The commitment should also inspire people at all levels of society to propose ways to speed up the shift to clean, renewable energy and reduce waste through greater energy efficiency. Although governments and industry must do a lot of the heavy lifting, it’s up to all of us to ensure that the planet we want—with clean air, safe water, fertile soil, and a stable climate—stays within reach, for our sake and the sake of our descendants.
Of course, climate science goes beyond determining that the world is rapidly warming to catastrophic levels and that human activity is a major contributor. Scientific research and analysis are also examining the current and potential consequences of global warming, the impacts on various natural systems and human endeavors, the feedback loops that are created from those impacts, and the potential solutions, among other elements of this complex and disturbing phenomenon.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at some of those impacts and what they mean for our world.
Chapter 2
CONSEQUENCES AND IMPACTS
MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF scientific evidence, developed over many years by scientists around the world, confirm that human activity is contributing to unusually rapid global warming and that failing to address its causes could be catastrophic for humanity, as well as numerous other species that share this small blue planet. Many indigenous peoples have long known that everything in nature is interconnected, that what we do to one part of a natural system often has unforeseen consequences that cascade throughout the environment. Our survival depends on a complex interaction of air, water, land, and living things, all interconnected and interdependent. Yet we have been recklessly treating the planet and its atmosphere as little more than a source of raw materials and a dumping ground for our waste and emissions.
Part of the problem is that Western thought and science often view things in isolation. Because nature doesn’t always behave the same in a lab, test tube, or computer program as it does in the real world, scientists and engineers have come up with many ideas that didn’t turn out as expected.
The insecticide DDT was considered a panacea for a range of insect pest issues, from controlling disease to helping farmers. But we didn’t understand bioaccumulation and biomagnification then—toxins concentrating up the food chain, risking the health and survival of animals from birds to humans. Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, seemed so terrific we put them in everything from aerosol cans to refrigerators. Then we learned they damage the ozone layer, which protects us from harmful solar radiation.
The problems caused by DDT and CFCs were relatively easy to resolve, but we’re now facing the most serious and complex unintended consequence ever: climate change, from destroying carbon sinks such as forests and wetlands, and from industrial agricultural practices—but mainly from burning fossil fuels.
Oil, gas, and coal are miraculous substances—energy absorbed from the sun by plants and animals hundreds of millions of years ago, retained after they died, and concentrated as the decaying life became buried deeper in the earth. Burning them to harness and release this energy opened up possibilities unimaginable to our ancestors. We could create machines and technologies to reduce toil, heat and light homes, build modern cities for growing populations, and provide accessible transport for greater mobility and freedom. And because the stuff seemed so plentiful and easy to obtain, we could build roads and vehicles—big cars that used lots of gas—so that enormous profits would fuel prosperous consumer-driven societies.
We knew fairly early that pollution affected human health, but that didn’t seem insurmountable. We just needed to improve fuel efficiency and create better pollution-control standards. That reduced rather than eliminated the problem and only partly addressed an issue that appears to have caught us off guard: the limited availability of these fuels. But the trade-offs seemed worthwhile.
Then, for the past few decades, a catastrophic consequence of our profligate use of fossil fuels loomed. Burning them has released excessive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, creating a thick heat-trapping blanket. Along with our destruction of natural carbon-storing environments, this has steadily increased global average temperatures, causing climate change.
We’re now faced with ever-increasing extreme weather-related events and phenomena, such as ocean acidification, which affects myriad marine life, from shellfish to corals to plankton. The latter produce oxygen and are at the very foundation of the food chain. The cascading consequences of extracting and burning fossil fuels, as well as destroying carbon sinks, are affecting all facets of the planet—human health, climate, weather patterns and events, other species, oceans, agriculture, and a range of human activity. In turn, these consequences are interacting with other elements of nature and human existence, creating complex feedback loops and further unintended consequences.
The interactions are complex and numerous and we’re still not clear on what some of the further consequences will be, but in this chapter, we’ll examine some of the costs of upsetting the earth’s carbon cycle.
A World of Extreme Weather, Water, and Food
INCREASINGLY FREQUENT AND severe heat waves, heavy rain and snowfall events, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and floods—unusual weather and its effects are everywhere, and getting worse as the planet warms. California has been experiencing severe drought since 2011. Temperatures in Spain, Portugal, India, and Pakistan reached record levels in 2015, sparking wildfires and causing thousands of deaths and heat-related ailments. In the same year, heavy rains, flooding, and an unusually high number of tornadoes caused extensive damage and death in Texas, Oklahoma, and parts of Mexico.
The likely causes are complex: a stuck jet stream, El Niño, natural variation, and climate change. Even though it’s difficult to link all events directly to global warming, climate scientists have warned for years that we can expect these kinds of extremes to continue and worsen as the world warms. Some hypothesize that the strange behaviors of 2015’s jet stream and El Niño are related to climate change, with shrinking Arctic sea ice affecting the former.
Hurricane Sandy, which wreaked havoc on Caribbean nations and the U.S. East Coast in October 2012, offered a glimpse into our future.
Does that mean climate change caused Hurricane Sandy? Not necessarily. Experts know that tropical Atlantic storms are normal in fall. This one and its impacts were made unusually harsh by a number of converging factors: high tides, an Arctic weather system moving down from the north, and a high-pressure system off Canada’s East Coast that held the storm in place.
But most climate experts are certain that the intensity of the storm and the massive damage it caused were in part related to changing global climate. Global warming causes sea levels and ocean temperatures to rise, which results in more rainfall and leads to a higher likelihood of flooding in low-lying areas. Scientists also believe 2015’s record Arctic sea-ice melt may have contributed to the high-pressure system that prevented Sandy from moving out to sea. In short, the storm and the unprecedented flooding and damage are exactly what climate scientists have been telling us to expect as global temperatures rise.
Extreme weather events, including heat waves and drought, are no longer just model-based predictions. NASA scientist James Hansen, who sounded the alarm about climate change in 1988, wrote in the Washington Post in 2012, “Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked