This article, written by Evan Lim, describes how glaciers are disappearing much faster that previous evidence based studies have estimated. Lim outlines the disastrous effects on communities.
Glaciers are disappearing to twice as fast as previous studies estimated, with disastrous effects on many communities.
Two new studies suggest that recent estimates of global ice melt are conservative.
In other words, ice is melting much more rapidly than experts thought. As a result, sea levels are rising faster as well.
The first study combines various observations from satellites, on-the-ground measurements, and model-based estimates to create a clearer picture of the state of Earth’s ice between 1994 and 2017. Essentially, it captures a global tally of change in ice mass over that time period. The resulting measurements of ice loss and sea level rise fall in the upper range of scenarios forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body within the United Nations meant to provide objective science related to climate change. The IPCC’s scenarios were laid out in their 2019 special report on oceans and the cryosphere, itself a recent overview of assessment work.
Faster sea level rise means that more areas will experience devastating floods sooner, and we are already seeing more of such events.
The second study zooms in on a particular region, rather than compiling measurements at the global scale. Focusing on Greenland, this study investigates how warmer ocean water affects marine terminating glaciers — those that end at the ocean. The authors identified at least 74 glaciers with retreats strongly influenced by warmer ocean waters, which expedite mass loss by undercutting a glacier’s base. Thus, the rest of the glacier is weakened and can collapse. Importantly, glacial melt contributes to rising sea levels; icebergs calving as glaciers thin adds water to the oceans.
Top and bottom illustrations show how the water thins the ice from below, making it easier for pieces to break off. (Source: Michael Wood et. al./Ocean forcing)
The authors of the first study emphasized that there is little doubt that the majority of ice loss is due to climate warming. In an interview with GlacierHub, Michael Zemp, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service and a professor of glaciology and geomorphodynamics at the University of Zurich who is not affiliated with the study, stated that “Overall, the data show that climate change is happening and impacts are only increasing.”
Zemp also highlighted the complexity of systems in the cryosphere, emphasizing an important dynamic between the two studies in question. Broadly, the driving force of increased ice melt is climate warming. However, within glaciated regions around the world, there are specific characteristics that need to be taken into consideration.
For example, as the Greenland study demonstrates, the region’s glaciers are losing mass much more quickly as the ocean waters melt them from below, making it more easy for pieces to break and fall off. As this regional phenomenon affects the glaciers so significantly, the study authors point out that “projections that exclude ocean-induced undercutting may underestimate mass loss by at least a factor of 2.”
From the different characteristics of each region to the various measurement types (satellite, on-the-ground, modeling) to the time periods in which measurements are observed, models of the cryosphere have much to incorporate. Zemp notes that reports by the IPCC, which attempt to pull data from many different studies, can suffer as a result of the challenges of incorporating wide-ranging factors.
When asked how to reduce ice melt, Walter Immerzeel, a professor at Utrecht University, answered,
“the only real option is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ASAP. The re-entry of the U.S. in the Paris climate agreement is a hopeful sign.”
Zemp’s conclusion echoed Immerzeel’s:
“the response is not easy, but still very simple. We have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the Paris Agreement will hopefully help with this.”
The Greenland study notes that from 2008-2017, there was a cooling period in the ocean near Greenland. Despite this cooling, grounded ice (ice on land) continued to retreat significantly. As a result of previous warming, the glaciers have already been removed from their state of equilibrium, meaning the balance between mass gain and loss is gone. Even if emissions stopped immediately, there would still be lingering effects and mass loss as a result of the damage that has already been done. If emissions stopped, global temperatures would still be high enough for ice to continue to melt.
“It [climate change] was already urgent, but these conclusions further emphasize this. We need to act now and invest in both mitigation (reducing emissions) and adaptation (being prepared for the impact),” Immerzeel told GlacierHub.
He also noted that increased ice melt has significant implications for communities which rely on glaciers as sources of fresh drinking water and water for irrigation. For example, villages in Peru rely heavily on the Cordillera Blanca mountain range. The mountains and glaciers provide a rich cultural history, economic benefits through tourism and water used for irrigation, tourist guesthouses and household consumption. As the glaciers melt, the traditions of the culture that rely on the glaciers disappear, and people’s livelihoods are threatened by the impacts on tourism and agriculture and the sudden appearance of floods.
While certain damages are unavoidable, there can absolutely be more harm to come if significant action is not taken now.
Whether action is undertaken to protect current vulnerable communities or future generations, reducing emissions can shrink the burden people will inevitably have to bear. Communities are being affected as glaciers melt and sea levels rise, but the extent to which these damages will occur is still uncertain and can still be changed if the right measures are taken.
This article was written by Evan Lim, Columbia University Earth Institute, and published in Climate & Capitalism on February 17th, 2021. You can read at source here.
Written By Paul Street and published in CounterPunch on February 19th 2021, this article provides seering analysis of capitalism and ongoing environmental collapse in the current politic climate.
We could stop being surprised by terrible things if we paid more attention to past and current history.
We could also remember that we are part of Nature and cannot survive much longer in a state of capitalist war on the web of life.
Shocking, Yes; Surprising, No
No Empathy Joe
Yes, it’s terrible that Joe Biden has refused to forgive more than a pittance of student debt. But do we not recall him telling a Los Angeles Times host that he had “no empathy, give me a break” for the plight of Millennials in the savagely unequal and environmentally unsustainable world he’d helped create over decades of Congressional service to corporate and financial America? No surprise.
Fascists Doing Fascist Stuff
The Trump-instigated January 6th fascistic Attack on the Capitol was shocking. Contrary to the “oh my God I can’t believe this is happening in America!” response of dismayed cable news talking heads, it was hardly surprising. As the historian Timothy Snyder noted in its aftermath, “When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march to the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of the American version.”
That’s because Trump was and is a fascist, as was clear well before he was elected. So are many of his backers. Nobody who paid attention to the real record of this white-supremacist racial- nationalist authoritarian and his Amerikaner base (please see my chapter on “the Trumpenvolk” in this excellent volume) should have been astounded by January 6th. It was the final crazed act in a rolling coup campaign that had been underway for months.
A Predicted and Predictable Pandemic Nightmare
The COVID-19 pandemic has been shocking. It should never have been surprising. Public health experts had been warning about such an event for many years from their observation of global capitalism’s encroachment into new geographic and biological spheres and the remarkable speed and scale with which the world capitalist system spreads people and germs across planetary space.
The special virulence with which the virus hit the United States is shocking but unsurprising. It was to be expected given the nation’s extreme attachments and captivity to corporate power, extreme class disparity savage racial inequality, and military empire. The U.S profits and war system is incapable of protecting public health. American “democracy” is about the upward concentration of wealth and power, with disastrous consequences for the common good. The terrible outcomes include a for-profit health care system wired to serve only the rich and a poisoned food system and environment that feeds rampant co-morbidities across the land. The steepest health price is paid by poor people of color, who have died to a disproportionate degree.
Of course COVID-19 made the U.S. its most favored nation. It’s the extreme capitalism, the over-the-top individualism, and the related acute racial oppression that made this predictable.
Capitalogenic Ecocide
The ongoing collapse of livable ecology, whose symptoms include ever more extreme weather (like the recent and ongoing polar cold snap within and beyond the U.S. South) is shocking. It is proceeding as predicted by environmental scientists who have warned for many decades about the exterminist consequences of unrestrained capitalism. The climate we used to know is being blown up by carbon capitalism, as predicted even by Exxon-Mobil.
The capital order is addicted to perpetual “growth,” that is accumulation, to sustain its rate of profit and to paper over its inequalities. It’s an environmentally unsustainable dependence. If we don’t break our dependence on capitalism, we are done for (we may already be done for). Capitalism is wired for the termination of livable ecology.
This Kills Everything
On this last point, this would be a good time for us to stop avoiding the little mater of ecocide, the biggest issue of our or any time. I enjoyed the esteemed Marxist economist Richard Wolff’s recent reflection on how the accumulation and investment centers of global capitalism are “migrating away from the U.S., Europe, and Japan.” By Wolff’s analysis, which strikes me as correct:
The blunt truth of modern economic development is this: capitalism is leaving its old centers and relocating to its new centers. About this leaving we can and should borrow the phrase: this changes everything…. On the one hand, the movement of capitalism from old to new centers plunges the old into a long-term decline evident in decaying industries and cities. Politics shifts away from prioritizing growth, adjudicating internal conflicts in ways that reproduce growing capitalism, and shaping the world into a distinctive center-periphery pattern. Instead, policies shift toward maintaining the global status quo against the many forces eroding it. For many politicians that shift of focus degenerates into scapegoating amid cascading social divisions and decay…On the other hand, capitalism finds profitable new territory in its new centers. Growth there offsets a decline in the old centers. The global 1 percent get richer because they draw increased wealth from both the old and new centers (emphasis added).
After reading this, I had two reactions. First: “brilliant, this helps us demystify a lot of recent economic, social, and political history.” Second: “fine but guess/so what?” Wherever its leading control, investment, and growth centers are located, capitalism has now so completely polluted and cooked the entirely planetary ecosystem that we will be fortunate to survive another half century as a species if we don’t get off this lethal growth-/accumulation-/profit-addicted system.
Here’s a little secret about capitalism: it kills everything no matter where its leading centers are located. It’s not Marx’s midwife to socialism; it’s a malignant cancer ready to bring about “the common ruin of the contending classes.”
Interesting, Even Exciting Times!
More disturbing on this and related scores was the brilliant and (I think justly) celebrated American historian and political commentator Rick Perlstein’s recent dialogue with Salon’s Chauncy de Vega, who deserves special recognition for having properly identified and denounced Trump was a fascist from the start:
De Vega: “How are you feeling given the Age of Trump and all that mayhem and pain, a pandemic and an overall surreal state of affairs? How are you making sense of this?”
Perlstein: “For all the horror of seeing one of America’s two major parties descend into fascism, the fact is that I am a writer and a historian. That we are living in the middle of a time that people will probably be talking about in a hundred years is interesting and exciting to me.”
Where to begin in responding to this? To start with, Perlstein might have wanted to tell de Vega, “hey, I was wrong and you were right about Trump” since Perlstein engaged in some brilliant but (as it turned out) wrongheaded denial of Trump’s fascist essence in the fall of 2015, by which tine de Vega was correctly identifying the orange monster for what it really was.
Then there’s the horrific candor of Perlstein finding recent American fascist politics and history “interesting and exciting” (on an intellectual level). Perlstein’s comment struck me as an elegant version of Tourette’s Syndrome. This is something you don’t say even if you think it. “Interesting and exciting” (to a well-off white professional American author)? Tell it to the immigrants penned up in Amerika’s concentration camps, the parents whose children were stolen from them at the southern U.S. border, and the survivors of the 450,000-plus Americans who have died from the pandemic Trump fanned across the nation, dismissing its significance (he said it “affects virtually no one” even after he survived it with the help of the best taxpayer-funded socialist medicine and treatment available).Tell it to the survivors of people murdered by white-nationalist killers triggered by Trump’s hateful rhetoric (e.g., Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, the victims of the El Paso Wal-Mart massacre, and the Tree of Life killings in Pittsburgh), and the people of Puerto Rico, who Trump left to suffer without adequate federal relief (while downplaying the extent of death and destruction) in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Tell it to the people of Iran. Tell it to the Muslims and others from Muslim countries who were unable to visit loved ones because of Trump’s racist travel ban. Tell it to the survivors of the hundreds of prospective migrants who have died in the southwestern U.S. desert (including 227 people whose remains were found along the U.S,-Mexico border last year) thanks to Trump’s intensified border enforcement and partial wall construction.
Mad Max if We’re Lucky
As my fellow historian and journalist Terry Thomas comments: “I think one might place more emphasis on the ‘horror’ of the Republican Party’s descent into fascism than the business about it being a time people will be talking about in a hundred years. … in a hundred years it could be something like a Mad Max movie, because we failed during this historical juncture. I don’t know how ‘exciting’ that is.”
But back to the environmental matter: it does not look good for a 22nd Century historian being able to look back smartly on the “interesting” and “exciting” times experienced in the US during the Trump years and their aftermath. There’s this little problem of the Antarctic melting around 2050 or 2060, under the pressure of growth-addicted global capitalism, whose key centers shift across geographic zones and nation states while rain forests are felled, arctic ice sheets collapse, and methane bubbles up in mass quantities from melting permafrost.
That changes everything.
I’d say its Mad Max if we’re lucky, to partly paraphrase Istvan Meszaros who (thinking of the environmental crisis) updated Rosa Luxembourg by writing “it’s socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky” two decades ago.
On a small but happy note, the epic fascist hate machine Rush Limbaugh has finally been silenced by Mother Nature. Vatican geologists report one of the fastest descents into Perdition on record.
Morgan describes how biodiverse wetlands are, she asserts we need a change in law to restore them begin to look after and to recreate balance between people, wetlands and biodiversity.
By Morgan Erickson-Davis
Wetlands provide many benefits to ecological and human communities alike, from nutrients and nurseries to flood control and climate change mitigation.
However, as much as 87% of the world’s wetlands has been lost over the past 300 years, with much of this loss happening after 1900.
In response, nations banded together and in 1971 ratified the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, an intergovernmental treaty designed to facilitate wetland conservation and sustainable use around the world.
But 50 years on, researchers say the convention has not led to effective protection and wetlands continue to blink out.
Swamps, sloughs, marshes, bogs, fens; water purification, flood control, wildlife nurseries, nutrient providers, carbon sinks: wetlands have many names and serve many environmental purposes. But for centuries they have been viewed simply as hindrances to human development, obstacles to drain and dredge to make room for progress.
Few have escaped this pressure.
Research indicates the world may have lost as much as 87% of its wetlands over the past 300 years, with much of this loss happening after 1900. But in the mid-20th century scientists started grasping just how ecologically – and economically – important wetlands are, and the global environmental community rushed to protect those that still remained.
The result was the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, an intergovernmental treaty designed to facilitate wetland conservation and sustainable use around the world. Named after Ramsar, Iran, where it was first signed in 1971, the convention today protects 2,413 wetlands encompassing some 2.55 million square kilometers (985,000 sq mi) and has been ratified by 170 countries.
And yet, wetlands are still disappearing. In an article published in the journal Nature earlier this month, researchers Peter Bridgewater at the University of Canberra and Rakhyun Kim at Utrecht University say the convention has not been the protective force it was intended to be.
“Over the 50-year lifetime of the convention, at least 35 percent of wetlands globally have been lost,” Bridgewater and Kim said in a press release.
That number was revealed during the Ramsar Convention’s first-ever Global Wetland Outlook in 2018, which also found that the world’s wetlands were disappearing three times faster than its forests. According to the outlook, the major driving forces behind wetlands loss are climate change, population increase, urbanization and changing consumption patterns like shifts towards a more meat-heavy diet, which requires the clearing and cultivation of larger areas of land.
In addition to supplying vital habitat and “biological supermarkets” for wildlife, wetlands provide important ecosystem services for human communities around the world. They reduce the likelihood of flooding by soaking up excess water from swollen rivers, they filter pollutants from groundwater before it enters aquifers, and they are one of the most effective natural carbon storage systems on the planet. According to the Ramsar Scientific and Technical Review Panel, wetlands store 35% of the world’s land-based carbon – despite covering just 9% of the its surface.
“Without wetlands, the global agenda on sustainable development will not be achieved,” said Martha Rojas Urrego, Secretary General of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, in a statement. “We need urgent collective action to reverse trends on wetland loss and degradation, and secure both the future of wetlands and our own at the same time.”
In their article, Bridgewater and Kim acknowledge the Ramsar convention has achieved positive results such as increasing awareness and attracting membership of most of the world’s nations, as well as establishing a global network of Wetlands of International Importance. However, they say it is not really working as intended.
“One of its major flaws is the Ramsar’s site-based approach,” they said, referring to the convention’s focus on identifying and protecting individual wetlands. All too often this protection exists only on paper, Bridgewater and Kim say, explaining that there is generally little on-the-ground change when a site is officially demarcated as a Wetland of International Importance.
“Clearly, expanding the Ramsar list has not been sufficient to improve the conservation status of wetlands,” they write, “although its absence may likely have produced even worse results for wetland conservation.”
To truly protect the world’s wetlands, Bridgewater and Kim say the convention needs to better connect with other global conservation schemes, shift its focus from simply collecting sites to ensuring that those already established are more effectively managed, and implement a more holistic understanding of wetland ecology and hydrology that considers the influence of the surrounding landscape.
“Some structural change in governance and implementation mechanisms is necessary,” they write. “Only more adaptive and dynamic global governance mechanisms will help take global decisions through to implementation and action locally, nationally and regionally; restoring the balance needed between people, wetlands and the rest of their biodiversity in the Anthropocene.”
This article was written by Morgan Erickson-Davis and originally published on Mongabay on 13th February 2021. You can read the original here.
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Citation: Bridgewater, P., Kim, R.E. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands at 50. Nat Ecol Evol (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01392-5
Written by Christian Ramp and originally published in The Conversation. This article highlights evidence linking reduction in reproduction of the humpback whale and climate change.
Climate change is having a serious impact on the world’s oceans in various ways, ranging from its devastating effects on tropical coral reefs to melting polar sea ice. But until now, it wasn’t known how these changes could be affecting whale populations.
Globally, humpback whales are increasing in numbers following the end of commercial whaling, but the populations in the northern hemisphere are not recovering to the same extent as those in the southern hemisphere. Our new research confirms that a North Atlantic population has shown a significant decline in the number of calves over the last 15 years.
The Gulf of St Lawrence in Quebec, Canada, has experienced major environmental changes as a result of warmer water and a dramatic reduction in sea ice. These changes have knock-on effects for the whole ecosystem where fluctuations at the bottom of the food web can result in decreases in the abundance of species higher up, including the prey of baleen whales such as schooling fish like herring and capelin.
Humpback whales need to feed intensively during the summer to build up the energy reserves to sustain them for the rest of the year while they fast. The Gulf of St Lawrence is an important summer feeding ground for humpback whales that migrate between the cold, productive waters of the North Atlantic and the warmer waters of their Caribbean breeding ground every year.
Disinformation is dangerous. We fight it with facts and expertise
Fewer mothers with calves have been sighted in the Gulf of St Lawrence over the last two decades, so we wanted to investigate if the major environmental changes recorded in the area could be affecting their breeding success.
We collected small biopsy samples of blubber from adult female humpback whales between 2004 and 2018 to measure reproductive hormones, and effectively carry out a pregnancy test. Colleagues at MICS were able to identify these females from their markings and follow the same individuals over several decades. So every year we knew if they returned to the Gulf of St Lawrence with a calf.
There are only a handful of other whale populations in the world that are studied in such detail. We are the first to combine this long-term information collected over 15 years about their calving rates with pregnancy rates to determine how many pregnancies were successful.
We found that humpback whale pregnancy rates were highly variable over the study period, but 39% of pregnancies were unsuccessful. Annual calving rates declined significantly from approximately 40% to 20% over the 15 years. Working with colleagues at DFO, we gathered information on the annual abundance of their prey as well as data on overall environmental productivity.
Our study confirmed that changes in these environmental data were linked to the decline in calving rates.
The probability of observing mother-calf pairs was related to favourable environmental conditions in the previous year, especially with the abundance of herring, one of their main prey. These results suggest that environmental changes in the Gulf of St Lawrence have resulted in declines in herring abundance, and this is negatively affecting the breeding success of the humpback whales.
We believe this decline could – at least in part – be the result of females being unable to build up the energy reserves needed to sustain pregnancy and meet the energetic demands of nourishing their young in years of poorer feeding availability.
Future of baleen whales
It was previously thought that baleen whales could show some resilience to climate change because of their ability to change their migratory patterns, or switch prey species, for example, if the location, timing or abundance of their main prey changed. However, our research shows that their ability to respond in these ways may not be enough to prevent their breeding success from being impacted by environmental change.
Continued monitoring of this humpback population in the Gulf of St Lawrence is required to assess how the observed decline in calving rates will affect population growth and viability.
A study led by researchers at the University of Queensland, Australia, predicted declines in baleen whale populations in the Southern Ocean as a consequence of reduced prey availability such as copedpods and krill, and increasing competition between whale species in response to diminishing food stocks caused by climate change.
Here, together with studies on North Atlantic right whales and Southern Resident killer whales we show that the effects of climate change and environmental variability could be already being felt in northern hemisphere whale populations.
It is possible that other, less-well studied whale populations are also experiencing declines in their breeding success. While it may not be possible to redress the balance in the short term, what we can do now is minimise other potential stressors on these species, particularly human disturbance, and help them to maximise their ability to reproduce successfully.
DGR are grateful to The Conversation and Christian Ramp for highlighting the facts surrounding these circumstances.
This article was originally published on January 13, 2021 in The Conversation, known for academic rigour. The authors fight disinformation with facts and expertise.
Anyone with even a passing interest in the global environment knows all is not well. But just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.
The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world. We outline the likely future trends in biodiversity decline, mass extinction, climate disruption and planetary toxification. We clarify the gravity of the human predicament and provide a timely snapshot of the crises that must be addressed now.
The problems, all tied to human consumption and population growth, will almost certainly worsen over coming decades.
The damage will be felt for centuries and threatens the survival of all species, including our own. Our paper was authored by 17 leading scientists, including those from Flinders University, Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles. Our message might not be popular, and indeed is frightening. But scientists must be candid and accurate if humanity is to understand the enormity of the challenges we face.
Getting to grips with the problem
First, we reviewed the extent to which experts grasp the scale of the threats to the biosphere and its lifeforms, including humanity. Alarmingly, the research shows future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than experts currently believe.
This is largely because academics tend to specialise in one discipline, which means they’re in many cases unfamiliar with the complex system in which planetary-scale problems — and their potential solutions — exist.
What’s more, positive change can be impeded by governments rejecting or ignoring scientific advice, and ignorance of human behaviour by both technical experts and policymakers.
More broadly, the human optimism bias – thinking bad things are more likely to befall others than yourself – means many people underestimate the environmental crisis.
Numbers don’t lie
Our research also reviewed the current state of the global environment. While the problems are too numerous to cover in full here, they include:
a halving of vegetation biomass since the agricultural revolution around 11,000 years ago. Overall, humans have altered almost two-thirds of Earth’s land surface
about 1,300 documentedspecies extinctions over the past 500 years, with many more unrecorded. More broadly, population sizes of animal species have declined by more than two-thirds over the last 50 years, suggesting more extinctions are imminent
about one million plant and animal species globally threatened with extinction. The combined mass of wild mammals today is less than one-quarter the mass before humans started colonising the planet. Insects are also disappearing rapidly in many regions
85% of the global wetland area lost in 300 years, and more than 65% of the oceans compromised to some extent by humans
a halving of live coral cover on reefs in less than 200 years and a decrease in seagrass extent by 10% per decade over the last century. About 40% of kelp forests have declined in abundance, and the number of large predatory fishes is fewer than 30% of that a century ago.
Major environmental-change categories expressed as a percentage relative to intact baseline. Red indicates percentage of category damaged, lost or otherwise affected; blue indicates percentage intact, remaining or unaffected. Frontiers in Conservation Science
A bad situation only getting worse
The human population has reached 7.8 billion – double what it was in 1970 – and is set to reach about 10 billion by 2050. More people equals more food insecurity, soil degradation, plastic pollution and biodiversity loss.
High population densities make pandemics more likely. They also drive overcrowding, unemployment, housing shortages and deteriorating infrastructure, and can spark conflicts leading to insurrections, terrorism, and war. Essentially, humans have created an ecological Ponzi scheme. Consumption, as a percentage of Earth’s capacity to regenerate itself, has grown from 73% in 1960 to more than 170% today.
High-consuming countries like Australia, Canada and the US use multiple units of fossil-fuel energy to produce one energy unit of food. Energy consumption will therefore increase in the near future, especially as the global middle class grows.
Then there’s climate change.
Humanity has already exceeded global warming of 1°C this century, and will almost assuredly exceed 1.5 °C between 2030 and 2052. Even if all nations party to the Paris Agreement ratify their commitments, warming would still reach between 2.6°C and 3.1°C by 2100.
The danger of political impotence
Our paper found global policymaking falls far short of addressing these existential threats. Securing Earth’s future requires prudent, long-term decisions. However this is impeded by short-term interests, and an economic system that concentrates wealth among a few individuals.
Right-wing populist leaders with anti-environment agendas are on the rise, and in many countries, environmental protest groups have been labelled “terrorists”. Environmentalism has become weaponised as a political ideology, rather than properly viewed as a universal mode of self-preservation.
Financed disinformation campaigns, such as those against climate action and forest protection, protect short-term profits and claim meaningful environmental action is too costly – while ignoring the broader cost of not acting. By and large, it appears unlikely business investments will shift at sufficient scale to avoid environmental catastrophe.
Changing course
Fundamental change is required to avoid this ghastly future. Specifically, we and many others suggest:
revealing the true cost of products and activities by forcing those who damage the environment to pay for its restoration, such as through carbon pricing
rapidly eliminating fossil fuels
regulating markets by curtailing monopolisation and limiting undue corporate influence on policy
reigning in corporate lobbying of political representatives
educating and empowering women across the globe, including giving them control over family planning.
The true cost of environmental damage should be borne by those responsible.Shutterstock
Don’t look away
Many organisations and individuals are devoted to achieving these aims. However their messages have not sufficiently penetrated the policy, economic, political and academic realms to make much difference.
Failing to acknowledge the magnitude of problems facing humanity is not just naïve, it’s dangerous. And science has a big role to play here.
Scientists must not sugarcoat the overwhelming challenges ahead. Instead, they should tell it like it is. Anything else is at best misleading, and at worst potentially lethal for the human enterprise.
Authors
Corey J. A. Bradshaw Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University
Daniel T. Blumstein Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles
Paul Ehrlich President, Center for Conservation Biology, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University
Over 90% of the excess heat due to global warming is absorbed by the oceans.
Heat content change in the upper 2000 meters of the global ocean. (Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, January 2021)
Even with the Covid-19-related small dip in global carbon emissions due to limited travel and other activities, the ocean temperatures continued a trend of breaking records in 2020. A new study by 20 scientists from 13 institutes around the world, reported the highest ocean temperatures since 1955 from surface level to a depth of 2,000 meters.The study was published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on January 13. It concluded with a plea to the policymakers and others to consider the lasting damage warmer oceans that can be caused as they attempt to mitigate the effects of climate change.
“Over 90% of the excess heat due to global warming is absorbed by the oceans, so ocean warming is a direct indicator of global warming — the warming we have measured paints a picture of long-term global warming,” said Dr. Cheng Lijing, lead author of the study and associate professor with the International Center for Climate and Environmental Sciences at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
“However, due to the ocean’s delayed response to global warming, the trends of ocean change will persist at least for several decades, so societies need to adapt to the now unavoidable consequences of our unabated warming. But there is still time to take action and reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases.”
Using a method developed by IAP, the researchers calculated the ocean temperatures and salinity of the oceans down to 2,000 meters with data taking from all available observations from various measurement devices from the World Ocean Database. They found that in 2020 the upper 2,000 meters of the world’s oceans absorbed 20 more Zettajoules than in 2019. By comparison, all human activities use about one-half of a zettajoule each year.
“Why is the ocean not boiling? Because the ocean is vast. We can imagine how much energy the ocean can absorb and contain, and, when it’s released slowly, how big the impact is.”
The researchers reported other effects, such as ocean salinity pattern amplification and more stratification due to the upper layer warming quicker than the deeper sections. Both changes could cause harm to ocean ecosystems.
“The fresh gets fresher; the salty gets saltier. The ocean takes a large amount of global warming heat, buffering global warming. However, the associated ocean changes also pose a severe risk to human and nature systems.”
Cheng noted the 2020 wildfires that ravaged Australia, parts of the Amazon region, and the west coast of the United States.
“Warmer oceans and a warmer atmosphere also promote more intense rainfalls in all storms, especially hurricanes, increasing the risk of flooding. Extreme fires like those witnessed in 2020 will become even more common in the future. Warmer oceans also make storms more powerful, particularly typhoons and hurricanes.”
The researchers will continue to monitor the ocean temperatures and the impacts of warming on other oceanic characteristics, such as salinity and stratification.
“As more countries pledge to achieve ‘carbon neutrality’ or ‘zero carbon’ in the coming decades, special attention should be paid to the ocean. Any activities or agreements to address global warming must be coupled with the understanding that the ocean has already absorbed an immense amount of heat and will continue to absorb excess energy in the Earth’s system until atmospheric carbon levels are significantly lowered.”
