The facts have been known for over a hundred years
Essay by S. Tom Bond, Lewis County, WV, September 4, 2018
What to eat on a hungry planet
Another extremely important result of the warming of the world is it’s effect on food. Take wheat, perhaps the most important food stuff. It is found in everything from bread to noodles, biscuits to cereals, beer to cakes, there is no more widely grown staple crop and more than 170 million metric tons trade every year. This year there will be a weak harvest, but not a disaster. Stocks will buffer through, although the EU and Russia have done poorly. Trade flows will shift, and developed economies can afford to buy it. Poorer countries in Africa and the Middle East will have it tough.
Bread prices affect political stability. In 2010 Russia, not a particularly efficient producer, but having great land area, and so a big exporter, had a heat wave and was not able to export, so world wheat prices doubled. This year production is down a third in Russia, but there are no plans to limit export.
For one specific example from this year, in the United Kingdom the price of wheat for bread rose by a fifth, strawberries by 28%, carrots by 41% and lettuce by 61%. The farm gate price of carrots rose by 80%, according to European Commission figures used by the economists. Spells of frigid and baking weather seen during the winter and summer will likely increase household food bills by an estimated $9.01 a month, the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) says.
Food business is big money, and Bloomberg takes notice. They have a visual here showing the projected change in wheat production by 2050. The shift is for warmer to cooler climates. Change also affects other foods, too, in the sea as well as on land. North American cod is expected to decline and lobster to increase. Anchovies and squid will increase, cod will come from Iceland and Norway. The U. S. corn belt is edging toward Canada, which now is famous for exported wheat.
Countries most expected to suffer are the tropics. Many now import much of their food stuffs, and production there will decline. Problems there result in emigration to Europe and other northern countries, with all the numerous problems that brings. The recent fighting in Syria is due in part to famine there.
Fine wine will decline in France, but will be possible in England. Weather has already brought disaster to the vineyards of Bordeaux and Champagne. Production there is the lowest in 60 years.
Coffee growing areas in Brazil, Java and other areas are set to decrease, but some California farmers are planting it. Unfortunately, taste must take a hit, since conditions must be just right to ripen the beans.
Chocolate is another delicacy expected to experience decline, as are the very fine cherries used to make maraschino cherries, since both are grown in very climate-sensitive areas.
Elevated CO2 helps plants grow, but reduces essential nutrients. It can reduce the zinc by 9.3% in wheat, for example, and the protein in rice by 7.8%. Rice eating populations use little protein supplement, which is more expensive, so this is significant for them.
Ocean effects are real and current
It is an easy calculation from readily available data that humans have added over 7708 tons per square mile of CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere and are adding 203 more tons to each square mile each year. It’s a pretty shocking figure. But not all of it stays in the atmosphere. According to the Scripps Institute, 26% was absorbed by the oceans, 46% goes into the atmosphere, and 28% goes into plants. The surface layers of the ocean which absorb CO2 are mixed downward by circulation, but the heat absorbed at the same time causes water to expand, which tends to slow downward movement, so surface layers hold significantly more CO2 than deeper layers.
Sea life is affected by the CO2 emitted by fossil fuel combustion. We have mentioned the northward movement of sea food above, but there are other significant effects, too. The sea has waves of warm water that circulate near the surface. Sea creatures that have evolved to tolerate a rather narrow band of temperature can sometime move out of the hot area, and some cannot. In 2016 and 2017, persistant high ocean temperatures off eastern Australia killed off as much as half the shallow water corals of the Great Barrier Reef, affecting creatures dependent on the reef. One in every four fish in the ocean lives around corral reefs. Much of the ocean’s diversity depends on this small area.
Another important effect on the ocean involves the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC), some times called the world “heat conveyer.” It is one way the earth moves heat from the tropics to the poles. There is a good YouTube representation of it, but the scheme is easiest to understand if you go to the video and watch the first 10 to 12 seconds and stop before going on to conceptualize what you have seen. The rest is detail, watching it is not necessary to understand. Red is warm currents, on the surface, blue is cold currents in the deep. Where it turns from red to blue the water is cooling, becoming more dense and sinking. Where it turns from blue to red the water is warming and raising. Try the video here.
Because of climate warming, this heat conveyer carrying heat from the tropics north is slowing down. Two factors affect the density of water, temperature and salinity, the amount of salt dissolved in it. Melting of ice in the north now dilutes the water in the upper Atlantic and reduces the rate of sinking in previous times. Geologists know it has stopped in the past. If it does again, the result would be catastrophic for Western Europe. It is as far north as Labrador, but enjoys a mild climate due to the warm winds off the North Atlantic. If the heat conveyer stops, the warm winds stop and Europe gets much colder. The Jet Stream would come further south, too, bringing cold air with it.
Another set of problems from the ocean is due to sea level rise presently occurring. A lot has been said about the effects on low lying development in Florida, ports for shipping, such as Norfolk with its naval yards, and those along the Louisiana and Texas coast particularly, and many other places in the world. Islands are made uninhabitable; Holland is being overwhelmed, Bangladesh loosing huge areas and so on. So I will just remind you of them.
Encroachment of sea water in aquifers along sea coasts threatens use of wells, both on islands and porous coasts like Florida. Overwhelmed wetland along coasts allows the intrusion of hurricanes with unreduced force into higher and developed areas. It also encourages coastal erosion and destroys wetland wildlife. Coral reefs and sea grass meadows are also in danger of “drowning” since they can only photosynthesize in relatively shallow water.
Science and Government are our foundation and hope
The first public warning of global warming appeared in a New Zealand newspaper in 1912:
“The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.”
The article also appeared in the U. S. Popular Science and an Australian newspaper the same year. The Scopes article goes on to say:
“The first person to use the term ‘greenhouse gases’ was a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius in 1896. In a paper published that year, he made an early calculation of how much warmer the Earth was thanks to the energy-trapping nature of some of the gases in the atmosphere.”
Even at this early stage, he understood that humans had the potential to play a significant role in changing the concentration of at least one of those gases, carbon dioxide (carbonic acid back then):
“The world’s present production of coal reaches in round numbers 500 millions of tons per annum, or 1 ton per km of earth’s surface. Transformed into carbonic acid, this quantity would correspond to about a thousandth part of the carbonic acid in the atmosphere.”
Though he didn’t explicitly say in that paper that human activity could warm the planet, Arrhenius would go on to make that argument in later works. A 2008 tribute to Arrhenius published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences stated that his ideas about coal and climate were popular and well known in his day but fell out of favor for a while after his death in 1927:
“While Arrhenius’ prediction [of warming] received great public interest, this typically waned in time but was revived as an important global mechanism by the great atmospheric physicist Carl Gustaf Rossby who initiated atmospheric CO2 measurements in Sweden in the 1950s.”
The science naive public, including a lot of people elected to government, hasn’t caught on to this day! In the 1930’s an amateur, G. S. Callendar, insisted that greenhouse warming was on the way. In the 1950s, Callendar’s claims provoked a few scientists to look into the question with improved techniques and calculations. What made that possible was a sharp increase of government funding, especially from military agencies with Cold War concerns about the weather and the seas. The new studies showed that, contrary to earlier crude estimates, carbon dioxide could indeed build up in the atmosphere and should bring warming. Painstaking measurements by C. D. Keeling drove home the point in 1960, showing that the level of the gas was in fact rising, year by year.
By the 1970’s research became sufficiently robust that the big oil companies became aware of it. They wanted to continue their highly profitable business and recognized their fixed assets; oil in the ground, leases, and vast physical apparatus would become defunct, so began to establish ways to debunk the idea. Vast resources were poured into the fight against the growing scientific consensus. They produced reports that spoofed the science, engaged in public relations on a vast scale, and lobbied federal and state governments. (Few understand the scale of lobbying the government in Washington, there are 22 lobbyists for each senator and representative today!)
The world’s governments created a panel to give them the most reliable possible advice, as negotiated among thousands of climate experts and officials. By 2001 this Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) managed to establish a consensus, phrased so cautiously that scarcely any expert or government representative dissented. For a quick, readable summary of the history of the IPCC, read the Wikipedia article. The IPCC provides an internationally accepted authority on climate change, producing reports which have the agreement of leading climate scientists and the consensus of 120 participating governments.
At that point the discovery of global warming was essentially completed. Scientists knew the most important things about how the climate could change during the 21st century. How the climate would actually change now depends chiefly on what policies humanity would choose for its greenhouse gas emissions.
Since 2001, greatly improved computer models and an abundance of data of many kinds strengthened the conclusion that human emissions are very likely to cause serious climate change. The IPCC’s conclusions were reviewed and endorsed by the national science academies of every major nation from the United States to China, along with leading scientific societies and indeed virtually every organization that could speak for a scientific consensus. Specialists meanwhile improved their understanding of some less probable but more severe possibilities. On the one hand, a dangerous change in ocean circulation seemed unlikely in the next century or two. On the other hand, there were signs that disintegrating ice sheets could raise sea levels faster than most scientists had expected. Worse, new evidence suggested that the warming was itself starting to cause changes that would generate still more warming.
In 2007 the IPCC reported that scientists were more confident than ever that humans were changing the climate. Although only a small fraction of the predicted warming had happened so far, effects were already becoming visible in some regions — more deadly heat waves, stronger floods and droughts, heat related changes in the ranges and behavior of sensitive species. But the scientists have not been able to narrow the range of possibilities. Depending on what steps people took to restrict emissions, by the end of the century we could expect the planet’s average temperature to rise anywhere between about 2.5–11°F. It may not seem much to those of us used to a climate we are well adapted to and who have heat and cooling and appropriate clothes, but it is significant in the physical and biological world.
So how is our government responding? Considering how important the inevitable changes are, and caught between science and the oil companies, one must say, “not well.” National Geographic has produced “A Running List of How President Trump Is Changing Environmental Policy.” Some of the points in that article are:
Trump EPA poised to scrap clean power plan; EPA starts rollback of car emission standards; White House cuts NASA climate monitoring program; FEMA expels “climate change” from strategic plan; EPA mills shake-up to environmental research plan; Trump proposes cuts to climate and clean-energy plans; EPA loosens regulations on toxic air pollution; Climate change websites ‘censored’ under Trump; Trump drops climate change from list of national security threats; Mining health study halted; climate advisory panel disbanded; Trump revokes flood standards accounting for sea-level rise; Report: EPA enforcement lags under Trump; U. S. pulls out of Paris Climate Agreement; Trump budget proposes deep cuts for the environment; EPA dismisses science advisors; Science and environment budget threatened.
And the list goes on. The situation is much the same in many states, certainly those in Appalachia. It is discouraging that the work of people who trained and handle the data daily is ignored, and the interests of companies which have accumulated great wealth impose themselves, retarding the necessary changes in technology that society needs.
Where will it all go? No one knows. It is a very complex situation, requiring public response. Climate change could get out of hand. It will not reverse. The best anyone can do is to communicate: learn and pass it on. There are many other threats to the survival of humanity, but this is certainly one of the most sure.
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