Right now, it is precisely 44 degrees outside my apartment. A storm is drenching my windows, and a forecast I heard on the radio predicted snow within the next twenty four hours. No, I don't live in Juneau, Alaska (which is actually supposed to be quite nice this time of year anyway), I live in Tacoma, Washington. In June, the nearly continuous rains of the past two seasons are supposed to have yielded an incredibly mild climate with gorgeous sunny days, blooming flowers and trees, long hours of sunlight and fantastic views of Mount Rainier. Instead we have weather that is exactly the same as it was four months ago. We have only had a handful of days above 65 and fierce winds have been blowing day and night since the end of 2007. As a result, the smell of barbecue sauce is faint, skin is paler than ever, and, more importantly, bees have not been able to do their usual business of pollinating plants.
This is big news, not just a minor inconvenience. The effects of global climate change are upon us, and have been for quite some time. Our own extraordinary powers of self-delusion are the only thing that haven't changed. If Hurricane Katrina, fiercer and more frequent tornadoes, and rising sea levels weren't our first clue, the indecisive thermostats should be our final one. We literally had a day over 75 this past week and now we are plunged into a reproduction winter. Not just here in the Northwest either. Powerful storms have killed people, *killed* people, in the midwest and East Coast and it's not even the peak season for these things. A flash flood carried away entire houses in Wisconsin for the SECOND time in a year. These things aren't happening in an area of monsoons and inadequate disaster response teams, but here, in the USA. Not to mention the typhoon that wracked Myanmar a month ago killing over a hundred thousand people. 140,800 is the most recent tally I saw. To put that into perspective, that's well over half the population of the city I'm in now. All of this is just the human toll of a global epidemic that puts a stranglehold on all life.
Even so, the politicians would have us believe this is all part of a natural cycle and we have no need to be concerned. Stop right there. Just stop! ANYtime that human lives are lost is a cause for *extreme* concern, particularly when it's on a global scale. In addition, the argument against the cause for global climate change comes from politicians and NOT scientists. They haven't set foot out in the field to study the rising carbon dioxide levels, the melting ice caps and glaciers, or the mysterious mass die-off that is plaguing keystone species. Instead, they have sat at their desks and looked at slides, heard arguments, and then decided what was good propaganda and what was bad information.
Isn't it interesting that of the American politicians decrying the climate crisis, most are Republicans, and that the Republican Party takes in over 75% more campaign funding than the Democratic Party from energy companies like the oil and coal industries? You know all those ads for chemical companies, oil refineries and coal plants you see on TV these days that don't seem like they're trying to sell anything? That's propaganda, pure and simple; visual imagery designed to influence the public's opinion on an issue.To root through all of the misinformation that has been propagated by the financially motivated, I now train my scientific lens on the issue of global climate change. Once known as global warming and still referred to as such by the media, it has since been renamed global climate change as the planet-wide experiment we are now living has demonstrated that the effects of pollution do not necessarily mean a rise in temperature so much as a rapid and radical shift in the temperature and moisture distribution of the world. Much much faster than biological life can keep up. You see, what makes Great Britain cold most of the time and South Africa hot most of the time, despite being at similar latitudes on the Earth's surface is the ocean. Specifically, the currents.
Often called the Atlantic (or Pacific) Conveyor Belt, the predominant currents that run through the Earth's oceans dictate the weather of the rest of the world. Water gets warmed as it passes the equator and rises, just like hot air does in a hot air balloon. As water gets further from the equator (and thus, further from the sun) it cools and wants to sink, but does so slowly because there's already cold water beneath it, thus carrying cold water further north and south into the poles at which point it normally sinks, gets sucked deep under the surface, and flows back to the equator to be warmed again. What the accumulation of greenhouse gases has caused, however, is the water stays warmer for longer and becomes at risk of not sinking once it reaches the poles. What's the big deal? If the water doesn't sink the whole circulatory system crashes to a halt as the water has no place to go. This poses several severe risks: 1) accelerating the already alarming decay of the polar ice caps, 2) phytoplankton and coral reefs produce over 50% of the all the Earth's atmospheric oxygen, but can only exist within a narrow temperature band that is threatened by warm stagnant water, 3) rapidly altering the weather of the planet with areas used to high rainfall suddenly getting none as it shifts wildly creating severe droughts interspersed with dramatic flooding, 4) cutting off the nutrients that many oceanic species depend on (stagnant water=dead water) since the small organisms that form the backbone of the marine ecosystem are mostly filter feeders that cannot move very far on their own to gather essential nutrients. Any one of these is more than likely to create a cascading effect that would exacerbate the climate crisis either by releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide from dying organisms, cutting off the food chain that most land animals rely on, or destroying natural landmarks like rivers, canyons, or lakes that funnel water to places it is supposed to go to nourish entire ecosystems.And that's just the projected effects. The effects that are happening right now, like right outside your window (yes, yours) are equally dangerous and should be a reality check for anyone still lugging around the indoctrination that climate change needs more study.
Right now, right outside that window I just mentioned, bees are dying. Upon the millions, these vital pollinators are just suddenly vanishing in a poorly understood phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder. As a very recent occurrence on it's current scale, the disorder is not very well-studied and the causes are unknown. Everything from disease, to cell phones and pesticides are being blamed, but unlike what is usually seen in the cases of disease, poison or parasites (ie. bees dying in a cluster around the hive), bees are dying in a wide distribution from the hive and appear to be very confused, abandoning the queen and larvae in the process of their extinction. Too laden with eggs to move herself and start a new colony, the queen starves along with all her larval children, destroying the entire colony. As a result of this strange and new behavior, one of the leading hypotheses for the mass die-off is global climate change. Bee's have incredibly keen senses that allow them to home in on mature flowers and fruits from miles away even with their primitive brains. These senses are finely tuned to the environment around them and any abrupt change in their surroundings is likely to confuse and agitate them. Could the increased amount of solar radiation making it through our atmosphere be blinding their ultraviolet spectrum of vision? Or the bees could just be starving where they stand. The exceptionally late winter of this year has caused flowers and trees to bloom very late in the seasonal cycle, much later than bees are used to accommodating. Or, the plants, because of their lack of sun and normal temperatures, produce sterile pollen that cannot sustain the young. Or the bees, as is the case here in Washington, can't get out to fly because of the harsh winds that would blow them off course or make landing on any flower stem a risky proposition. No matter what the cause, we'd better find a way to fix it soon as I don't think I have to lecture you on what would happen if the bees suddenly disappeared.Bees aren't the only ones dying. One of the most ridiculous stories I've heard of late is that of polar bears drowning. DROWNING!! These are giant, enormously strong and enduring mammals with as much built-in flotation from fat as a rubber raft. And the poor creatures are drowning because the space between ice sheets in the North Pole has grown too far for them to swim. The Great Barrier Reef of Australia, the largest coral reef in the world, was written off by marine biologists a couple years ago as being impossible to save because of the rise in ocean temperatures. What that means for the Australian ecosystem could be dire.
And now I ask the politicians who seek to cloud our judgment, how many more animals must die before enough "study" is done to come to a conclusion? Or would you prefer to analyze the skyrocketing carbon dioxide, methane, sulfuric acid and nitrous oxide levels in the air we breathe? Perhaps the marked increase in radiation we are exposed to? Or maybe the incredible cancer rate would bring environmental awareness more to your mind? The diseased food we continue to ingest? The toxic waste we drink that's more metal than water? Maybe you're just waiting for a flood to wipe the world clean so you can take your chosen few to start anew in the world that's left after the Earth has its retribution. A sort of Götterdämmerung ark...
What I least understand about the people who condemn environmentalism and the climate crisis as liberal fear-mongering is that, in the end, they die too. The lies they preach are so obviously paid for by the companies making money off the things that are destroying life that it is a wonder to me how people don't see through the act. The evidence is all around and inside of us that the energy companies and the conservative politicians who speak for them are killing us that we should stand up and say "No more!" Instead, we mostly just sit at home and complain about the price of gas and how grandma died of lung cancer when she never touched cigarettes. Get up and do something. Do it for the polar bears.
