Other Effects of the Climate Crisis (Week 11) - Post 2

Other Effects of the Climate Crisis 

          Mark Twain explained the climate crisis perfectly when he said "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know...it's what we know for sure that just ain't so." Fifty years ago the public decided that there was no way Pangaea, a giant super-continent made up of all seven land masses joined together, could ever have existed. The general conclusion was that "continents were so big, there's no way they could move." And, just as the public once knew for sure that Pangaea was not real, the public now knows for sure that climate change is not real. Of course it is now a known fact that Pangaea did exist. Even though a majority of the public does not believe in climate change, its effects are all around. Climate change is evident through water shortages, stronger hurricanes, harsher flooding, increased drought, thawing of permafrost, ocean current movements, and many other reasons. To begin with water shortages, it's worth a look at the Himalayas. Forty percent of the world population gets their drinking water from rivers and spring systems that are fed, more then half, by the melt water coming off the Himalayas and other glaciers. As the world's glaciers recede more in the summers and grow less in the winters, that forty percent of people will face a serious shortage of clean water due to this melting. Then their are the hurricanes. As the oceans get warmer the hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones get worse. Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst hurricanes ever recorded, but it began small, hitting Florida as a category one, it wasn't until it went over warmer waters in the gulf that it got stronger, slamming into Louisiana as a category 5. As water temperatures increase, wind velocity increases and so does moisture content. these factors strengthen hurricanes, turning them from disastrous to deadly in only a short amount of time. Science textbooks used to say that it is impossible to have a hurricane in the South Atlantic, but they have had to be rewritten because in the same year as Katrina, the first South Atlantic hurricane ever, hit Brazil. In addition to hurricanes, flooding has also gotten worse. Precipitation has increased in parts of the world due to increased temperatures. There is more water being evaporated off the ocean and it puts all this moisture up in the air. When storm conditions trigger rainfall, much more rain falls down. This leads to increased precipitation in one-time huge storm events, and unfortunately these huge influxes of rain lead to terrible flooding. Paradoxically, just as rainfall increases in some parts of the world, drought worsens in others. Global warming not only increases precipitation worldwide, but it also relocates that precipitation. Then, just as warmer temperatures increase evaporation off the ocean, it increases evaporation of moisture in soil. These already dry places like Darfur and Niger in North Africa are experiencing severe drought and starvation due to a lack of rainfall and dried out ground. Over the last thirty years the world has seen a serious increase in the destruction of natural disasters, and with insurance companies this has not gone unnoticed. Another cornerstone of natural stability that is threatened is permafrost. Permafrost is a thick layer of soil that stays solid year round. Trees put their roots in permafrost, buildings have foundations in permafrost, and parts of the world are only accessible by roads built on permafrost. However, due to warmer global temperatures, this permafrost is thawing. There is now a phenomenon called drunken trees. Trees in polar regions appear "drunk" because they are tilted and seem to be falling over due to the thawing permafrost these trees put their root in. Buildings and homes are collapsing and falling apart because the ground they are built on is thawing. Roads in Northern Alaska have seen a serious decrease in the number of days the tundra is frozen enough to drive on. Thirty-five years ago, the roads were open two-hundred and twenty-five days a year, now the number is below seventy-five days. Ocean currents are another major factor in global climate change. The earth climate has a system that distributes heat from the equator to the poles; it does this by means of wind and ocean currents. The worldwide average temperature is currently fifty-eight degrees. Now the most common climate prediction is that humans will increase that temperature by four degrees during this century. Because the climate system works on a nonlinear wind and ocean current system, that will not mean a uniform increase. At the equator there will be an increase of about one degree, but at the poles there will be an increase of 12. This leaves room for a major change in the now relatively stable wind and ocean currents. One specific ocean current system scientists are worried about is the Gulf Stream current in the North Atlantic. There is giant conveyor belt that runs ocean currents and carries warm and cold water to each part of the world. This conveyor is turned by what is essentially an aquatic fan in the North Atlantic. Here the warm water of the Gulf Stream comes up and is cooled by the colder temperatures. This now cool salty water is denser then the incoming warm water so it sinks at the rate of five billion gallons per second, pulling the current back south again. It is this turning conveyor that brings warm water to the north where the wind then carries the warm breeze over Europe. During the last ice age most all of the North United States and Canada was covered by a glacier. Near the end of that ice age that ice melted and covered North America in a giant freshwater lake. When the last North American glacier finally melted, the water covering North America flooded into the North Atlantic. The once salty dense water was then diluted with freshwater and it stopped sinking. That large aquatic pump then turned off. The heat transfer in the North Atlantic stopped and it sent Europe back into an ice age for another nine-hundred to a thousand years. Scientists are now worried about this pump, not because there is another giant freshwater glacier in North America, but because nearby giant freshwater glacier, Greenland, is now melting. Climate change is evident in all these effects: water shortage, stronger hurricanes, worsening droughts and floods, thawing permafrost, ocean currents, and still others including dying coral reefs, invasive species, expanding infectious disease vectors, and the polarization of seasons. One only hopes the world realizes these effects and makes a change sooner rather then later. 

          The effects of climate change are everywhere, but in order to really make a change the laws and regulations in this world need to change. Unfortunately there has been a serious lack of governmental responses to this crisis, especially in the United States. As Upton Sinclair said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." While the governments of the worlds are non committal, the climate rests at a dangerous tipping point. And, as Al Gore has said "Making mistakes in our dealings with nature can have bigger consequences now because our technologies are often bigger than the human scale. When you put them all together, they've made us a force of nature". What people do now is more important then ever, one only hopes the right steps are taken to address this crisis that effects our entire world.