From: impracticalcogitator.wordpress.com/...
We ony have one planet, and we are killing it.
The rate with which environmental factors accelerate year by year indicates that our children will face irreversible disasters on a scale Hollywood films cannot begin to approach. Some tipping points have already been passed; many more lie in the immediate future. There are measures that can safeguard the world as we know it, but they have to be undertaken quickly.
Just to be clear, these are the issues I would offer as offering almost certain apocalyptic disaster if not averted in the next decade:
Greenhouse gases have now reached 400 parts per million, a tipping point.
Global temperatures are rising; all ten of the hottest recorded years are within the last twelve years. Much of that heat has been absorbed by the oceans bringing significant change in biodiversity in the oceans. The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the ocean is increasing by about 2 billion tons per year.
Global Sea Level has risen almost seven inches in the last century. The rate of increase in the last decade is nearly double that of the last century.
The Arctic tundra and the Amazon rain forest have already begun dramatic change due to warming and drying.
Glaciers are melting. In the mid-1800s, Glacier National Park contained about 250 glaciers; today 25 remain, and they are at risk of disappearing. In the park, the number of 90 degree plus days has tripled since the start of the last century. Greenland lost 60 cubic miles of ice from 2002 to 2005.
The snowmelt in Colorado occurs two to three weeks earlier than it did in 1978; the Cascades in Washington State lost about a quarter of their snowpack from1930 to 1978. Snow melt arrives earlier; water stored in snowpacks is gone by the middle of the increasingly hot summer.
The surface level of the Dead Sea is dropping by about three feet a year.
The island chain known as the Solomon Islands has entirely lost five islands and is about to lose six more.
Anything else? Well, the death of coral reefs brings a dramatic drop in fish population, a trend accelerated by technologically advanced large scale fishing practices. Could the oceans actually be fished out? Yup, and that's not all. The number of "Dead Zones," areas of water that have become anoxic, areas in which there is little or no dissolved oxygen at the floor of the body, are increasing rapidly, as photos from NASA indicate.. Some of the problem comes from pollution, particulary at the mouths of rivers, where bacteria use oxygen and give off carbon dioxide during respiration.
It's not just heat. the number of extreme weather events is increasing incrementally, so that extreme cold, rain, drought, devastating flooding have all increased each year since 2005. As the level of the oceans rise, so too does condensation, creating more extreme conditions of wind and rain.
And, just in case there's not enough evidence literally hitting us in the face, the effect of the melting of permafrost would release something like 1700 gigatons of carbon into the environment, the impact of which is not calculable in considering the eventual effective rate of warming.
I know, it's overwhelming; time to go watch tv.
But, unforunately, that's not the last of it. In concentrated form, we have not a lot of time to deal with desertification, deforestration the effects of hydrolic fracking, habitat destruction, air pollution, disappearing wetlands, biodiversity loss, oh, and I forgot to mention that when peat bogs dry out and burn, they too release eons of srotes carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, the population of the United States, the nation best able to bring about change, does not agree on some of the basic principles that inform creative thinking about environmental security.
Today, about forty percent of Americans believe that humans have existed in our present form since the beginning of time, and, of course the percentage is higher among members of certain religious groups and higher among people above the age of thirty. The current Republican nominee for the office of Vice President, Mike Pence responded to an interviewer's question, saying, “Um … I, do I believe in evolution? Ah, I, I, ah … I embrace the, uh — the, uh — the view, ah, that God created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all that’s in them.”
To be clear, the denial of science, from evolution to climate change, particularly the conviction that talk of global warming is a conspiracy, in some cases attributed to the Chinese (Hmmmm... to what end?) is alive and well in the Republican Party, the party that currently holds a majority in the House and the Senate, a party dependent upon the support of two significant groups, conservative Christian fundamentalists and corporate donors.
Even the most conservative of Republicans goes to a doctor and watches the weather report, but trust scientists? Not so much.
I'm not sure we could have planned the end of the planet more assiduously; the measurable facts are stunning and overlooked on a daily basis. The current political jockeying revolves around personality and lightly discussed issues involving the economy and national security. We can live in a complicated, intracately balanced world for a bit longer, but time is running out.
Following World War II and America's use of nuclear devices to end the war with Japan, the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board has maintained the Doomsday Clock, a measurement of the liklihoodof the world's descent into global catastrophe; the closer to midnight, the greater the certainty of disaster. For much of its history, the Board looked at the possibility of global nuclear war as the agent of apocalypse, but since 2007, the clock also represents the effects of climate change.
The moment of greatest threat, two minutes to midnight, came in 1958, when the United Syaes and the Soviet Union both tested thermonuclear devices within a month of each other. The least threat, seventeen minutes to midnight came in 1991, when the United States and the Soviet Union sign the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and the Soviet Union is dissolved.
A bit of a blip brought the clock to five minutes to midnight in 2007 as the North Koreans tested their nuclear weapon and Iran seemed capable of arriving at nuclear weapon capacity.
2015? We were at three minutes to midnight. Why? Well, take a look at the top of this article and consider the pressing environmental issues we have not yet begun to address.
Tick Tock