These 2 Disastrous Climate Reports Are Kind of an Argument for Greta Thunberg
Time magazine chose Greta Thunberg as its Person of the Year on Wednesday and a lot of people got mad. Some said the Hong Kong protesters deserved it more. Some have long maintained she's not an expert on the climate crisis, so why should anyone listen to her? (Although it's not like anyone was listening to the experts in the first place, which is kind of why the kids got involved.) Some say she's a prophet of doom who makes things out to be worse than they are. The president greeted the news by telling Thunberg to "chill," and suggesting she get anger management classes. Considering we have taken minimal action in response to the crisis—and, since the Trump administration settled in, the United States is actually in many ways moving backwards—this seems a nearly impossible feat. A pair of reports on this very same Wednesday well and truly put it to bed.
For months now we've known, thanks to reports from the U.N.'s International Panel on Climate Change, that the world has a rapidly closing window to radically change how much carbon dioxide we're pumping into the air. The longer we wait, and the less decisively we act, the worse the world we're left with will be. The greatest terror is the prospect of feedback loops, where a certain amount of warming triggers a possibly irretrievable scenario. One example is sea ice, which is white and reflects solar energy more than the deep blue water that's produced when it melts. That new water absorbs more heat, which in turn melts adjacent ice faster. Fun.
But today, the Washington Post gave us an update on another feedback loop that almost makes that one dull and boring!
Especially noteworthy is the report’s conclusion that the Arctic already may have become a net emitter of planet-warming carbon emissions due to thawing permafrost, which would only accelerate global warming. Permafrost is the carbon-rich frozen soil that covers 24 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s land mass, encompassing vast stretches of territory across Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland.
There has been concern throughout the scientific community that the approximately 1,460 billion to 1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon stored in frozen Arctic soils, almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases as what is contained in the atmosphere, could be released as the permafrost melts...The report concludes permafrost ecosystems could be releasing as much as 1.1 billion to 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. This is almost as much as the annual emissions of Japan and Russia in 2018, respectively.
“These observations signify that the feedback to accelerating climate change may already be underway,” the report concludes.
So the Arctic, which is warming much faster than the rest of the planet already, might be set to release a whole bunch of carbon itself which will, in turn, head on up to the atmosphere and trap more heat? And, to be specific, there's more than twice as much carbon in that permafrost as is already up in the atmosphere? This seems like cause for concern. Maybe even some sort of urgent action.
But the WaPo was not finished there.
The Greenland ice sheet’s losses have accelerated so fast since the 1990s it is now shedding more than seven times as much ice each year, according to 89 scientists who use satellites to study the area. The sheet’s total losses nearly doubled each decade, from 33 billion tons per year in the 1990s to an average now of 254 billion tons annually. Since 1992, nearly 4 trillion tons of Greenland ice have entered the ocean, the new analysis found, equivalent to roughly a centimeter of global sea-level rise.
While a centimeter may not sound like much, that uptick is already affecting millions.
“Around the planet, just 1 centimeter of sea-level rise brings another 6 million people into seasonal, annual floods,” said Andrew Shepherd, a University of Leeds professor.
And that's the real problem here. It's not some binary where stuff is alright and then stuff is real bad. Even before the water's at your ankles on a permanent basis, every time a storm comes through you've got worse flooding and more severe storm surge and all the rest. It's already here, and it's only a question of how bad we will allow it to get. Already, the U.N. suggests at least half a billion people will be at risk of food scarcity. Aridification is destroying areas of once arable land, while floods and storms and droughts will ruin farmers' livelihoods and create food scarcity in other areas. Where are those people going to go? How will the people who already live there react when they arrive? Look at how we're dealing with migration and refugee issues already.
Then are the approximately three billion people who rely on the seas to eat. In 2015, a study found that we may be precipitating a mass extinction event in the world's oceans. That's part of what scientists have called the sixth mass extinction event in Earth's history—the great tragedy of the Anthropocene. Drinking water is already a problem, and it's only going to get worse. The Water Wars cometh. And then, of course, there are the fires raging throughout the American West, and Australia, and Europe, and the Arctic (!), in fire seasons that grow longer and more severe by the year.
All of this is to say that maybe the rapid destabilization of the planet, which in turn makes it less hospitable to human life and civilization as we know it, is an urgent issue requiring our attention. You can't exactly tell people to ignore the rise of American authoritarianism, or what appears to be another spasm of anti-Semitic violence, or that the president admitted to abusing his own charity to the tune of millions of dollars, or that 700,000 people are about to be thrown off food stamps. But it's still difficult to deny that we hardly ever pay attention to the great movements in our world—the ones that will reverberate through future generations, and perhaps ensure there aren't too many more of them.
Maybe the Hong Kong protesters deserved it more. But has anyone done more to raise awareness of an existential threat to mankind in the last year than Greta Thunberg? Did someone else get millions of kids in the street on a single Friday in September? And what does it matter that they're children? Who are we to tell them to shut up (or "chill"), when it's we who have forsaken their birthright?
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