I've been following environmental issues since high school when Audubon Magazine each month charted the paths of environmental devastation in the United States and occasionally overseas. In those Good Old Days it seemed our worst problems were the Interstate Highway System crashing through both natural areas and urban neighborhoods, and President Johnson's Army Corps trying to dam every mile of flowing water in the 48 states. Then, I remember seening a Science article on "scientists trying to save the fragile green hell". It was one of the first inklings that environmental degradation was a lot more far reaching than a bunch of superfluous highways, dams and smokestacks.
In the following decades environmentalists fought increasingly futile rear-guard actions against wholesale destruction of the Earth's ecosystems. Rainforests generated some public concern, but not enough to stop total ruin to Southeast Asia and large tracts of South and Central America and Afica. Not to mention the destruction of dry forests, cloud forests, boreal forests, Old Growth forests, all for cheap hamburger, cheap electricity, cheap cardboard, and half-baked World Bank "development" schemes.
Then came this Global Warming thing...
Firstly, let me congratulate LaFeminista for finally adding 2+2 and coming up with something other that 5.
During the brief flury of angst over the destruction of rainforests, the slogan that these forest are the "lungs of the planet" became popular—you can still see this repeated in environmental literature. Unfortunately for the forests, this is not precisely true. Air conditioners of the planet, yes, but a mature rainforest more or less consumes the oxygen that it produces. So where are the lungs of the planet?
It's the phytoplankton, stupid!
As LaFeminista points out, that 40% hit the phytoplankton has already taken bodes ill for our air supply, since they produce
half of the oxygen we breathe
.
So why am I smiling? Because with Climate Change environmental consequences are now falling on the unjust as well as the just. Ecosystem destruction, mass extinctions, pollution....we've taken it all in stride up to now because, hard as it is to face, we can keep the juggernaut runnning without those rainforests, endangered species, or even clean air or water. A totally messed up climate and maybe not much oxygen are another matter, however. So, with no offense intended to all the concerned people here and elsewhere who have just become environmentalists when they hear about the consequences of climate change, I have to say I feel some satisfaction. Sort of the way we feel watching a good detective show when the perp finally get what's coming to him.
I'm not going to be exempt from any of the consequences of climate change. James Inhofe and I will have an equally hard time drawing a breath of air if the phyoplankton decreases continue. However, I expect I'll enjoy the irony of situation more than he will.