishing nets, overturning trawlers and devastating coastal livelihoods. These assaults have cost the Japanese fisheries industry billions of yen in losses."
Nuclear jellyfish. Clearly a fairly serious problem. It's not pleasant to ponder that we may be returning to the Precambrian era when the oceans basically only had jellyfish in them.
Although there are certainly other environmental aspects that need looking at, I feel these two can be major rallying points since they are so clear-cut. On one hand, putting more money towards planting trees and preventing deforestation seems like something everyone can get behind since it will reduce atmospheric C02 in addition to generate beautiful habitats for animals. On the other hand, transitioning the argument away from being that C02 possibly causes the world's average temperature to rise to being that C02 definitely turns the ocean into an acidic, jellyfish-haunted wasteland seems like a smarter way to go about things.
And remember, none of this is to say that I don't believe the earth is getting warmer or that climate change is not a real thing that we're at least partially responsible for. Last year, 15,000 warmest temperature records were broken in the US in March alone. That sounds pretty severe to me.
All I'm suggesting is that the message used to get the point across to the masses move away from abstract and complicated climate temperature science towards more complete view of the earth's health as a whole with an emphasis on things we can see and that people can emotionally relate to. Trying to make necessary policies that need to be enacted ASAP based solely on a theory of rising temperatures during a period of non-rising temperatures is simply not gonna work.
The battle for people's opinions is a fickle one. When the red herring aren't biting, jellyfish may prove an easier catch.
AS
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