NewsMic - Max Plenke
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| Image Credit: AP |
In 1848, two ships — the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus —
sank while
trying to navigate through the Northwest Passage. It was brutal: a
900-mile-long sea route punctuated with heavy sea ice that connects the
northern Atlantic and Pacific oceans through an arctic maze. Neither
ship made it. All 129 men on the expedition died.
Last month, the Crystal Serenity, a
14-deck, 820-foot cruise ship,
sailed from Anchorage, Alaska to New York City using that same pass,
but without the icy obstacles. What was formerly the perilous end of a
crew of British Royal Navy sailors is now, for the first time ever, a
luxury cruise route.
And it couldn't have happened if a rapidly warming planet
hadn't melted away the danger. That's good news for the people who own
cruise ships, or have the
$30,000 to $156,000 necessary to book passage on such cruise ships — but it's terrible news for the rest of us.
In the last few months, we've witnessed
record-breaking temperatures,
extreme flooding and an unprecedented
mammalian extinction.
And unfortunately, that doesn't indicate an anomalous summer. It means
we're witnessing the tangible and quantifiable results of global
warming.
We reached out to an earth scientist, a biologist and a
geologist who agreed that over the past three months the effects of
climate change have accelerated, and they've left their mark in three
notable ways.
Climate change claimed its first mammalian species
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| A now-extinct Bramble Cay melomys Source: Wikimedia |
A June report from researchers at an Australian government environmental group
deduced that the
Bramble Cay melomys, a tiny rodent found exclusively on an island in
the Great Barrier Reef, hadn't been detected since 2009. After an
exhaustive search of an island that, during high tide, was only
6.2 acres — down from 9.8 acres in 1998 — the researchers officially declared the species extinct. They
pegged "dramatic
habitat loss" due to "human-induced climate change" as the cause,
marking the first time a mammal died off due to climate change.
Mark Urban, an associate professor from the University of
Connecticut's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, said he
was shaken when he heard about the report. "The first thing that came to
my head was, 'It's happening. This is what we predicted and now we're
seeing it occur,'" he said in a phone interview Tuesday. "It's not great
news, but maybe this is exactly ... what we need to understand the
immediacy of the risk."
"The first thing that came to my head was 'It's happening. This is what we predicted and now we're seeing it occur."
Last year, Urban published a study titled "
Accelerating extinction risk from climate change,"
which looked at over 130 separate studies to figure out what kind of
threat the warming planet poses to different species. His findings were
what one might expect: Small species living on small islands, like the
melomys, or on "sky islands," like the tops of mountains, were at
greatest risk of extinction since they probably couldn't survive
relocation. It spells disaster for a slew of other small mammals like
the American pika, a mountain rock bunny that lives in the Sierra
mountains.
If changes aren't made to slow the progress of climate
change, said Urban, one in six species will be at risk of going extinct.
"The surprise here is the accelerated risk ... if we just keep doing
what we're doing," he said. "It's critical we don't get there."
Arctic sea ice levels are now the lowest they've ever been
In August, scientists from
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
released evidence
that sea ice levels in the Arctic are extremely low compared to what
they were 10 years ago. "Now, we're kind of used to these low levels of
sea ice," NASA sea ice scientist Walt Meier said in a press release
released by the agency. "It's the new normal."
While species extinction and rampant flooding are the things
we can witness with our own eyes, the scariest things are happening
somewhere few of us will ever go — but are having an impact all of us
can feel all the same. Melting sea ice is the effect that, as the planet
warms up, the ice at the top of the planet melts. This isn't news;
we've been hearing about the melting polar ice caps for years. But it's
gotten so bad that scientists are saying it's entirely changed the
ecosystem up north.
"We're seeing the greening of the arctic," Charles Miller,
principal investigator for the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability
Experiment at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a phone
interview Tuesday. "Because of climate change effects at these
latitudes, we're seeing increase in plant growth."
Through the course of his team's research in Alaska, Miller
has seen temperatures reach absurdly high levels. Last July, the town of
Deadhorse, Alaska, set the
all-time record high temperature for a town on the Arctic Ocean: 85 degrees Fahrenheit.
"That part of the world should be frozen most of the year," Miller said.
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| A pipeline forced to shutdown in Deadhorse, Alaska Source: Al Grillo/AP |
When the northernmost parts of the planet start to emulate beach weather, bigger problems arise, like the melting of
permafrost,
a usually reliable layer of always-frozen ground. "Permafrost can be
harder than concrete — you need special machinery to get through it,"
Miller said. When the permafrost melts, that infrastructure, which has
been solidly frozen for tens of thousands of years, collapses. Land
elevation drops. And construction, whether that's pipelines, buildings
or entire communities, is compromised.
Because of that phenomenon, the village of Kivalina, Alaska, is
practically being devoured
by northern waters as its permafrost base thaws beneath it, the sea
level inching closer to residents' doorsteps. "They regularly do aerial
fly-overs because of the permafrost failure," Miller said. "They're
worried the village will literally erode into the water."
The failure of permafrost isn't the only problem with a
warming arctic. According to Miller, there are 1,500 billion metric tons
of organic carbon frozen in the arctic soil — enough that, as it thaws
out, the arctic region could turn into the carbon-emission equivalent of
a continent-sized exhaust pipe.
"It's possible the carbon could become mobilized," Miller
said. "With the same amount of greenhouse gases we've seen with fossil
fuels like coal and oil, there might be natural feedback from permafrost
that contributes tens of billions of tons of carbon over the coming
centuries."
If tens of billions of tons of organic carbon are released
from the frost, it could all end up in the atmosphere — becoming a
gigantic and unstoppable source of greenhouse gases.
Climate change has turned extreme flooding into a regular occurrence
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| Flooding in Louisiana left thousands of people displaced Source: Max Becherer/AP |
In mid-July,
13 people died when
roughly two feet of water pummeled southern Louisiana. A storm like
that should, statistically, only have an annual exceedance probability
of less than 0.2% — meaning it should only happen once every 500 years,
according to the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The storm was, instead, the eighth of its kind in about 12 months, the latest in a string of storms in
Texas,
Oklahoma,
South Carolina,
West Virginia and
Maryland.
Storms in general are getting stronger and more frequent, according to
Beth Christensen, Director of Adelphi University's Environmental Studies
Program. Higher storm frequency doesn't necessarily mean your town's
going to flood — unless the air is full of moisture. Unfortunately, in
New Orleans, it was.
"We are in record territory," the
National Weather Service said in a
statement, after an agency-launched weather balloon recorded astronomical levels of atmospheric moisture.
According to Christensen, there's a strong correlation
between higher global temperatures and more intense rain. When you have
high heat, you get more evaporation from bodies of water. When you have
more evaporation, you have more moisture in the atmosphere, meaning more
humidity — or air full of water vapor. So when the storm falls,
according to
NOAA, that water vapor turns the rain fat and heavy.
"Add this tendency to flood to the higher sea levels
resulting from, one, increased melting of ice in the high latitudes, and
two, volumetric increases associated with the warmer water, and we can
expect more of these events, not fewer, in the future," Christensen
said.
Heavy flooding doesn't only knock out power and beat up
homes. It hit India's tea crops hard, decreasing production by 7.22% in
July, according to the
Economic Times. Recently, floods
in Jamaica ruined up to $8 million in coffee beans set for export. And in August,
flash floods in China destroyed several vineyards, resulting in an "overnight loss" of about 4 million yuan, or around $600,000.
"We can document that these events are anthropogenic," she
said, meaning derived from manmade environmental pollution. "This is our
new reality."
So is the planet past salvation?
Even though there's
an "every little bit helps" mentality when it comes to fighting against
increased carbon emissions, we're in
larger initiative territory if we're going to save the planet: taking cues from countries like Costa Rica, which
didn't burn a single fossil fuel to power its electrical grid for two months; converting the U.S.' own power grid to a more efficient, computer-controlled, "
smart" technology; and following through on the
Paris Agreement,
the legally-binding agreement signed by more than 170 countries in
April, pledging actions to restrict the planet's temperature rise to
under 3.6-degrees Farenheit, widely considered the danger zone. It
wouldn't be easy, fast or cheap. But if the last year is any indication,
we can no longer afford to be armchair observers in a rapidly changing
global event.
"We need to search for alternatives to carbon-based energy
systems like fossil fuels," Miller said. "It's having a noticeable
impact on the Earth as an entire system."
"It's not enough to think these things are localized," he concluded. "Every action we take has a global impact."
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