https://truthout.org/articles/a-planet-in-crisis-the-heats-on-us/
[Note this statement in the article:
"It’s well known, however, that there’s been a political element built
into the IPCC’s scientific process, based on the urge to get as many
countries as possible on board the Paris climate agreement and other
attempts to rein in climate change. To do that, such reports tend to use
the lowest common denominator in their projections, which makes their
science overly conservative (that is, overly optimistic)."
images in online article]
Op-Ed Environment & Health
A Planet in Crisis: The Heat’s on Us
By Dahr Jamail, Truthout
Published January 15, 2019
I’m standing atop Rush Hill on Alaska’s remote St. Paul Island. Though
only 665 feet high, it provides a 360-degree view of this
tundra-covered, 13-mile-long, seven-mile-wide part of the Pribilof
Islands. While the hood of my rain jacket flaps in the cold wind, I gaze
in wonder at the silvery waters of the Bering Sea. The ever-present wind
whips the surface into a chaos of whitecaps, scudding mist and foam.
The ancient cinder cone I’m perched on reminds me that St. Paul was, oh,
so long ago, one of the last places woolly mammoths could be found in
North America. I’m here doing research for my book, The End of Ice. And
that, in turn, brings me back to the new reality in these far northern
waters: as cold as they still are, human-caused climate disruption is
warming them enough to threaten a possible collapse of the food web that
sustains this island’s Unangan, its Aleut inhabitants, also known as
“the people of the seal.” Given how deeply their culture is tied to a
subsistence lifestyle coupled with the new reality that the numbers of
fur seals, seabirds and other marine life they hunt or fish are
dwindling, how could this crisis not be affecting them?
While on St. Paul, I spoke with many tribal elders who told me stories
about fewer fish and sea birds, harsher storms and warming temperatures,
but what struck me most deeply were their accounts of plummeting fur
seal populations. Seal mothers, they said, had to swim so much farther
to find food for their pups that the babies were starving to death
before they could make it back.
And the plight of those dramatically declining fur seals could well
become the plight of the Unangan themselves, which in the decades to
come, as climate turbulence increases, could very well become the plight
of all of us.
Just before flying to St. Paul, I met with Bruce Wright in Anchorage,
Alaska. He’s a senior scientist with the Aleutian Pribilof Islands
Association, has worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service, and
was a section chief for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration for 11 years. “We’re not going to stop this train wreck,”
he assures me grimly. “We are not even trying to slow down the
production of CO2 [carbon dioxide], and there is already enough CO2 in
the atmosphere.”
While describing the warming, ever more acidic waters around Alaska and
the harm being caused to the marine food web, he recalled a moment
approximately 250 million years ago when the oceans underwent similar
changes and the planet experienced mass extinction events “driven by
ocean acidity. The Permian mass extinction where 90 percent of the
species were wiped out, that is what we are looking at now.”
I wrap up the interview with a heavy heart, place my laptop in my
satchel, put on my jacket and shake his hand. Knowing I’m about to fly
to St. Paul, Wright has one final thing to tell me as he walks me out:
“The Pribilofs were the last place mammoths survived because there
weren’t any people out there to hunt them. We’ve never experienced this,
where we are headed. Maybe the islands will become a refuge for a
population of humans.”
The Loss Upon Us
For at least two decades, I’ve found my solace in the mountains. I lived
in Alaska from 1996 to 2006 and more than a year of my life has been
spent climbing on the glaciers of Denali and other peaks in the Alaska
Range. Yet, that was a bittersweet time for me as the dramatic impacts
of climate change were quickly becoming apparent, including
fast-receding glaciers and warmer winter temperatures.
After years of war and then climate-change reporting, I regularly
withdrew to the mountains to catch my breath. As I filled my lungs with
alpine air, my heart would settle down and I could feel myself root back
into the Earth.
Later, my book research would take me back onto Denali’s fast-shrinking
glaciers and also to Glacier National Park in Montana. There I met Dan
Fagre, a US Geological Survey research ecologist and director of the
Climate Change in Mountain Ecosystems Project. “This is an explosion,”
he assured me, “a nuclear explosion of geologic change. This … exceeds
the ability for normal adaptation. We’ve shoved it into overdrive and
taken our hands off the wheel.” Despite its name, the park he studies is
essentially guaranteed not to have any active glaciers by 2030, only 11
years from now.
My research also took me to the University of Miami, Coral Gables, where
I met the chair of the department of geological science, Harold Wanless,
an expert in sea-level rise.
I asked him what he would say to people who think we still have time to
mitigate the impacts of runaway climate change. “We can’t undo this,” he
replied. “How are you going to cool down the ocean? We’re already there.”
As if to underscore the point, Wanless told me that, in the past, carbon
dioxide had varied from roughly 180 to 280 parts per million (ppm) in
the atmosphere as the Earth shifted from glacial to interglacial
periods. Linked to this 100-ppm fluctuation was about a 100-foot change
in sea level. “Every 100-ppm CO2 increase in the atmosphere gives us 100
feet of sea level rise,” he told me. “This happened when we went in and
out of the Ice Age.”
As I knew, since the industrial revolution began, atmospheric CO2 has
already increased from 280 to 410 ppm. “That’s 130 ppm in just the last
200 years,” I pointed out to him. “That’s 130 feet of sea level rise
that’s already baked into Earth’s climate system.”
He looked at me and nodded grimly. I couldn’t help thinking of that as a
nod goodbye to coastal cities from Miami to Shanghai.
In July 2017, I traveled to Camp 41 in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon
rainforest, part of a project founded four decades ago by Thomas
Lovejoy, known to many as the “godfather of biodiversity.” While
visiting him, I also met Vitek Jirinec, an ornithologist from the Czech
Republic who had held 11 different wildlife positions from Alaska to
Jamaica. In the process, he became all too well acquainted with the
signs of biological collapse among the birds he was studying. He’d
watched as some Amazon populations like that of the black-tailed
leaftosser declined by 95 percent; he’d observed how mosquitoes in
Hawaii were killing off native bird populations; he’d explored how
saltwater intrusion into Alaska’s permafrost was changing bird habitats
there.
His tone turned somber as we discussed his research and a note of anger
slowly crept into his voice. “The problem of animal and plant
populations left marooned within various fragments [of their habitat]
under circumstances that are untenable for the long term has begun
showing up all over the land surface of the planet. The familiar
questions recur: How many mountain gorillas inhabit the forested slopes
of the Virunga volcanoes, along the shared borders of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Rwanda? How many tigers live in the
Sariska Tiger Reserve of northwestern India? How many are left? How long
can they survive?”
As he continued, the anger in his voice became palpable, especially when
he began discussing how “island biogeography” had come to the mainland
and what was happening to animal populations marooned by human
development on fragments of land in places like the Amazon. “How many
grizzly bears occupy the North Cascades ecosystem, a discrete patch of
mountain forest along the northern border of the state of Washington?
Not enough. How many European brown bears are there in Italy’s Abruzzo
National Park? Not enough. How many Florida panthers in Big Cypress
Swamp? Not enough. How many Asiatic lions in the Forest of Gir? Not
enough…. The world is broken in pieces now.”
“A Terrifying 12 Years”
In October 2018, 15 months after Jirinec’s words brought me to tears in
the Amazon, the world’s leading climate scientists authored a report for
the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warning us that
we have just a dozen years left to limit the catastrophic impacts of
climate change. The gist of it is this: we’ve already warmed the planet
one degree Celsius. If we fail to limit that warming process to 1.5
degrees, even a half-degree more than that will significantly worsen
extreme heat, flooding, widespread droughts and sea level increases,
among other grim phenomena. The report has become a key talking point of
political progressives in the US, who, like journalist and activist
Naomi Klein, are now speaking of “a terrifying 12 years” left in which
to cut fossil fuel emissions.
There is, however, a problem with even this approach. It assumes that
the scientific conclusions in the IPCC report are completely sound. It’s
well known, however, that there’s been a political element built into
the IPCC’s scientific process, based on the urge to get as many
countries as possible on board the Paris climate agreement and other
attempts to rein in climate change. To do that, such reports tend to use
the lowest common denominator in their projections, which makes their
science overly conservative (that is, overly optimistic).
In addition, new data suggest that the possibility of political will
coalescing across the planet to shift the global economy completely off
fossil fuels in the reasonably near future is essentially a fantasy. And
that’s even if we could remove enough of the hundreds of billions of
tons of CO2 already in our overburdened atmosphere to make a difference
(not to speak of the heat similarly already lodged in the oceans).
“It’s extraordinarily challenging to get to the 1.5 degree Celsius
target and we are nowhere near on track to doing that,” Drew Shindell, a
Duke University climate scientist and a co-author of the IPCC report,
told the Guardian just weeks before it was released. “While it’s
technically possible, it’s extremely improbable, absent a real sea
change in the way we evaluate risk. We are nowhere near that.”
In fact, even best-case scenarios show us heading for at least a
three-degree warming and, realistically speaking, we are undoubtedly on
track for far worse than that by 2100, if not much sooner. Perhaps
that’s why Shindell was so pessimistic.
For example, a study published in Nature magazine, also released in
October, showed that over the last quarter century, the oceans have
absorbed 60 percent more heat annually than estimated in the 2014 IPCC
report. The study underscored that the globe’s oceans have, in fact,
already absorbed 93 percent of all the heat humans have added to the
atmosphere, that the climate system’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is
far higher than thought and that planetary warming is far more advanced
than had previously been grasped.
To give you an idea of how much heat the oceans have absorbed: if that
heat had instead gone into the atmosphere, the global temperature would
be 97 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it is today. For those who think
that there are still 12 years left to change things, the question posed
by Wanless seems painfully apt: How do we remove all the heat that’s
already been absorbed by the oceans?
Two weeks after that Nature article came out, a study in Scientific
Reports warned that the extinction of animal and plant species due to
climate change could lead to a “domino effect” that might, in the end,
annihilate life on the planet. It suggested that organisms will die out
at increasingly rapid rates because they depend on other species that
are also on their way out. It’s a process the study calls
“co-extinction.” According to its authors, a five to six degree Celsius
rise in average global temperatures might be enough to annihilate most
of Earth’s living creatures.
To put this in perspective: just a two degree rise will leave dozens of
the world’s coastal mega-cities flooded, thanks primarily to melting ice
sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, as well as the thermal expansion of
the oceans as they warm. There will be 32 times as many heat waves in
India and nearly half a billion more people will suffer water scarcity.
At three degrees, southern Europe will be in permanent drought and the
area burned annually by wildfires in the US will sextuple. These
impacts, it’s worth noting, may already be baked into the system, even
if every country that signed the Paris climate accord were to fully
honor its commitments, which most of them are not currently doing.
At four degrees, global grain yields could drop by half, most likely
resulting in annual worldwide food crises (along with far more war,
general conflict and migration than at present).
The International Energy Agency has already shown that maintaining our
current fossil-fueled economic system would virtually guarantee a
six-degree rise in the Earth’s temperature before 2050. To add insult to
injury, a 2017 analysis from oil giants BP and Shell indicated that they
expected the planet to be five degrees warmer by mid-century.
In late 2013, I wrote a piece for TomDispatch titled “Are We Falling Off
the Climate Precipice?” Even then, it was already clear enough that we
were indeed heading off that cliff. More than five years later, a sober
reading of the latest climate change science indicates that we are now
genuinely in free fall.
The question is no longer whether or not we are going to fail, but how
are we going to comport ourselves in the era of failure?
Listening While Saying Goodbye
It’s been estimated that between 150 and 200 plant, insect, bird and
mammal species are already going extinct every day. In other words,
during the two and a half years I worked on my book 136,800 species may
have gone extinct.
We have a finite amount of time left to coexist with significant parts
of the biosphere, including glaciers, coral and thousands of species of
plants, animals and insects. We’re going to have to learn how to say
goodbye to them, part of which should involve doing everything we
humanly can to save whatever is left, even knowing that the odds are
stacked against us.
For me, my goodbyes will involve spending as much time as I can on the
glaciers in Washington State’s Olympic National Park and North Cascades
National Park near where I live, or far more modestly, taking in the
trees around my home on a daily basis. It’s unclear, after all, how much
longer such forest areas are likely to remain fully intact. I often
visit a small natural altar I’ve created amid a circle of cedar trees
growing around a decomposing mother tree. In this magical spot, I grieve
and express my gratitude for the life that is still here. I also go to
listen.
Where do you go to listen? And what are you hearing?
For me, these days, it all begins and ends with doing my best to listen
to the Earth, with trying my hardest to understand how best to serve,
how to devote myself to doing everything possible for the planet, no
matter the increasingly bleak prognosis for this time in human history.
Perhaps if we listen deeply enough and regularly enough, we ourselves
will become the song this planet needs to hear.