An oil filter ad from 1970 claimed “You can pay me now or pay me later.” The premise was that if you didn’t regularly replace your car’s $6 oil filter, you could face huge repair bills down the road. This describes our situation with climate change. We have kicked that can down the road for decades, and guess what: that big bill is starting to come due.
As predicted by climatologists, severe storms, floods, and heat waves worldwide are more frequent, occurring five times more often in 2016 than in 1970. Flooding from intense storms has become commonplace. In the past 10 months we witnessed heat waves, droughts, and devastating wildfires in Australia and California. The Golden State’s wildfire “season” is now year-round and includes megafires.
Wildfires are increasing common above the Arctic Circle, and slash-and-burn farming is destroying the tropical rain forests. Wildfires are a double whammy: They remove CO2-absorbing trees while releasing stored CO2 from the burning.
Food security is now an issue. Midwestern states have seen more than their share of floods and droughts. A recent derecho windstorm flattened one-third of the crops in several states. The Southwest is suffering from a megadrought. With changing climate, plant diseases and pests are on the move, pollinators are disappearing, as are natural enemies of pests.
Prolonged droughts in Central America are sending refugees north to our border. This is not an isolated case – refugees worldwide are on the move because of droughts, food insecurity, and lack of water.
The warming and acidification of oceans (from absorbed CO2) are threatening the marine food chain. Coral reefs, the tropical rain forest of the ocean in the incredible diversity of life they support, are dying. An estimated 1 billion people get their protein from coral reef systems, but already 50% are gone. Meanwhile, island nations and coastal populations are threatened by storm surges and prodigious high tides.
But easily the most troubling thing that scientists have told us is that the ice caps and the permafrost are melting faster than their models had predicted, with permafrost thawing 70 years before expected.
Melting permafrost means previously frozen tundra starts to decay, releasing even more greenhouse gases (including methane, 25 times worse than CO2), which sets up a feedback loop. More greenhouse gases means more warming, which accelerates the melting and creates more greenhouse gases, etc. Will there be an irreversible tipping point? Have we already passed it?
Ditto at the poles. The ice and snow at the poles reflects 85% of the sun’s radiation back into space without serious warming impact. As glaciers, the Greenland ice sheets, and Antarctica melt, however, more water and land will be exposed, which will absorb (not reflect) the sun’s radiation. This absorbed radiation is reradiated as infrared radiation (heat), which is absorbed by greenhouse gases and warms the air, melting more ice – another feedback loop, another potentially irreversible tipping point and sea-level rise.
All the above is not a hoax. Nineteen of the 20 hottest years on record have happened since 2000. What is a hoax is the continuing denial of the peer-reviewed science of human-caused climate change.
The primary source of denial? The fossil fuel industry’s own scientists told them about the connection between their products and global warming as early as the 1970s. In the 1990s, when the grave consequences of global warming were becoming obvious, they chose not to diversify their energy portfolio to make the transition to renewables; instead, they doubled down on fossil fuels. Using the Tobacco Strategy, they then systematically misled the American people with disinformation, obfuscation, and lies about the science of climate change. They must be held to account.
What can we do? Here are three suggestions.
First, read Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by Paul Hawken. It presents a compendium of ideas, which either you can do yourself or you can advocate for at all levels of government. In the back is a list prioritizing which actions will give us the biggest bang for our bucks.
Second, help defund the fossil fuel industry. You can do this by changing your credit card banks and insurance companies if they are heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry. Not only has the fossil fuel industry misled us, but they’ve given us Deepwater Horizon, oil spills (Mauritius the latest), and the filth and environmental degradation of tar sands. Natural gas has given us fracking (featuring escaped methane, groundwater contamination, and earthquakes), as well as gas pipeline leaks and gas explosions. It is time to leave the rest of the fossil fuels in the ground.
Third, we must vote Donald Trump from office. He has removed us from the Paris agreement, buried the science, stifled discourse, and thrown the entire weight of his office into enabling the fossil fuel industry. Four more years of Trump would be catastrophic.
It is time to stop more fossil fuel infrastructure projects (e.g. Granite Bridge pipeline) and prevent the industry from starting new extraction from public lands (e.g. Alaska National Wildlife Refuge). We need a more sustainable energy future. To do otherwise, as John Kerry stated, is to continue “perhaps the greatest abdication of generational responsibility in history.”
You can pay me now, or you can pay me later. Realize that the latter “you” are our children and grandchildren, who will pay the massive infrastructure, human migration, and disaster bills that will come from an increasingly unlivable world.
There is no planet B.
(Allan MacDonald lives in New London.)