By Mickey Friedman
February 16, 2019
Like the soon-to-be profusion of pot shops here in my used-to-be Best Small Town in America, my world, our world, changes more faster than ever.
For the good in small ways, but the very worst in the biggest way.
With apologies, and the help of a variety of environmental exerts, let me explain. No sooner than the human brain allows in the bad news, the news grows more dire. All of which makes climate crisis denial all the more pathetic.
Witness the President’s snarky tweet of January 28: “In the beautiful Midwest, wind-chill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Warming? Please come back fast, we need you!” Confusing cold temperatures with critical climate change does a grave disservice to our attempts to develop a comprehensive strategy to combat the climate crisis.
The UK Guardian reports on a study that reveals that enormous glaciers in Greenland are depositing ever larger chunks of ice into the Atlantic Ocean. The ice melting faster than scientists previously thought, with ice loss increasing fourfold since 2003. And that the largest ice loss actually occurred in the south-west region of the island, which is largely glacier-free. Meaning surface ice is simply melting as global temperatures rise, causing gushing rivers of meltwater to flow into the ocean and push up sea levels. Now South-west Greenland, not previously thought of as a source of woe for coastal cities, is set to “become a major future contributor to sea level rise.”
From 2002 to 2016, “Greenland lost about 280bn tons of ice per year … enough to raise the worldwide sea level by 0.03 inches annually.” Worst case scenario, “If all of Greenland’s vast ice sheet, 3km thick in places, was to melt, global sea levels would rise by seven meters, or more than 20ft, drowning most coastal settlements.”
In Antarctica, two 2018 studies found the rate of melting from the Antarctic ice sheet has accelerated threefold in the last five years, a record-breaking rate. The subsequent sea rises could have catastrophic consequences for cities around the world.
The Washington Post just offered devastating examples of how the climate crisis has radically changed American reality. I had no idea what was happening in our western states. “Montana has warmed 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, considerably more than the United States as a whole. That added heat is contributing to raging forest fires and bark beetle outbreaks, a combination that has devastated the state’s forests … Montana’s trees, which had provided the crucial function of pulling carbon dioxide from the air, are sending the greenhouse gas back into the atmosphere. And forests that once provided a counterbalance to climate change are at the moment contributing to it, as carbon-rich trees suddenly burn, or die and slowly decompose.” In recent years Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming have become carbon emitters.”
With rising temperatures and fewer frigid days the beetles survive and multiply, attacking trees at ever higher altitudes.
The Post continues: “Rising temperatures also are shrinking the mountain snowpack, weakening the forests. The snowpack, which has been declining since the 1930s, has been melting more quickly in the past four decades. Trees stressed by drought struggle to resist beetle attacks, and the drier ground makes forests more susceptible to fires. In 2017, a massive 1.367 million acres burned in the state.
“Since 1997, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming have been losing about 2 percent of their trees every year, says Christopher Williams, a forest and climate change researcher at Clark University in Massachusetts. That’s the equivalent of some 800,000 forest acres annually.”
Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, told the UK Guardian: “We now have attribution studies that show how much more likely or stronger extreme weather events have become as a result of human emissions. For example, wildfires in the western US now burn nearly twice the area they would without climate change, and almost 40% more rain fell during Hurricane Harvey than would have otherwise. So we are really feeling the impacts and know how much humanity is responsible.”
As for the mix of optimism and pessimism, Kayhoe noted: “Ten years ago, few people felt personally affected by climate change. It seemed very distant. Today, most people can point to a specific way climate affects their daily lives. This is important because the three key steps to action are accepting that climate change is real, recognizing it affects us, and being motivated to do something to fix it. Opinion polls in the US show 70% of people agree the climate is changing, but a majority still say it won’t affect them.”
A little more faster and just maybe they’ll know for sure.
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“More Faster” was first published in the February 7, 2019 edition of The Berkshire Record.