[Note: This is the fifty-seventh sample from my rough draft
of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy. The Search field on the right side will find
words in the full contents of all rants and reviews. These samples are not freestanding
pieces. They will be easier to
understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE —
if you happen to have some free time. If
you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording
my book HERE.
[Continued from Climate Crisis 02 Sample
56]
In The Great Acceleration, McNeill and Engelke
described how a warming climate is disturbing the relationship between water
and the family of life. The
precipitation patterns of the past are changing, creating new challenges for
ecosystems, human societies, and life as we know it.
Extreme weather events are expected to occur more
frequently. When ocean surface
temperatures get warmer, cyclones are more likely to be spawned. Warmer air can hold more moisture. In regions having a moist climate, clouds
bloated with water are more likely to form.
More and more often, storms are dumping huge loads of rain, sudden
deluges that cause destructive floods and landslides. In regions having a dryer climate, warmer air
will create fewer clouds, produce less rain, crank up the air temperature,
intensify drought conditions, and encourage wildfires.
With a warming climate, the glaciers of the world are melting
and retreating more rapidly. Winter
precipitation is delivering more rain, less snow. Winter rain tends to run off promptly. Snowpack retains the moisture longer. It melts later, closer to the growing season,
when the water can be used to irrigate thirsty cropland.
The water flowing out of the Himalayas feeds the Indus,
Yangzi, Mekong, Ganges, Yellow, Brahmaputra, and Irrawaddy rivers. Two billion people depend on this water
arriving in adequate amounts, at the appropriate time. In the coming years, more water shortages and
major changes are expected.
Paul Ehrlich
and John Harte wrote that a third of global crop production depends on
irrigation. Melting snow has been an
essential source of irrigation water.
“The winter snowpack in mountainous regions such as the Himalayas, the
Rockies, the Sierra, and the Andes is a most efficient reservoir, storing water
through the cold months and releasing it gradually as snowmelt in warm months when farmers need it.”
“In response to severe and prolonged drought in many regions
of the world, including China, India, Thailand, Italy, and California, loss of
surface irrigation water has resulted in excessive pumping of groundwater,
which in turn has led to land subsidence, groundwater depletion, and
irreversible loss of aquifer volume.” Food
production is also challenged by droughts, deluges, super storms, heat waves,
aggressive wildfires, declining insect pollinators, soil salinization, soil
depletion, erosion, and so on.
Sahana
Ghosh reported that the once mighty Ganges River is wheezing. Over the years, river volume has been
declining, because farmers have been diverting too much water via their irrigation
canals. The river got shallower. Then, they switched to tube wells with
motorized pumps. Naturally, overpumping
the groundwater has serious consequences.
In the dry months, the river now looks more like a mudflat. Reduced flow also concentrates the load of
pollutants. Researcher Abhijit Mukherjee said, “Our prediction shows that about 115
million people can be impacted due to insufficient food availability in the
next few decades.”
Jim
Robbins wrote about the Colorado River blues. The 1,450 mile (2,333 km) watershed starts in
the Rocky Mountains and ends at the Pacific.
It used to empty into the Gulf of California, but not a single drop of
water enters the Gulf today. In 2018,
river volume was just two-thirds of normal, tied for the record low.
The Colorado is one of the most heavily engineered waterways
in the world — designed for the benefit of humans, not nature. It is the source of much contention. It serves 40 million people, and the number
of users keeps growing. A drought since
2000 has reduced its flow. It is the
most severe drought in 1,250 years. The Lake
Mead reservoir at Hoover Dam, and the Lake Powell reservoir at Glen Canyon Dam,
are at all-time lows.
Some suspect that climate change is drying out the West. This is not just a temporary drought, the
West may actually be getting permanently dryer.
“Worst case, if the reservoirs ever hit ‘dead pool’ — when levels drop
too low for water to be piped out — many people in the region could become
climate refugees.”
Agriculture uses 80 percent of the Colorado’s water, cities
use 10 percent. As demand exceeds
supply, some users will be cut off.
Dewatering agriculture would snuff out many farms and nearby towns. Wildlife does not have a top priority.
Frederick
Pleitgen and team described an emerging water shortage crisis in the Middle
East, caused by persistent drought and extreme heat. Temperatures sometimes soar to life
threatening levels. Rainfall mostly
evaporates. Rivers, lakes, and wetlands
are drying up. As Iran’s once large and
beautiful Lake Urmia shrinks, its water is getting too salty, so farmers are
pumping groundwater for irrigation.
Aquifers are being overpumped, depleting the limited reserves. If current trends continue, some regions will
become uninhabitable.
Homes in Jordan receive some water once or twice a week. Numerous upstream dams limit the amount of
water that eventually arrives at the end of the watershed. Israel has a huge water desalinization
program that requires large amounts of fossil energy to operate, adding still
more carbon into the atmosphere.
Every variety of plant and animal has different environmental
requirements for optimal health. They
all have evolved to survive within a limited range of conditions. Humans can’t survive extreme conditions, nor
can the livestock and crops we depend on.
When reality is shifting into a new and unusual trend, the family of
life will struggle, and some will blink out.
Evolution is not a speedy process.
With regard to crop plants, important variables include
temperature, sunlight hours, pH, available moisture, soil fertility, and so
on. As warming proceeds, the regions
that have a tropical climate are expanding from their equatorial homeland
toward the poles. Regions that used to
be temperate are getting hotter. In the
good old days, frigid winters used to provide beneficial pest control, by
freezing lots of insects and other things that harmed crops and humans. Winter precipitation was stored in ice and
snow.
Brian
Halweil emphasized how important a stable climate is to agriculture. In 2003, for the first time, the potato
blight fungus came to visit the town of Chacllabamba, Peru. It almost totally destroyed their crop. Located at an altitude of 13,000 feet (4,000
m), a cool climate had protected the potato fields for thousands of years. No more.
Spuds had been their staple food.
Jerry
Hatfield and John Prueger investigated how rising temperatures affected a
variety of crop plants. Extreme heat
events may last a few days, and have a big impact. When temperatures are outside of the ideal
range, plant growth, pollination, and reproductive processes can be
affected. Pollination is especially
sensitive to rising temperatures. High
temperatures during the reproductive phase of the life cycle can reduce corn
yields by as much as 80 to 90 percent.
When wheat is maturing, a frost can cause the grains to be
sterile. Too much heat can reduce the
number of grains that form. Rice is
especially vulnerable to high heat during the pollination process. For the major crops, yields are expected to
decrease as global temperatures rise.
Kimberly
Cartier noted that growing conditions are getting less predictable than in
the past. Rainy seasons may be more
intense than usual, or less. Their
arrival may be earlier than the ideal time, or later. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) pattern
is associated with precipitation patterns, and it is a well-known
troublemaker. In 1983, an unusual ENSO
coincided with the largest global failure of corn (maize) crops in modern
records. ENSO can also alter wheat and
soybean production on a global scale.
Mike
Davis wrote about a horrific era of ENSO related droughts and famines. In the years 1876-79 and 1896-1902 between
12.2 and 29.3 million died of famine in India.
In the Madras Deccan, “the only well-fed part of the local population
were the pariah dogs, ‘fat as sheep,’ that feasted on the bodies of dead
children.” In the same period, between
19.5 and 30 million died of famine in China, and 2 million in Brazil. Famine hit these three nations the hardest,
but many other nations were also affected.
In the U.S., churches organized to send relief to hungry farmers in the
Dakotas and western Kansas.
Samuel
Markings wrote about the relationship between photosynthesis and
temperature. In plants, photosynthesis
is the process that uses sunlight to transform water and CO2 into
food (glucose) and oxygen. Optimum
temperatures range between 50 to 68°F (10 to 20°C). Above this range, higher temperatures slow
photosynthesis. The process declines
sharply when temps rise above 104°F (40°C).
When temps persist in this range, plant survival is endangered.
Abdul Wahid
and team wrote an extensive report on heat tolerance in plants. Each crop species has a threshold
temperature. If this temperature is
exceeded too long, the result is heat stress — irreversible damage to plant
growth and development. Harm varies
based on intensity (temperature in degrees), duration, and the rate at which
the temperate rose.
Qunying Luo
extensively described threshold temperatures for a number of major crop
species. At different stages of a
plant’s life, they can be damaged by excess heat — leaf initiation, shoot
growth, root growth, sowing to emergence, grain filling, etc. For example, “Several studies found that
temperatures of above 35°C (95°F) are lethal to maize pollen viability”
Tnau
Agritech Portal published a report on the effects of high temperature on
plant growth in India. Each plant
species has a thermal death point. For
many annual crops, 122°F (50°C) is fatal.
Excess heat can reduce yields, and inhibit the absorption and
assimilation of nutrients. It can cause
pollen abortion, which reduces the grain set.
Even short exposure can affect the growth of shoots and roots.
Evelyn
Lamb wrote that rice provides 16 to 20 percent of the calories consumed by humankind. Corn and wheat are similarly popular. Thus, more than half of the calories consumed
by humans are provided by rice, corn, and wheat. Growing rice in flooded paddies produces more
greenhouse gas emissions per calorie than corn or wheat, twice the emissions
from wheat.
Santosh
Koirala reported that most rice crops begin by transplanting young plants
in flooded paddies (“puddling”). “When
rice is grown under puddled transplanted conditions, paddy soil becomes anoxic
— depleted of dissolved oxygen — and then, in the absence of oxygen, microbes
that break down plant matter produce methane.”
Puddling “is becoming less profitable because of the costs of labour,
shortage of water, and high energy costs.”
It results in depletion of soil quality, and higher methane emissions.
“Methane is the second
major greenhouse gas, after carbon dioxide, and agriculture accounts for 40% of
these greenhouse emissions. Although farm
animals are a major source, flooded rice paddies emit as much as 500 million
tons, which is around 20% of total manmade emissions of this gas.”
Kritee Kritee
and team noted that rice is a staple food for almost half of humankind, so it’s
especially important to pay attention to its climate impacts. Globally, one third of water used for
irrigation goes to rice farming. Rice
receives one seventh of all fertilizer used.
“Methane from global rice cultivation currently accounts for one-half of
all crop-related greenhouse gas emissions.”
Experts recommended that these methane emissions could be
reduced by shifting from continuously flooded rice fields to intermittent
flooding. Unfortunately, the team was
surprised to discover that this brilliant solution had an unintended
consequence. The emissions of nitrous
oxide (N2O) tripled — a greenhouse gas that persists in the
atmosphere much longer than methane. It
is an unintended consequence of using nitrogen rich fertilizer.
Janet
Ranganathan and team wrote a hefty and thorough report filled with
recommendations for reducing the environmental harm caused by high impact diets
and overpopulation. Consumption of
animal-based foods is growing, and these foods (especially beef), result in
higher emissions of greenhouse gases.
Meat and dairy foods are not necessary for adequate
nutrition, so less is better.
“Plant-based foods can be readily combined to provide the full set of
essential amino acids, as with rice and beans or peanut butter and bread.” The only essential not provided by a
vegetarian diet is vitamin B12, which supplements can provide.
Obesity is a growing trend, even among low-income
people. “Globally, there are now
two-and-a-half times more overweight than undernourished people. More than one in three adults are
overweight.” Folks around the world are
overdoing the consumption of calories and protein.
The Second
State of the Carbon Cycle Report is a spellbinding 878 page report on the
carbon cycle in North America. I learned
a very important fact of life:
“Globally, soils contain more than three times as much carbon as the
atmosphere, and four and a half times more carbon than the world’s biota
[living things]; therefore, even small changes in soil carbon stocks could lead
to large changes in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2).”
Carbon compounds are central to the existence of the entire
family of life. The CO2 that
plants extract from the atmosphere allows them to live and grow. Plants exhale oxygen that animals need, and
animals exhale CO2 that plants need.
Soil is home to an amazing community of fantastic microbes. Dead organic material contains carbon. When it drops to the ground, soil microbes
eagerly decompose it, and do so in a way that stabilizes the carbon, so it is
more likely to be retained in the soil, rather than float away. Soil microbes that encourage carbon retention
do not enjoy unusual shifts in moisture or temperature. They don’t enjoy deforestation, tilling, or
being sprayed with farm chemicals.
Livestock production is a significant source of greenhouse
gases — CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide. Ruminants include cattle, sheep, goats, elk,
deer, bison, etc. The digestive system
in ruminants includes a process called enteric fermentation, which produces
methane emissions (3% farts, 97% belches).
Poultry, hogs, and horses emit greenhouse gases in smaller volumes via
different processes. Manure stored in
large quantities generates large emissions of methane. Pools of deep shit contain little or no
oxygen, so they provide ideal conditions for producing methane.
“Soils in North America have lost, on average, 20% to 75% of
their original topsoil carbon with historical conversion to agriculture.” Most of this conversion took place in the
last 200 years or so. To add insult to
injury, “On a per-person basis, food loss and waste in North America is 375 to
500 kilograms per year.” (826 to 1,102 pounds)
Zombie
fires were the subject of a BBC story.
They are also called overwintering fires or peat fires. They occur in Russia, Canada, and
Alaska. In recent years, temperatures in
the Arctic have been soaring, and permafrost has been thawing. When tundra and forest lands dry out, they
become prone to wildfires. These fires
can ignite ancient peat deposits beneath the surface. Toasty peat can smolder all winter, beneath
the snow cover. When spring arrives, the
snow melts, oxygen reaches the embers, and the fire can reignite. They “come back from the dead,” hence the
zombie tag.
Alexandra
Witze reported that in the summer of 2020, there were many Siberian tundra
fires, and they emitted 244 megatons of CO2, a 35 percent increase
over the intense 2019 fire season. About
half of the fires were burning on peat lands, the most carbon-dense
ecosystems. When shallow layers near the
surface dry out, they are more susceptible to burning. Warmer winters and springs mean the fire
season starts sooner. In the Arctic, the
fire zone is moving northward, into lands that have traditionally been
fire-resistant.
Portia
Kentish reported that the climate crisis is well underway in Arctic
regions, causing huge and spooky impacts — a powerful warning to the rest of
the world, which is not leaping to action.
During a May 2020 heat wave, locations in Siberia that are normally
close to freezing had temperatures hotter than Athens or Rome. Some Arctic permafrost is up to 80,000 years
old. When permafrost thaws, methane
emissions begin. Heat waves encourage
wildfires. They are burning peat
deposits that have been building up for 15,000 years. About half of Russia’s Arctic fires are
consuming peat soil.
We could sequester lots of CO2 by planting
enormous numbers of trees. That sounds
wholesome. Sadly, the current fad is
deforestation — cutting enormous numbers of trees to grow soybeans, create
livestock pastures, make charcoal, produce wood products, and clear the way for
urban sprawl.
As the planet gets warmer, forests will become more
vulnerable to pests and pathogens.
Droughts will become hotter, longer, and dryer. This encourages wildfires. Wikipedia is posting pages that, year by
year, document wildfire activity in the world.
The report for the record breaking year of 2021 is [HERE]. As of August 19, fires had been reported in
Algeria, South Africa, Cyprus, India, Israel, Russia, Turkey, France, Greece,
Italy (10 regions), Canada, and United States (9 states), Argentina, and
Australia.
Rodrigo
Pérez Ortega reported that climate change is encouraging trees to grow fast
and die young. Research suggests that
this may be universal, affecting almost all tree species and climates. Based on tree ring analysis, this trend
corresponds with the exponential growth of human caused CO2
emissions, as well as rising temperatures — a combo that stimulates rapid
growth. This reduces their potential for
maximum long term CO2 absorption.
Nate McDowell
and team studied changing forests.
“Shifts in forest dynamics are already occurring, and the emerging
pattern is that global forests are tending toward younger stands with faster
turnover as old-growth forest with stable dynamics are dwindling.” These shifts are occurring because of
“anthropogenic-driven exacerbation of chronic drivers, such as rising
temperature and CO2, and increasing transient disturbances,
including wildfire, drought, windthrow, biotic attack, and land-use
change.” Their findings indicate that it
is “highly likely that tree mortality rates will continue to increase.”
Robert
Hunziker reported on new information linking rising temperatures with the
increase in tree deaths. In the U.S.,
giant sequoias are dying from the top down.
In the Southwest, drought has killed hundreds of millions of trees. In Africa, 2,000 year old baobab trees are
wheezing and dying. In Germany, dead
trees are everywhere. Dead and dying
trees are more vulnerable to insects and disease. They provide abundant fuel for forest
fires. Siberia is burning up. “New studies show drought and heat waves will
cause massive die-offs, killing most trees alive today.”
Dahr
Jamail visited Glacier National Park, home to a formerly thriving boreal
forest. A warming climate has delighted
millions of hungry pine bark beetles, some of whom can now have two life cycles
per year. In the last 20 years, beetles
have killed 40 million acres (16 million ha) of trees. They kill fewer pines now, because fewer
pines remain alive. The latest serial
killer is white pine blister rust, which has infected almost 85 percent of the
trees in the park.
Songlin Fei
and team studied how insects and diseases are hammering U.S. forests, which are
now home to more than 450 nonnative tree-feeding insects and tree
pathogens. The study focused on the 15
most destructive nonnative forest pests.
It found that “41.1% of the total live forest biomass in the
conterminous United States is at risk of future loss from these 15 pests. These results indicate that forest pest
invasions, driven primarily by globalization, represent a huge risk to U.S.
forests and have significant impacts on carbon dynamics.”
Peter
Wohlleben shared his intimate knowledge of the trees in his beloved German
forest. Trees can’t walk, but forests
are always slowly wandering. Since the
end of the last ice age, a warming climate has enabled the trees of central Europe
to gradually migrate northward. Animals
and winds move seeds away from their source.
Today, the climate is warming way too fast, which presents a mortal
threat to temperature sensitive species.
Human tree huggers are working to relocate and transplant as many types
of trees as possible. Assisted
migration is a heroic effort to “help forests walk.”
The climate crisis is not expected to promote miraculous
advances in the health of humankind. The
huge herd is moving into an era of food insecurity, power shortages, water
scarcity, poor sanitation, infectious diseases, deteriorating medical care
systems, and so on. A hotter climate and
extreme weather events will add to these challenges.
The Lancet’s 2020 report presented a
competent 42 page discussion on the climate change impacts on health. Warming trends are increasing the frequency
and intensity of floods, drought, storms, wildfire, temperature anomalies, and
food scarcity. These changes are killing
more folks in the 65+ age range. In
2018, heat waves killed about 296,000 people.
“The climate suitability for infectious disease transmission
has been growing rapidly since the 1950s.”
The dengue virus is spreading across South America. “From 1950 to 2018, the global climate
suitability for the transmission of dengue increased by 8.9% for Aedes
aegypti and 15% for Aedes albopictus. In 2015 to 2019, suitability for malaria
transmission in highland areas was 38.7% higher in the African region and
149.7% higher in the Western Pacific region compared with a 1950s baseline.”
David
Wallace-Wells added that malaria also thrives in hotter regions because
“for every degree increase in temperature, the parasite reproduces ten times
faster.” Consequently, by 2050, up to
5.2 billion people may be infected, according to World Bank estimates. As tropical climates move northward, so will
tropical pathogens.
A tipping point in an ecosystem is a threshold that, when
exceeded, can lead to large changes.
Sometimes an imbalance can reach a level of intensity that triggers an
irreversible cascade of events, like a chain reaction of falling dominoes. The climate crisis is a momentous tipping
point in the human saga. Melting Arctic
ice has busted loose an avalanche of devastating changes. Clever humans, with all their gee-whiz
technology, are powerless to refreeze the Arctic, halt the avalanche, put the
carbon back where it came from, and make everything nice again.
Over the millennia, high impact cultures have increasingly
evolved into aggressive control freaks, radically manipulating ecosystems to
satisfy their impulsive whims. They are
unencumbered by foresight, and display little respect for the family of life
and the generations yet to come.
For a very long time, their enthusiastic cleverness usually
didn’t slam head-on into devastating limits.
They kept nature on a short leash, and brutally abused her. The game is different now. We’ve created changes that threaten our
survival, changes we can’t undo. We are
no longer in the driver’s seat.
Nature has put a tight leash around our necks, and we’re about
to discover what it’s like to be powerless, kicked, and beaten. Mistakes indeed have consequences
(ouch!). Our seat in the family of life
is not a throne. We are not the Crown of
Creation. We’re often more like
hyperactive children who get completely lost, confused, and anxious.
Many folks who deliberately pay acute attention to reality
are totally spooked. These hyper alert
folks have developed a special ability to comprehend the obvious — we’re in the
<bleeping> express lane to surprising changes. Many of them seem to perceive tipping points
to be elements of a remarkable cosmic drama.
Tipping points are fire-breathing dragons that we must heroically slay
in order avert runaway warming, and a hellish ecological apocalypse called
Hothouse Earth.
The alert ones are jumping up and down and shouting about
tipping points, in a desperate frantic effort to wake up the clueless
billions. Dudes! It’s time for action! We only have ten years to fix this mess! It’s not too late! The presumption is that the mess is a
solvable problem. We are heavily
indoctrinated with the illusion that technology can overcome any
challenge.
At the same time, the titans of industry assure us that they
are ready and eager to sell us the miracles we need: electric cars, solar
panels, wind turbines — clean green energy, and a prosperous economy that will
grow until the end of time! We can
simply shop our way to a better tomorrow.
Everything will be OK. Think
happy thoughts. Hope will save the
world.
Will electric cars will be so cool that the Arctic ice
refreezes? Will the glaciers rise and
shine again? Will green energy be so
cool that the permafrost stops thawing, and the methane seeps go back to
sleep? Is learning how to walk as hard
as they say? To learn more about tipping
points, check out Fred
Pearce, Timothy
Lenton, Katharyn
Duffy, and Will
Steffen.
[Continued in Climate Crisis 04, Sample 58]
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