Our Rapidly Changing Planet - Democratic Underground

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Fri May-14-10 07:05 PM
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Our Rapidly Changing Planet

Bill McKibben’s new book, “Eaarth – Making a Life on a Tough New Planet”, is a real mind opener, and is probably one of the most important books around today. The misspelling of “Earth” is meant to convey the fact that we currently live on a planet that has been irreversibly changed (for the worse) in the past several decades, due to human economic activity. James E. Hansen, the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who refused to be silenced by the Bush administration in speaking the truth about global warming, says that McKibben’s book “blazes a path to help preserve nature’s greatest treasures”.

Eaarth

The first premise of Eaarth is that we live on a planet that has been radically changed in the past several years, and which continues to change for the worse. From the preface:

The first point of this book is simple: global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat… It’s our reality. We’ve changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways. And these changes are far, far more evident in the toughest parts of the globe, where climate change is already wrecking thousands of lives daily….

In July, 2009, Oxfam released an epic report, “Suffering the Science”, which concluded that even if we now adapted “the smartest possible curbs” on carbon emission, “the prospects are very bleak for hundreds of millions of people, most of them among the world’s poorest” …

The book is not devoid of hope. However, McKibben does tell us that we have some very tough challenges ahead, and that we’d better face reality if we want to meet those challenges:

We need now to understand the world we’ve created, and consider – urgently – how to live in it… We’ll need to figure out what parts of our lives and our ideologies we must abandon so that we can protect the core of our societies and civilizations… which doesn’t mean that the change we must make will be without its comforts or beauties… The end of this book will suggest where those beauties lie. But hope has to be real. It can’t be a hope that the scientists will turn out to be wrong, or that President Barack Obama can somehow fix everything. Obama can help – precisely to the degree he’s willing to embrace reality, to understand that we live on the world we live on, not the one we might wish for.

Yet human civilization has thus far failed miserably in the effort to meet the challenges we face – or rather, our leaders have failed to even muster the political will to make more than minimal efforts to do so. McKibben speaks of the failure of the Copenhagen summit in the preface to his book:

Many people had invested great hope that the Copenhagen conference would mark a turning point in the climate debate. If it did, it was a turning point for the worse, with the richest and most powerful countries making it abundantly clear that they weren’t going to take strong steps to address the crisis before us. They looked the poorest and most vulnerable nations straight in the eye, and then they looked away and concluded a face-saving accord with no targets or timetables.

McKibben is not at all alone in his opinion of the failure of the Copenhagen summit. Markus Becker sums up how most climate scientists assess what happened:

The global climate summit in Copenhagen has failed. There will be no concrete goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Industrialized countries extended no concrete offers of hope to developing countries…

Radical and recent changes in the physical characteristics of our planet

Chapter 1 of Eaarth, titled “A New World”, describes many of the most striking and important recent changes in the physical nature of our planet. McKibben begins the chapter by noting that for the past 10,000 years – which includes the whole time period of human civilization – the average temperature of our planet &w=307">has been quite constant, varying only between about 58 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet, in a little more than a century, due to human industrial activity, the average temperature of Earth has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (one degree Centigrade), as explained in this article.

This rise in temperature has driven numerous substantial changes in the physical characteristics of our planet in recent years:

Melting ice and glaciers, rising oceans, and flooding islands
By October 2007 there was 22% less Arctic sea ice than ever previously observed. As Arctic ice continued to melt, the Northeast and Northwest passages opened, so that the North Pole could be circumnavigated for the first time in human history. Such events have caused many scientists to believe that Arctic ice is now in a death spiral.

Glaciers around the world have also been melting at a rapid pace, causing mountain climbers to abandon slopes that they had climbed for years. The Chacaltaya Glacier in Bolivia, previously the highest ski run in world, is now nothing but rocks and mud. McKibben explains that the importance of these glaciers extends way beyond their use as ski slopes:

These glaciers are the reservoirs for entire continents, watering the billions of people who have settled downstream because they guaranteed a steady supply… In Northwest China there are 300 million people relying on snowmelt for water supply. There is no way to replace it until the next ice age.

And as a result of so much melting ice, there was a 17 cm rise in sea level during the 20th century, the expectation of much greater rises in sea level during the 21st century, the first disappearance beneath the sea in modern times of an uninhabited island (Kiribati) in 1998, the first disappearance beneath the sea in modern times of an inhabited island (Lohachara) in 2006, and the submerging of several more islands since that time.

McKibben also related an interesting story about a trip he took to Tibet, which suggests that inhabitants of foreign countries who aren’t continually exposed to climate change denial propaganda may have a better understanding of what’s going on than many or most Americans:

A gangly young man guided me… for a view of the enormous glacier whose snout towered over the valley. A black rock the size of an apartment tower stuck out from the middle of the wall of ice. My guide said it had appeared only the year before and now grew larger daily as its dark surface absorbed the sun’s heat. … No one in the village was literate. So out of curiosity I asked the young man: “Why is it melting?” I don’t know what I expected – some story about angry gods? He looked at me as if I was visiting from the planet Moron. “Global warming,” he said. “Too many factories.”

Acidifying seas
Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has caused a great amount of it to be deposited in our oceans, thus resulting in their acidification. McKibben explains the significance of that.

For far longer than human civilization, oceans have been chemically constant. They’re so vast that we’ve taken their stability as a given… Oceanographers were shocked a few years ago when researchers began noticing that the seas were acidifying as they absorbed some of the carbon dioxide we’ve poured into the atmosphere… Already the ocean is more acid than anytime in the last 800,000 years, and at current rates by 2050 it will be more corrosive than anytime in the past 20 million years. In that kind of environment, shellfish can’t make thick enough shells. By the summer of 2009, the Pacific oyster industry was reporting 80% mortality for oyster larvae, apparently because water rising from the ocean deep was corrosive enough to kill the baby oysters.”

Extreme weather events
The National Oceanic Atmospheric Organization has reported 111 major hurricanes in the tropical Atlantic from 1995 to 2008, a 75% increase over the previous thirteen years. A researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research noted that:

Storms are not just making landfill and going away like they did in the past… Somehow these storms are able to live longer today.

As testament to that fact, we’ve seen in the past few years: the earliest category 5 hurricane ever reported (Emily, 2005); the first January tropical cyclone (Zeta, 2006); the first tropical cyclone in the South Atlantic (Catarina, 2004); and, the first known tropical storm to strike Spain (Vince, 2005).

In an article titled “NASA Links Severe Storm Increase, Global Warming”, a NASA study is cited that concluded that global rainfall has been increasing by 1.5% per decade over the past 18 years. By 2009, lighting strikes over the Arctic had increased by 20 times, resulting in burned Arctic tundra.

The Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters conducted research that gives us an indication of the magnitude of the increase in severe weather events. That research found that there was four times the number of weather disasters in the last thirty years as in the first 75 years of the 20th Century.

Drought
Since 1980, the world’s tropics have expanded two degrees latitude north and south. Consequently, many large rivers are drying up. McKibben explains the significance of all this:

As the tropics expand, they push the dry subtropics ahead of them, north and south, with “grave implications for many millions of people” in these newly arid regions… By early 2008 half of Australia was in drought, and forecasters were calling it the new normal… They are trying to avoid the term drought because it implies the condition may someday end… The brushfires ignited by drought on this scale claimed hundreds of Australian lives in early 2009.

Drought in the American Southwest is now believed by scientists to be a permanent condition. A report titled “Climate Change: Stronger, Faster, Sooner”, notes how droughts are adversely affecting world wide food supplies. Other recent reports have noted serious droughts in China, India, Brazil and Argentina.

Brian Fagan talks about the significance of climate change-related drought in his book, “The Great Warming – Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilization”. Towards the end of his book he discusses what is likely to happen if not enough is done to resolve our global warming problem:

The United Nations Environment Program reports that 450 million people in 29 countries currently suffer from water shortages. By 2025, an estimated 2.8 billion of us will live in areas with increasingly scarce water resources… Contaminated water supplies are a worse killer than AIDS in tropical Africa… The number of food emergencies in Africa each year has already almost tripled since the 1980s… Future drought-related catastrophes will make these preliminaries seem trivial…

Imagine how many people might uproot themselves if the choice were between famine and food. Many believe the wars of coming centuries will not be fought over petty nationalisms, religion, or democratic principles, but over water, for this most precious of all our commodities may become even more valuable than oil. They are probably correct.

Rising carbon dioxide – a look at the numbers

After noting the above mentioned changes, and the fact that they have occurred much sooner than most scientists believed they would, McKibben asks why they are occurring so much sooner than expected. Specifically, he asks why events that we just recently spoke of as posing threats to our grandchildren are already occurring:

So how did it happen that the threat to our fairly far-off descendants, which required that we heed an alarm and adopt precautionary principles and begin to take measured action lest we have a crisis for future generations, et cetera – how did that suddenly turn into the Arctic melting away, the tropics expanding, the ocean turning acid? How did time dilate, and “100 or 200 years from now” become yesterday?

The answer,, more or less, is that global warming is a huge experiment. We’ve never watched it happen before, so we didn’t know how it would proceed. Here’s what we knew twenty years ago: the historic level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the level that produced those ten thousand years of stability, was roughly 275 parts per million. And also this: since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution we’d been steadily increasing that total, currently raising it more than two parts per million annually. But no one really knew where the red line was… The number that people tossed around for about a decade was 550 parts per million.

So, given an historic level, since the dawn of human civilization, of 275 parts of carbon dioxide per million (ppm) in our atmosphere, and a target of 550 ppm considered to be safe, let’s consider a few more numbers:

350 ppm: In 2007, James Hansen, perhaps the world’s leading climatologist, concluded that 350 ppm is a more appropriate safe level.

390 ppm: 390 ppm is our current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Compare that to the safe level of 350 ppm. So, we have already passed it – which explains why we’re seeing so many changes in our planet so much sooner than was expected. The last time we had levels that high was twenty million years ago, when temperatures rose as much as ten degrees Fahrenheit and sea levels rose one hundred feet.

725 ppm: 725 ppm is the level we’ll end up at by 2100 if every government pledge made during the Copenhagen summit of December 2009 is fulfilled – which is why climate scientists consider that conference to have been an utter failure.

The good news

The situation is nevertheless not hopeless – if we as a society somehow manage to muster the political will to address the problem. As McKibben goes through the numbers described above, he notes:

We can, if we’re very lucky and very committed, eventually get the number back down below 350. This book {which I haven’t finished reading yet} will explore some of the reasons this task will be extremely hard, and some of the ways we can try. The planet can, slowly, soak up excess carbon dioxide if we stop pouring more in. That fight is what I spend my life on now, because it’s still possible we can avert the very worst catastrophes. But even so, great damage will have been done along the way, on land and in the sea. In September 2009 the lead article in the journal Nature said that above 350 we “threaten the ecological life-support systems… and severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies”.

In the preface to his book McKibben notes that though we’ve lost the first several rounds of the fight, it’s still not over:

We’ve lost that fight, insofar as our goal was to preserve the world we were born into. That’s not the world we live on any longer, and there’s no use pretending otherwise. So far we’ve increased global temperatures about a degree (Centigrade), and it’s caused the massive change chronicled in chapter 1. That’s not going to go away. But if we don’t stop pouring more carbon into the atmosphere, the temperature will simply keep rising, right past the point where any kind of adaptation will prove impossible. I have dedicated this book… with the pledge that we’ll keep battling. We have no other choice.