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. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 207 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 of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Hold tight, we’re in for nasty weather1
This week: A BIOSPHERE CHECK FOR EARTH DAY
What are the problems with the biosphere?
- Atmospheric release of carbon is destroying the climate, while nano-particle pollution and pm 2.5 - 10 are deadly and pervasive, and spread atmosphere-wide throughout the troposphere and into the stratosphere.
- The melting cryosphere is expanding both storm size and impact, causing extreme drought and extreme flooding, while producing accelerating sea level rise.
- The hydrosphere is polluted and acidifying, and the ocean’s heat exchange engines are shutting down due to higher and higher average water temperatures.
- The pedosphere (the soil layer of the lithosphere) is drying, being ripped away by catastrophic floods and agricultural misuse, polluted, poisoned, and dying.
In the biosphere, all of these issues are causing mass death events, a reduction of diversity of life, and a destruction of systems that support species and habitats, producing an ongoing and accelerating mass extinction event, the 6th great extinction in the history of this planet.
BOTTOM LINE:
The biosphere is dying. We are killing it.
Why does SF need to act on biosphere problems?
We’re part of the biosphere; if it dies, we die. As it’s weakened, we die. When it’s poisoned, we die. As the connections between species and ecosystems are broken, we die. When flooding and drought and heat increase, we die. We have no independence from the biosphere. We are a tiny fraction of the biosphere and we are directly and indirectly destroying it.
BOTTOM LINE:
We fix it or we die.
So what must SF do?
None of the following items are news, none of them. SF needs to:
- WATER: Institute blackwater recycling, legalize and assist with graywater reuse, create and enforce permanent water restrictions and regulations without advantaging the wealthy, legalize and promote composting toilets, localize water sourcing, increase surface permeability and enforce and strengthen surface permeability laws, plant native trees in great numbers and build bioswales everywhere, disinter SF’s streams and lakes, and in general work to have SF treating water the same way the US treated metals during WW II.
- ENERGY: Localize our energy production and grid control, allowing no carbon production at any stage. We have an abundance of energy resources right here in SF; this is not rocket science.
- PLANT ABSORBENT SACRIFICE ZONES: Because of ongoing sea level rise, coastal areas are already sacrifice zones, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. Fill these zones with densely planted spongy ecosystems instead of trying to armor them up, and we will have something that is green and CO2 absorbing that actually protects us instead of making the sea level rise and storm surge situations much worse.
- MOVE: Put all our necessary infrastructure uphill now, and phase out and clean up all low-lying infrastructure that is going to go underwater and endanger us if left to do so without a plan. 3 of our 4 sewage treatment facilities are at current sea level, for example; they will not operate underwater and will create immense pollution, health, and safety problems when submerged (from water-driven wreckage) if they are not decommissioned and moved.
- PLAN LIKE NASA: All planning in and for SF must be planning for survival on a hostile planet. That includes, but is not limited to, creating the most aerodynamic profile from all directions (include all buildings and trees in constructing this profile), growing a majority of our food locally, marshaling our resources (such as by reusing and recycling everything used in SF in SF itself), producing our own energy, recycling all of our own waste, and planning and implementing local resilience and redundancies.
- BUILD: All SF’s building must be uphill and not car-oriented. Require all buildings, new and old, be green, sustainable, and non-carbon-producing. As much as possible, build on bedrock. This will mean changing zoning, and that needs to happen. Plan for refugees and flooding now because they both are already coming here. Do not eliminate green space while building, and build densely.
- PLANT: Plant a true native forest in SF, and create connected greenbelts throughout the city. Plant seagrass meadows and kelp forests and, as the water levels rise, plant new seagrass meadows and kelp anchorages in newly submerged areas. These will protect us far more than concrete ever can.
- ELIMINATE POLLUTION: In SF, outlaw non-biological atmospheric carbon production, get rid of and eliminate the creation of radioactive waste, eliminate all chemical and plastic pollution, reduce noise pollution and eliminate light pollution (especially important as this contributes to carbon pollution in addition to being a major health risk.)
BOTTOM LINE:
SF can take actions to deal with the coming disasters, and we need to act now.
Why must SF act immediately?
Let’s talk El Niño and wet-bulb temperatures.
El Niño is warm part of ENSO. The most recent global record temperature was during the last El Niño. In between then and now, we’ve poured CO2 into the atmosphere and the average temperature rise has accelerated. There’s a nice graphic here (https://americasbestpics.com/video/the-staircase-of-denial-temperature-anomaly-anomaly-anomaly-anomaly-anomaly-CWEf5PKOA) if you want to see how it works. And that’s why this El Niño is looking like it will be catastrophic.
This El Niño will take us over 1.5°C temperature increase (Remember Paris? It was just 8 years ago.) We’re looking at savage heat waves, extreme drying and flooding, and new types of weather. And that brings us to wet-bulb temperatures.
There are many ways to describe wet-bulb temperature, but the most useful for us is “the lowest temperature that can be reached with current air conditions by the evaporation of water only”. At wet-bulb temperatures of 85°F, people start dying because cooling by evaporation of sweat no longer works (the air is too saturated to absorb the water). These conditions are often described in the news as “deadly heatwaves” but they are really high wet-bulb heatwaves. These have happened in India and Pakistan in the summer of 2015 (the peak of the prior El Niño), killing ~4000 people. The 2021 heat dome over the US and Canada had a high wet-bulb temperature and killed ~200 people. In both cases, the damage to other animals and to plants was massive, causing more short- and long-term ecological havoc. Globally, the number of dangerous wet-bulb events more than doubled between 1979 and 2017.
So we’re coming into another El Niño and all we’ve done in the time since the prior one is pour fuel on the fire that is burning up the ability of this planet to support life. But there are things, important things, SF can still do to mitigate the damage and reduce the losses and fatalities, if we act now! Act now!
FOOTNOTES
1. from “Burning Down The House” by The Talking Heads.