I wish I could come back 100 years from now to see how people make sense of this time. The world is in the middle of a pandemic, a climate emergency, and the sixth mass extinction. And what is the human species’ behavioral response to these looming catastrophes? Two words come to mind: suicide and homicide. It’s widely accepted that the reason for the jump of coronaviruses from animals to humans lies with us. We invade and destroy other species’ territories at will, burning rain forests, building roads into uninhabited or indigenous peoples' lands, shrinking other creatures’ habitats, all without considering the zoonotic disease consequences. Our man-centric, no---man-exclusive--behavior makes us as responsible for the spread of SARS-CoV-2 as the bat which likely harbored it.
And after unleashing that virus, we denigrate the experts, notably public health doctors and scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci above, who
try to help us contain it. We are
so suspicious of life-saving vaccines that we refuse to take them, thereby
self-fulfilling our prophecy that they are ineffective. We chafe at our political leaders' attempts to impose the most minor restrictions on
our freedoms, regarding public health precautions to keep a minimum
distance, wear a mask, avoid large groups, and wash our hands, as if
they were a major assault on our inherent right to do whatever the hell we want, when we want, and how we want. In the context of a pandemic, this exaltation of the right of the individual over the rights of the community is at best selfish. At worst, it's both suicidal and homicidal.
As for the world around us, we ignore the climate emergency and the disappearance of millions of species as we accelerate their destruction. We continue to subsidize fossil fuels. We build on coasts vulnerable to sea level rise. We deregulate heavy industries that belch greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We look the other way as agribusiness spills pollutants into our rivers and lakes, poisoning our drinking water and harming our fisheries.
In short, in the middle of a pandemic, a climate crisis, and a mass extinction, we are behaving
irrationally, irresponsibly, and lethally all over the world. We’ve gone mad. We’re acting so nuts it makes me wonder if humans
don’t have a basic design flaw that dooms us to extinction and predicts we
will take everything else along with us.
Are we Homo sapiens or are we Homo stultus? Where does this stupidity come from? What makes us so crazy? Do we somehow sense that these three crises are
existential? Are we paralyzed by the realization
that it may already be too late to mitigate, much less solve, them? Do we subconsciously fear that we are
evolutionarily ill-equipped to deal with them?
I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but it
feels like something big, unstoppable, and unavoidable is going on with us, and that something isn't good. When you consider what’s been happening on the climate front over just the last month, it feels like End Times.
First,
There’s The Meltdown In the Arctic. The Arctic is heating up much faster than climate
scientists predicted. They weren’t
expecting these temperatures for another 70 years. Surprise!
The Arctic is warming not just twice as fast as scientists estimated,
but three times faster than the global average.
It’s so hot that wildfires are raging in Siberia (see above). For the first six months of
this year, temperatures have been anomalously high in the region, so high that Siberian rivers like the one below are melting. 
On June 20, temperatures in the High Arctic
hit 100.4°F, the 11th straight day of temperatures above 86°F. The normal temperature for that period in June is 68°F. WaPo
Siberia. To what is this Arctic heat wave attributed? Climate researchers say the unusual heat was made at
least 600 times as likely by human-caused climate change. WaPo
Heat Streak.
Pretty In Pink. As above normal
temperatures melt the snow on alpine glaciers in Italy, a pink alga is
appearing. The alga darkens the snow,
which accelerates the melting, which feeds the alga, which….You get the idea.
Our
Goose Is Cooked. According
to WaPo
Climate Sensitivity, in 1979, a study at MIT concluded that if
we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, as compared
to pre-industrial levels, we would experience a rise in temperatures within the
range of 2.6 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 4.5 Celsius). We are on course to double CO2 emissions
within the next 50 years, and a recent comprehensive international study indicates the lower range MIT researchers predicted in no longer achievable and we will blow right on by it substantially. The new study now puts the temperature rise
at between 4.1 (not 2.6) and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 and 4.5 degrees Celsius). Our global goose has effectively been cooked.
Me
Thinks It Must Be Methane.
Carbon dioxide emissions are the worst climate offender, but methane is
a close second. Now at the highest
levels on record, methane is on track to raise global temperatures by 3 to 4
degrees Celsius. According to Guardian
Methane, since 2000, discharges of methane from feed lots like the one above;
fracking; landfills; wetlands; and leaks from oil and gas wells, pipelines, distribution lines and even
the gas stoves in our homes have risen by more than 50 million
tons a year. That’s equivalent to 350 million
cars on the road or double the total emissions of Germany or France. An earth scientist at Stanford who heads the Global Carbon Project warns, “There’s a hint
that we might be able to reach peak carbon dioxide emissions very soon. But we
don’t appear to be even close to peak methane.
It isn’t going down in agriculture; it isn’t going down with fossil fuel
use.”
Climate
Migration. All
this heat is producing droughts, which result in crop failures, which leads to mass migration of people
seeking land to farm so they can feed their families. I’ve written about this before, so I will
simply give you a link to the latest excellent interactive article on the subject from NYT
Climate Interactive.
If It’s Not The Damn Heat, Then It’s The Damn Flooding. As reported in NYT
Coastal Flooding, the frequency of high-tide flooding along
the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts since 2000 has increased fivefold in some
cities. Salt water infiltration into
ground water contaminates drinking water, damages property, and impedes
transportation. Per NOAA, “Damaging floods that decades ago happened only during a
storm now happen more regularly, even without severe weather.”
South-eastern China, Australia’s north,
Bangladesh, West Bengal and Gujarat in India were especially at risk. In the
United States, North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland were considered to be most
exposed, as were the UK, northern France and northern Germany. But the study also shows how the risk of
damage from rising sea levels and storm surges will continue to rise even if
emissions are kept to a level that would keep the global temperature rise to
well below 2C by the end of this century.
And If You Think That’s Bad….Take a look at this update on the hurricane season from NOAA Hurricane Report, predicting a particularly active hurricane season this year. The agency has already logged a record-setting nine named storms. Typically, by the beginning of August, there are only two. NOAA updated its May outlook on August 6 and now predicts:
19-25 named storms (winds of 39 mph or greater), of which 7-11 will become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or greater), including 3-6 major hurricanes (winds of 111 mph or greater). This update covers the entire six-month hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30, and includes the nine named storms to date.
The right whales are dying at an alarming rate from ship strikes and entanglement in lobster and fishing gear. NOAA’s fisheries division found that, to avoid extinction, the population cannot afford even a single death a year, but since 2017, 31 deaths have been reported. The [right whale] calf found off Elberon [on June 25] was the 11th North Atlantic right whale known to have died since June 2019.
Between 2007 and 2013, more than 10 million hives were lost worldwide – twice the normal rate – many from Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a mysterious phenomenon with no known single cause in which a hive’s worker bees disappear. Where beekeepers used to expect about 5% hive losses a year, they now routinely see upwards of 30%. One survey found that commercial bee farmers lost 40% of their hives – some 50 billion bees – during the winter of 2018-2019.
Fish Or Cut Bait. Climate heating is also ravaging our
fisheries. As reported in Guardian Fish:
Sixty per cent of studied fish species will
be unable to survive in their current ranges by 2100 if climate warming reaches
a worst-case scenario of 4-5C (7.2-9F) above pre-industrial temperatures,
researchers have found. [See Our Goose Is Cooked above; we're headed for 4-8C.]
In a study of nearly 700
fresh and saltwater fish species, researchers examined how warming water
temperatures lower water oxygen levels, putting embryos and pregnant
fish at risk. “A 1.5C increase is
already a challenge to some, and if we let global warming persist, it can get
much worse,” said…a climatologist who co-authored the study
published in the journal Science.
Tik Tok vs. Tick Tock…While Trump fiddles with a Chinese social media app, the world is burning, flooding, and its creatures are disappearing. One of Trump's first executive orders was his announcement in 2017 (above) that the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. We’ve got until November 3, 2020, to save the agreement. As Todd Stern, the chief US negotiator of the agreement warns in Guardian Climate Fight:
The choice of Biden or Trump in the White House is huge, not just for the US but for the world generally to deal with climate change,” said Stern. “If Biden wins, November 4 is a blip, like a bad dream is over. If Trump wins, he seals the deal. The US becomes a non-player and the goals of Paris become very, very difficult. Without the US in the long term, they certainly aren’t realistic.
So there you have it. We're on track in the US to experience a surging and re-surging COVID-19 pandemic until an effective vaccine is found and widely administered. We're dissing the rest of the world on its hard-fought climate accord. And we're extinguishing the lives of creatures large and small, many of whom are necessary to our continued existence. Are you mad yet? I'm mad as hell.
Keep it real! Wear your damn mask! And don’t forget to vote!
Marilyn
Thank you Marilyn for writing about the horrific truth. Not easy. But everyone needs to face it and figure out a solution.
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