Global warming: The heat is on
Charles Dudley Warner was a 19th Century writer whose words were hauntingly visionary.
His friend Mark Twain used one of his more prescient lines to great effect when, in one of his humorous lectures, he said, “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
Dudley left this mortal coil 1900, well before the terms global warming and climate change entered the lexicon, never realizing just how spot on he was.
The thing is that even though we now understand that, indeed, we can do something about the weather, we are not taking enough steps to fix it, which is why we should take heed of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announcement last week that July 2019 was the Earth’s hottest month on record.
France, Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom all came in with all-time, record-high temperatures last month, reaching 101.7 in Cambridge, England and 108.7 degrees in Paris. On our side of the globe, the thermometer reached the 90-degree mark in Anchorage, Alaska — making it not only the hottest Fourth of July in that city but the hottest day ever recorded in that city.
Now, the NOAA isn’t known particularly as an organization of tree-hugging hippies with granola ideology. Scientists there aren’t alarmists who make a habit of running around clucking, “The sky is falling.”
The NOAA is a group of highly trained federal scientists who place science over the petty indulgences of partisan politics.
If these guys are concerned, we should be concerned.
NASA, another bunch of federal scientists who keep track of such things, had already told us that all but one of the 16 hottest years in the 134 years of available records have occurred since 2000 and that over the last 50 years, the average global temperature has risen faster than at any other time in recorded history.
Last month, the global temperature was 1.71 degrees above average.
That may not sound like much, but in the macro view, 1.71 degrees makes a huge difference.
The rising temperatures are responsible for longer and hotter heat waves, longer and more frequent droughts, heavier rainfall whenever the skies open, and more powerful hurricanes.
There is evidence we can see and measure, such as Antarctica losing approximately 134 billion metric tons of ice per year since 2002. The melting ice floes result in the oceans rising and moving inland, particularly in the southeast where the Atlantic is creeping in and the Gulf of Mexico continues to rise.
Science tells us that global warming and climate change result when carbon dioxide and the vast collection of pollutants come together in the atmosphere. It begins a chain of events that starts when, instead of disappearing into space, sunlight and solar radiation are absorbed by the atmosphere, which traps heat in and makes us sweat a bit more profusely.
The United States ranks second behind China, which is the leader in global-warming pollution. The Chinese produce about 28 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions while the U.S., which makes up barely 4 percent of the world’s population, accounts for 16 percent of the toxic emissions. That’s as much as the European Union and India combined — which, by the way, rank third and fourth.
Our contribution to this mess comes primarily from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, which produces about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. Of those practices, coal-burning power plants are the biggest contributors of carbon dioxide.
Our transportation sector generates another 1.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year.
As one of the most advanced nations on the planet, you would think the United States would be at the forefront of efforts to turn this around.
Unfortunately, our government has decided to pull out of international pledges that comprise the Paris Agreement, hammered out to ratchet down the pollutants and practices that cause this life-threatening cycle of pollution and rising temperatures.
Global warming became politicized, ignored, and denied by conservatives who could be counted on every winter whenever a cold snap drifted across the nation to say, “So much for global warming.”
Except that even now the corner is being turned, and even some from the conservative side of the aisle are accepting the science that spells out the jeopardy we have placed our planet in.
And independent of a White House that snubs its nose at pure science, more than 25 of our major cities have adopted resolutions to reach a goal of 100 percent reliance on renewable resources like solar and wind for electricity.
Those resolutions are a good start but nowhere near enough to turn things around.
We need a vast cultural change to catch up on this, and it will be difficult.
Our technology needs fixing, and our lifestyles need fixing. But most of all, our attitudes need fixing, because it will require a lot from all of us to take the necessary steps to implement true and lasting changes to, hopefully, save us from ourselves.
Besides alternative power and fuels, we need to heal our oceans, preserve our forests, scrub our air.
To do so would require honest, non-partisan efforts, which is particularly challenging in today’s ideological standoff.
If we can’t get past the playground name calling, lies, and political dirty tricks that stifle productive social discourse, how can we expect to come together on something so vast as fixing our environment?
We’ve talked about fuel efficiency in the auto industry for decades. Finally, there are believers who are designing vehicles with greater mileage, that burn cleaner, and that are powered by alternative fuels.
But is it too late?
There are those who shrug off the fact that our forests are disappearing without realizing how dependent we are upon them for the air we breathe.
I’ve seen the efforts to revive the coal industry, one of the greatest offenders to the planet’s heath, just to put a couple thousand people nationwide back to work. While saving jobs sounds good on the campaign trail, saving the planet sounds even better.
I have often heard people talk about how species come and species go. How many times have you heard how it’s a shame that we put the spotted owl ahead of deforestation projects?
The fact is that whether it’s the spotted owl, the white rhino, the humpback whale, or any of nature’s other creatures, they are tied together by a singular thread with purpose and function to ensure that this rock we live on remains viable.
Next time somebody shrugs off the disappearance of a species — any species — remind them that we, too, are endangered and that it is up to us to save ourselves.
That’s a fact they simply cannot shrug off.
Peace.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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