You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event, in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information.
This is the letter for week 24 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents to see topics for all the strike letters, see this story.
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Because misunderstanding how science works is now become deadly,
and because science needs to be driving our decisions.
This week’s topic is SCIENCE.
What is science?
Science is a revolutionary system where information is not based on belief. Instead, science values observable, repeatable phenomena that can be described and quantified to make and test predictions. The more accurate the observations, the more exactly repeatable the phenomena, the better the predictions. To be accepted, data and conclusions must be thoroughly questioned and vetted for errors and biases. The doing of science is an endeavor involving our entire species. And we need to be using it now, more than ever.
How does it work?
Anyone can do science. You do science by making observations. You form hypotheses (educated guesses) based on your observations. You find out what other people have figured out about the same area of study. You make predictions about the consequences of your hypotheses. You figure out a way to test your hypotheses. You conduct tests. You collect data. You analyze the data to see how far off your ideas were. You refine or throw out or try again until you think you’ve got it figured out. You publish your work in peer-reviewed journals with all the methods and data and reasoning laid out for everyone to see. Others go through your work, looking for faults or problems. Others try the same experiments. Others try related, slightly different experiments. Others apply the implications of your published work to a related area of study and do some more experiments. Everyone throws the ideas and data and conclusions around and settles on an understanding of what these most likely show. Science describes the universe; science doesn’t cause it. The better the description, the more accurate the resulting predictions.
OK, so what does science have to say about what’s happening right now?
What does science say about earth’s climate?
The carbon humans have dumped into the air is trapping increasing amounts of infrared radiation in our atmosphere. The trapped infrared, aka heat, is finding its way into various earth systems:
- It is melting ice (decreasing the planet’s albedo),
- It is heating the ocean,
- It is moving more water into the atmosphere (and water in air is also a greenhouse gas),
- It is increasing energy in the atmosphere (causing bigger and more ferocious storms),
- It is increasing average temperatures worldwide,
- It is lowering the ocean’s pH,
- It is raising sea levels,
- It is changing precipitation patterns,
- It is causing desertification,
- It is melting the permafrost (releasing methane, a wickedly effective GHG, into the atmosphere), and
- It is killing ecosystems and driving species extinct.
What does science say about current extinctions?
- We are in the 6th mass extinction event since the Cambrian explosion 541 million years ago. We are currently losing species at up to 1000 times the background extinction rate.
- The current mass extinction, the Anthropocene extinction event, is human-caused.
- Up to 50% of all individual animals have been lost in the last 40 years. Billions of regional and local species populations have been lost.
- One million species are in danger of going extinct in the next few decades.
- Extinctions cause ecosystem collapse.
- Extinctions result in a massive loss of biological resources (DNA, etc.)
What does science say about what we have to do?
- Cut carbon emissions.
- Create climate-ready infrastructure.
- Restore bio-rich coastal buffer zones and flood plains, and eliminate all buildings in these areas.
- Create climate early warning systems.
- Eliminate cars. (Note: This will likely require boosting transit.)
- Overhaul agriculture: Eliminate destructive profit-driven agriculture (such as palm deforestation, for example), require permaculture, ban pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.
- Stop destroying the oceans (Note: Doing so will require banning all bottom trawling, cyanide fishing, reef pounding, dynamite fishing, overfishing, keeping under and oversized fish, fishing that causes any bycatch, industrial fishing boats and fleets, and making fishers find and pull out of the water all ghost nets, ghost longlines, and any other fishing gear adrift in the ocean, and banning for all purposes all whale hunting.)
- Substantially reduce deforestation and overgrazing. (Note: This will likely require reducing the amount and type of meat available for consumption by humans.)
- Protect and restore endangered species (Note: This will absolutely require a ban and enforcement with fines and prison sentences of any trade in threatened species or things made from their bodies.)
- Increase the amount and health of non-human occupied or used areas. (Note: This will likely require substantial restrictions and reductions in housing, agriculture, and transportation.)
What does science say about our timeline for action?
- The IPCC report says we have until 2030 to reduce carbon pollution so the planet only heats up by 1.5°C. Please note we’re already 1°C hotter and our current trajectory will lead to a 3°C increase or more.
- That means we have to be reducing global CO2 emissions by 2020, and the amount of CO2 can never go up again. By 2030, the amount of CO2 has to be half current levels or lower. We must get to 0 net CO2 emissions by 2050.
- We are in the midst of biological annihilation caused by “human overpopulation and continued population growth, and overconsumption, especially by the rich.” We must immediately reduce rates of habitat change and overexploitation, and provide family planning worldwide. We have already failed to meet the Aichi Biodiversity Targets for 2020 in the IPBES summary.
- And please remember that all timelines to date have proven overly optimistic.
What does science say about politics?
Nothing. Politics doesn’t deal with the observed physical universe; it deals with social possibilities, personal ambition, and group objectives. The current planetary situation is a physical reality; it, therefore, is not in the realm of politics. So what can politics do? Politics MUST lead the public in doing what science has identified as vital for survival. Politics MUST figure out how to enact the solutions science identifies as do or die. Politics doesn’t get to decide what has to be done or on what timeline because politics isn’t capable of changing physical realities. Politics MUST use the information provided by science and act now.
Science needs to be the decider. Politics needs to be the actor.
Physics trumps politics in the real world, and that real world is the world we’re destroying right now. It’s no use worrying about attaining higher office when we are killing the biosphere. A dead biosphere means no higher office, no functioning San Francisco government, no fresh water in CA, and a mass extinction that includes our species. The choices are stark when viewed from the surface of a dying planet, and that’s exactly where we stand now.
We only have 68 weeks left to start actions, and we know from multiple prior examples that, when it comes to the climate crisis and the current extinction event, published timelines are ridiculously optimistic. Those ridiculously optimistic timelines say we have 68 weeks in which to act. Act now! Follow the science!