Other Effects of the Climate Crisis (Week 11) - Post 1

Other Effects of The Climate Crisis

 An Inconvenient Truth - Notes

Gore, Al. An Inconvenient Truth. Participant Media, 2006.

-There are good people who are in politics, on both sides, who hold this at arm’s length because if they acknowledge it and recognize it then the moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable.

-“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know…It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so -Mark Twain

Comparing the general scientific conclusion at the time that Pangea never happened, “continents were so big, how could they move?” to the current world belief that climate change is not real.

-“In the Himalayas there's a particular problem because 40% of all the people in the world get their drinking water from rivers and spring systems that are fed more than half by the melt water coming off the glaciers. And within this next half century those 40% of the people on Earth are gonna face a very serious shortage because of this melting.”

-From studying glaciers in Antarctica scientists have measured atmospheric CO2 for the last 650,000 years, it was never over 300 parts per million… today, it is at 410 parts per million.

(CO2 image).

-“When there is more carbon dioxide the temp. gets warmer” On the graph showing CO2 concentrations exactly matching temperature.

-Hurricanes: The oceans get warmer and hurricanes get worse. Typhoons, and tornadoes as well.

-The science textbooks have had to be rewritten because they say that it's impossible to have a hurricane in the South Atlantic. But the same year the first one ever hit Brazil.

-And then, of course, came Katrina. It's worth remembering that when it hit Florida, it was a Category One. But it killed a lot of people and caused billions of dollars' worth of damage. And then what happened? Before it hit New Orleans, it went over warmer waters. As the water temperature increases, the wind velocity increases and the moisture content increases. And you'll see Hurricane Katrina form over Florida. And then as it comes into the gulf over that warm water, it picks up that energy and gets stronger and stronger and stronger.

-Flooding One often unnoticed effect of global warming is it causes more precipitation, but more of it coming in one-time big storm events. Because the evaporation off the oceans puts all the moisture up there, when storm conditions trigger the downpour, more of it falls down.

-Drought: Global warming, paradoxically, causes not only more flooding, but also more drought. This neighboring province right next door

had a severe drought at the same time these areas were flooding. One of the reasons for this has to do with the fact that global warming not only increases precipitation worldwide, but it also relocates the precipitation.

And focus most of all on this part of Africa just on the edge of the Sahara.

Unbelievable tragedies have been unfolding there, and there are a lot of reasons for it. But Darfur and Niger are among those tragedies. And one of the factors that has been compounding them is the lack of rainfall and the increasing drought. This is Lake Chad, once one of the largest lakes in the world. It has dried up over the last few decades to almost nothing, vastly complicating the other problems that they also have. 

second reason why this is a paradox. Global warming creates more evaporation off the oceans to seed the clouds, but it sucks moisture out of the soil. Soil evaporation increases dramatically with higher temperatures. And that has consequences for us in the United States, as well.

-Permafrost:  Two canaries in the coal mine. First one is in the Arctic. This, of course, is the Arctic Ocean, the floating ice cap. Greenland, on its side there. I say canary in the coal mine because the Arctic is one of the two regions of the world that is experiencing faster impacts from global warming.

This is the largest ice shelf in the Arctic, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf. It just cracked in half three years ago. The scientists were astonished.

These are called drunken trees just going every which way. This is not caused by wind damage or alcohol consumption. These trees put their roots down in the permafrost, and the permafrost is thawing. And so they just go every which way now. This building was built on the permafrost and has collapsed as the permafrost thaws. This woman's house has had to be abandoned. The pipeline is suffering a great deal of structural damage. And incidentally, the oil that they want to produce in that protected area

in Northern Alaska, which I hope they don't, they have to depend on trucks to go in and out of there. And the trucks go over the frozen ground. This shows the number of days that the tundra in Alaska is frozen enough to drive on it. Thirty-five years ago, 225 days a year. Now it's below 75 days a year because the spring comes earlier.

  

-Ocean Currents: To look at a vast expanse of open water at the top of our world that used to be covered by ice. We ought to care a lot because it has planetary effects. The Earth's climate is like a big engine for redistributing heat from the equator to the poles. And it does that by means of ocean currents and wind currents. They tell us, the scientists do, that the Earth's climate is a nonlinear system. Just a fancy way they have of saying that the changes are not all just gradual. Some of them come suddenly, in big jumps. On a worldwide basis, the annual average temperature is about 58 degrees Fahrenheit. If we have an increase of five degrees, which is on the low end of the projections, look at how that translates globally. That means an increase of only one degree at the equator, but more than 12 degrees at the pole. And so all those wind and ocean current patterns that have formed since the last ice age and have been relatively stable, they're all up in the air and they change.

Ocean Temperature Conveyer: And one of the ones they're most worried about, where they've spent a lot of time studying the problem, is in the North Atlantic where the Gulf Stream comes up and meets the cold winds coming off the Arctic over Greenland. And that evaporates so that the heat out of the Gulf Stream and the steam is carried over to Western Europe by the prevailing winds and the Earth's rotation. But isn't it interesting that the whole ocean current system is all linked together in this loop? They call it the ocean conveyor. And the red are the warm surface currents. The Gulf Stream is the best known of them. But the blue represent the cold currents running in the opposite direction, and we don't see them at all because they run along the bottom of the ocean. Up in the North Atlantic, after that heat is pulled out, what's left behind is colder water and saltier water because the salt doesn't go anywhere. And so that makes it denser and heavier. And so that cold, dense, heavy water sinks at the rate of five billion gallons per second. And then that pulls that current back south. At the end of the last ice age, as the last glacier was receding from North America, as the last glacier was receding from North America, the ice melted and a giant pool of fresh water formed in North America. And the Great Lakes are the remnants of that huge lake. An ice dam on the eastern border formed and one day it broke. And all that fresh water came rushing out ripping open the St. Lawrence there, and it diluted the salty, dense, cold water, made it fresher and lighter, so it stopped sinking. And that pump shut off. And the heat transfer stopped. And Europe went back into an ice age for another 900 to 1,000 years. And the change from conditions like we have here today to an ice age took place in perhaps as little as 10 years' time.

-Other effects: seasons, ecological niches (birds and caterpillars), invasive species, infectious disease vectors expanding, coral reefs,

“Overall species loss is occurring 1000% times faster than the natural background rate”

-Ice Sheet Melt: If Greenland Ice melted it would raise sea levels 20ft

They are so majestic, so massive. In the distance are the mountains and just before the mountains is the shelf of the continent, there. This is floating ice, and there's land-based ice on the down slope of those mountains. From here to the mountains is about 20 to 25 miles. Now they thought this would be stable for at least 100 years, even with global warming. The scientists who study these ice shelves were absolutely astonished when they were looking at these images. Starting on January 31, 2002 in a period of 35 days this ice shelf completely disappeared. They could not figure out how in the world this happened so rapidly. And they went back to try to figure out where they'd gone wrong. And that's when they focused on those pools of melting water. But even before they could figure out what had happened there, something else started going wrong. When the floating sea-based ice cracked up, it no longer held back the ice on the land, and the land-based ice then started falling into the ocean.

It was like letting the cork out of a bottle. And there's a difference between floating ice and land-based ice. That's like the difference between an ice cube floating in a glass of water,

which when it melts doesn't raise the level of water in the glass, and a cube that's sitting atop

a stack of ice cubes which melts and flows over the edge. That's why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand.

-Separating the truth from the fiction and the accurate connections from the misunderstandings

is part of what you learn here. But when the warnings are accurate and based on sound science, then we as human beings, whatever country we live in, have to find a way to make sure that the warnings are heard and responded to. We both have a hard time shaking loose the familiar patterns that we've relied on in the past. We both face completely unacceptable consequences.

-Population growth stresses resources

-“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.”

-Rapid vs gradual growth- human reaction to climate change (frog story)

-Doubt

-U.S Government:

 Compared to Current Trump Administration- EPA is a former Shell Lobbyist

-Let me give you an example of the wrong way to balance the economy and the environment. One part of this issue involves automobiles. Japan has mileage standards up here. Europe plans to pass Japan. Our allies in Australia and Canada are leaving us behind. Here is where we are. Now there's a reason for it. They say that we can't protect the environment too much without threatening the economy and threatening the automakers. Because automakers in China might come in and just steal all our markets. Well, here is where China's auto mileage standards are now. Way above ours. We can't sell our cars in China today because we don't meet the Chinese environmental standards.