Eli's short essay on why climate change is a big deal

The earth won’t be here in a few million years, everyone knows that. However, the possibility that your children or grandchildren might die because of the effects of pollution and climate change is something not as well known. NASA says this on this on their homepage, “Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position” (Shaftel 2018).

The first gasoline powered engine was invented right before 1900. That’s when it all began. Not to say that animals don’t contribute but plants and animals keep each-others populations in check. Their numbers can’t get too far ahead of each other because they need each other. It is believed that dinosaurs would not have lasted much longer anyways because the trees would not have continued to produce sufficient oxygen. We face a similar problem today. We’re cutting down too many trees, reproducing ourselves and animals far too quickly, and we’re polluting the only air we have faster than plants and soil could ever help us with. That can equate to many issues. The earth is in a delicate balance that’s not meant to last forever in the first place.

Many people still believe climate change is some kind of hoax or conspiracy. In fact, I found a research essay written this year about people’s continued disbelief. The author uses a great analogyat the very end of his conclusion; “A skeptic at the back of the room asks, “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”” (Zajchowski p. 10, 2018) However, researchers have been recording evidence for years and there are many undisputable truths. Besides icebergs and glaciers that haven’t moved in a thousand years falling apart. Greenhouse gases don’t escape the atmosphere and prevent many other things from doing so, especially heat. Carbon dioxide has never gone over three hundred parts per million until 1950. Since then the concentration has increased exponentially not once but annually for the most part. The earth’s average annual temperature has gone up 1.6% since then (Shaftel 2018). Every year emissions have gotten much worse.

There is a host of ways Americans’ opinions about climate issues divide. The divisions start with views about the causes of global climate change. Nearly half of U.S. adults say climate change is due to human activity and a similar share says either that the Earth’s warming stems from natural causes or that there is no evidence of warming. The disputes extend to differing views about the likely impact of climate change and the possible remedies, both at the policy level and the level of personal behavior. (Cary 2016)

Some of these terms mean different things and the average person should inform themselves. Global warming refers to the specific evidence researchers have gathered that connects because of emissions and greenhouse gases, the global average temperature is going up. Climate change is not representative of the weather in Atlanta. Weather is local and short term. Climate is conditions in a large area or region over periods of time. Like Alaska is constantly cool and Florida is constantly hot. The fact that It snowed in Florida in the last few years is evidence of climate change. Because Florida is almost tropical, it literally doesn’t snow that far south. What I think of as I think of climate change is the glaciers in Greenland. The ice in the glaciers has not changed in the hundreds of years that people have built villages around them. Now, huge pieces of the glaciers are falling into the sea and villagers are having to move out because the shockwaves in the bays and harbors can destroy their homes. The climate in Greenland was so constant for so long people assumed it would never change. That’s literally what’s happening now.

Because they are so sensitive to temperature fluctuations, glaciers provide clues about the effects of global warming (Oerlemans, J. 2001). The 1991 discovery of the 5,000 year-old "ice man" preserved in a glacier in the European Alps fascinated the world, yet the discovery meant that this glacier had reached a 5,000-year minimum. With few exceptions, glaciers around the world have retreated at unprecedented rates over the last century. Some ice caps, glaciers, and ice shelves have disappeared altogether. Many more are retreating so rapidly that they may vanish within decades. Scientists have confirmed that this retreat is an unintended effect of the Industrial Revolution and modern energy use (Roe et al. 2016) (State of the Cryosphere 2017).

What has been happening? Think about all the cars, trains, buses, ships and factories that have ever been built. Not every car gets sold, not every train and ship make it a full fifty years. However, everything else has emitted particles and molecules into the air that can’t be readily absorbed, re-used, or even escape the atmosphere. That’s a lot of bad stuff, over a hundred years of it too. Some of it never goes away, there’s nowhere for it to go. Which is why they’re called greenhouse gases. Plants use carbon dioxide and oxygen but that’s not the whole problem and people won’t stop destroying them all. Regular soil and bodies of water absorb some of the carbon and solid particles but only a small amount. What can we do? There are many things that our future depends on that we should be doing as much as we can. That’s why it’s such a big deal, because one day there won’t be any water left to drink or oxygen to breathe. We know that if we stopped everything, the emitting, polluting, and cutting, Things won’t go right back. The earth is already on a slope. The earth has gone through climate cycles before. Most scientists believe we have been through five cycles of heat and ice age and this is simply number six. If we could cease everything, plant a million more trees, and scrub the atmosphere, it might begin to bring the earth back a little bit. But trees, soil and water bodies are the only way we have of scrubbing the atmosphere right now. It could take a few million trees. Scientists in Africa are confident in their conclusions as well:

The continent of Africa is warmer than it was 100 years ago. Warming through the twentieth century has been at the rate of about 0.5◦C/century… The six warmest years in Africa have all occurred since 1987, with 1998 being the warmest year. This rate of warming is not dissimilar to that experienced globally and the periods of most rapid warming (Low 2005).

NASA has been studying climate change and its effects for decades, they’ve collected tons of evidence and they have all of that plus images that’ll make you cry for the next generation here.

There are large cities in Asia and India where you have to wear a dust mask when you walk around outside. They even sell air in cans and bags. Bodies are delicate and there are many ways that just breathing something in can kill you. Some things shut down your nervous system, making it impossible to breathe. Some things scar the lungs and over long periods of time, render them useless or create an environment where cancer develops. Elements and compounds that are not oxygen and nitrogen are accumulating in the air we breathe, so are tiny particles of solid matter such as ash and soot. You don’t have to smell smog in the air in your small town for the bad stuff to be everywhere. A team of scientists reached this conclusion in the past year. “A weight of evidence suggests that climate-related environmental change in one part of the world will have systemic health and wellbeing impacts elsewhere at some point” (Morris 2018).

Twenty percent of all the gas converting done by plants is done so in rainforests. Another twenty percent from ocean life. Unfortunately, the rainforests are being destroyed, and have been for far too long. In fact, it’s common knowledge now. Everyone knows but it seems that there is nothing we can do. The governments either don’t care, or I imagine they get paid to stay quiet. The governments almost definitely benefit economically. When the big machines come through the forest and cut the trees down, it’s not only the trees that die. The entire habitat, ecosystem, and weather cycle dies too. When loggers clear the trees out, the animals that are large enough and smart enough escape. But they have now lost their way of life. Everything else dies, the plants and insects, there is only bare earth left. This leaves empty holes that didn’t use to be there. Making the ground differ in temperature and greatly affecting masses of air, essentially changing the weather. If it begins to rain less in one area, it affects other areas. It may not rain sufficiently in another area of the forest causing things there to die too. The rainforest doesn’t really expand either, it’s very delicate. Trees do grow back but imagine how long it takes those forty to ninety-foot canopy trees to grow. Every plant in a rainforest fights for every photon that comes down from the sun. Even if the trees could grow back quickly, that’s not enough for the intricate ecosystem to come back. It involves a relationship with bacterium, Fungi, plants, scavengers, predators, and some things that seem like they don’t do anything.

The same goes for kelp, plankton and all the photosynthesizing sea creatures as well. The gas exchanges in ocean life is equivalent if not greater than those in the rain forest. Mainly due to the surface area of direct sunlight during all hours of the day, there’s little competition for sunlight because there’s more than enough to go around. Needs transition There is a literal sea of garbage in the Pacific. Imagine all the possible ways that can cause problems. Everyone’s seen a picture of a sea turtle stuck in the rings of an empty six pack plastic holder. Think about why coral reefs are so important. Because they harbor so much life. So many creatures live in reefs because of the cover and protection they provide. A fish lacks the intelligence to differentiate a colorful reef and a colorful mountain of garbage. Garbage in the ocean can trick entire schools of fish into inevitable demise. Garbage wastes the surface area of the water, prohibiting plants from utilizing the sunlight. It can of course be contaminated with an array of chemicals that could hardly be worse for living things. If a large piece of garbage were to sink, it’s still wasting ocean floor that life down there fights for. To get back to the topic, all these things affect our climate. Even if they didn’t, humans causing the death of so much life eventually will. The proof is everywhere. The same goes for the ice caps, glaciers, and places that are generally covered in ice all the time. Some of these places aren’t even freezing most of the time anymore. This poses a real problem. It’s also concrete evidence that this is not the same way things have been for thousands if not millions of years. There’s more wrong with ancient ice melting than you might think. We already know that it means that the earth is hotter now than before the ice formed because it’s been there ever since. That ancient ice also contains things inside it. There are ancient organisms that didn’t die sometimes. They could be pathogenic or otherwise deadly. The ice that melts contains methane and carbon dioxide as well so it contributes as it melts. A French scientist wrote a book about a machine that’s developed to detect conditions like this. He talks as if every bit of information he receives has extreme variables and can hardly be trusted. Still he writes:

The uncertainty is due to the fact that there is a single and excessively short period (1975-2000), where CO2 concentration and global temperature increased simultaneously. Indeed, we observed that over the past millennium, on many occasions, natural climate fluctuations often led to comparable temperature variations, both in terms of amplitude and duration (several tenths of a degree in a few decades). In such circumstances, not only is it impossible to accurately estimate sensitivity to CO2, but we cannot even detect with any certainty the existence of a cause-effect relationship (de Larminat 130, 2014).

What happens to people in the next hundred years? Especially if nothing changes, we would see direct impacts sooner than a hundred years. Maybe in our lifetime. People all over the world are going to have to migrate away from the equator, stay covered because all rain will probably be acid rain, and if you think people can’t breathe in metro China It’ll be like that everywhere on earth. People will begin to die. There’s only so much one person could do. Canadian scientists did a pretty extensive study of health effects on Canadian’s as well as the rest of the world. “Climate change is now considered to be one of the major threats facing public health in the coming decades [231]. Research on the health impacts of climate change (e.g., extreme heat events, vector-borne diseases) is increasing in Canada and internationally” (Yusa 2015 p. 8388). Other researchers in North America ignore scientific etiquette altogether with strong language to get the point across: “Climate change will increase the risk of infectious disease by expanding the ranges of species known to carry zoonotic diseases, changing pathogen dynamics in environmental reservoirs and altering pathogen transmission cycles” (Greer, p. 721, 2008). Every scientist is very serious about the problems we’re all going to have to face. I even see “fact-checked” articles on Facebook that we’re hurtling on a path of sure death.

There are solutions. We can stop being lumber dependent. However, I believe that won’t happen for a long time. First, we would have to convince everyone that there are alternatives to wood, and that we’re destroying everything. I know it wouldn’t happen for a long time because activists have been fighting for the rainforests for decades now. No one listens or even believes it’s important. Maybe if we stress to the public that if it continues, we’re all going to die, they might understand the importance. We can build with something else like concrete, we can make paper out of hemp, or eliminate the need for paper entirely. I believe that is possible. Eliminating lumber dependence is our best option, because it’s the only one that involves staying on earth. If we can build machines that do the gas exchanging that would help, but it would be very difficult to build enough machines and place them all over the world so that they are as efficient as trees. They can’t be powered by electricity or engines, that would do as much harm as good. They would have to be placed by rivers and use water turbines, or use wind power. There are too many issues with a machine, and people would use it as an excuse to chop down every tree on earth. Machines or leaving the trees alone still doesn’t solve the problem of all the other pollution that goes on besides just carbon dioxide. If you think the government isn’t doing very much about it, I’m afraid I can’t prove you wrong. NASA has tons of stuff but I couldn’t find anything immediately compelling but you can see for yourself here.

What could be the biggest problem in convincing everyone that this problem requires action is that anyone that’s undecided or not convinced thinks that someone else will do it. I’ve been reading stories and watching videos lately and people are burning trash or turning plastic back into oil. These people are doing these things on their own. They’re not getting a government stipend or anything. We should all be that tired of hearing that humans are going to go extinct because of themselves.

Many of the remaining wildland ecosystems across the world are at a cross-road. The natural factors that inhibited human expansion in these ecosystems in the past are now major attractants for people and business that value access to nature. The resulting land use pressures on private lands and climate change pressures on public lands have reduced the ecological integrity of many of these wildland ecosystems. These forces are projected to increase in the coming decades, raising challenges for sustaining wildland ecosystems. (Hansen 2016)

If we stop cutting down trees and plant more than there were, recycle and reduce waste by some impossible number, (that can be a whole other paragraph.) and stop otherwise polluting almost entirely, the earth may begin to spring back. However, scientists have devised a “doomsday clock,” that explains where approaching a point of no return. If we go past a point of no return, It’ll be too late to do anything but hop in a spaceship and find another planet.

Seeing science has a whole gallery here.

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Non-Scholarly

“Climate Change Evidence: How Do We Know?” Edited by Holly Shaftel, NASA, NASA, 21 Sept. 2018, climate.nasa.gov/evidence/.

National Snow and Ice Data Center, 2017 December 6, State of the Cryosphere. https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/glacier_balance.html

Image: seeing science 2017 http://seeingscience.umbc.edu/2017/02/climate-change-before-and-after/

Scholarly

Low, P. S. (2005). Climate Change and Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Greer, Amy, Canadian Medical Association Journal, Climate change and infectious diseases in North America: the road ahead, p.721, Canadian Medical Association Journal, March 11, 2018

Hansen, A. J., Monahan, W. B., Olliff, S. T., & Theobald, D. M. (2016). Climate Change in Wildlands : Pioneering Approaches to Science and Management. Washington, DC: Island Press. http://libproxy.ung.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1781779&site=eds-live&scope=site&ebv=EB&ppid=pp_357

MORRIS, G. P. et al. Scoping the proximal and distal dimensions of climate change on health and wellbeing. Environmental Health: A Global Access Science Source, 5 dez. 2017. v. 16, n. Suppl 1, p. 116. Disponível em: <http://libproxy.ung.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mnh&AN=29219099&site=eds-live&scope=site>. Acesso em: 20 set. 2018.

de, Larminat, Philippe. Climate Change : Identification and Projections, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/northgeorgia/detail.action?docID=1830138. Created from northgeorgia on 2018-10-08 13:06:07.

Funk, Cary, Pew Research Center, Public Views On Climate Change and Climate Scientists, Pew Research Center, October 4, 2016 http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/04/public-views-on-climate-change-and-climate-scientists/

Yusa, Anna, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Climate Change, Drought and Human Health in Canada, p. 8388 International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, July 17, 2015.

Zajchowski, Chris, Journal of Park & Recreation Administration, To Err is Human: Pondering the Undoing of Human-Induced Climate Change, p. 10, Journal of Park & Recreation Administration, June 1, 2018.