Three hundred years of industrial expansion, most in the last 50 years, brings us to where humans are now tweaking the control dials on the Earth's basic life support systems. This recent spasm of global human activity has been fired by an appetite, growing exponentially, for pre-Pleistocene plants, compressed into coal, oil and gas-the fossil fuels. I don't know what arrogance allows people to literally consume that which formed over billions of days and nights. What I do know is that we are flooding the global atmosphere with carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, and that we'd better stop this madness if we want to protect the complex ecological assemblages native to our bioregions.
The Earth's climate is changing because of fossil fuel burning. That statement triggers fits of hysterical denial. But the evidence is piling up.
Scientists may hedge all their predictions, but insurers make their money betting, safely, on the odds of disaster. While the fossil fuel industry finances whole organizations dedicated to denying the danger of global climate change and invests heavily in the campaigns of federal political candidates, the $1.4 trillion insurance industry is growing very nervous about their financial vulnerability. As Franklin Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America points out, "The insurance business is first in line to be affected by climate change ... it could bankrupt the industry." Their top-notch forecasting experts have good reason to worry that the world's climate is going haywire. Here's a sampler of recent evidence.
Irrefutable Evidence?
The fact that sulfur dioxide (SO2) from fossil fuel burning is affecting the Earth's climate is nearly irrefutable. It is easier to measure the climate impact of SO2 than carbon dioxide (CO2), the other climate- changing fossil fuel by-product. Instead of trapping heat like CO2, SO2 particles reflect sunlight away, cooling the climate beneath. SO2 particles don't travel very far either, because they're washed out of the atmosphere within a couple weeks. That means SO2 veils the regions around the biggest polluters-eastern North America, Europe and eastern Asia. In contrast, greenhouse gases survive for decades in the air, long enough to spread evenly around the globe and affect climate for several human generations.
Recently, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) showed that in regions where SO2 emissions are greatest, temperatures cooled compared to the rest of the unveiled globe, and that the cooling was greatest during summer days, when there's more solar energy for SO2 to reflect. What's more, when the Clean Air Act limited SO2 emissions in the US beginning around 1970, the cooling trend stopped.
That is compelling evidence that humans are changing the climate, and according to NCDC's Thomas R. Karl, "the reduction of temperature is large enough to have an impact on global temperatures." He estimates that without the SO2 , the Earth would be 0.5 degrees Celsius (deg C) warmer. Add that to the global warming of 0.6 deg C measured in the last 140 years, and the planet would have warmed over one deg C without the SO2 . That fits with the more catastrophic trend line in the range of global warming forecasts.1
More Extreme Weather in the US
In the short term, SO2 may be hiding the full power of greenhouse warming, but in a separate study, the NCDC showed that US weather has been growing more extreme. They scrutinized US records for the last 80 years to track summer droughts, drenching rain storms, wet winters, and other types of wild weather events that are expected to increase in a greenhouse-heated world.
They discovered that since the late 1970s, the climate has been stuck in greenhouse mode, with extreme weather more often. Statistical analyses showed only a five percent probability that the "latest surge toward the greenhouse side is just another fluctuation of an otherwise stable climate," according to science writer Richard A. Kerr.2 Karl [of NCDC] told the New York Times simply, "I would say the climate is responding to greenhouse gases."
The Ocean is Heating
Most of the extra heat added to the climate system by greenhouse gases is absorbed by the ocean; after all, it covers 70 percent of the Earth. Just the top 10 feet of ocean waters contain as much heat as the entire atmosphere.
The Pacific Ocean is huge. It is 63.8 million square miles large, about as big as all the Earth's land masses combined, including Antarctica which is nearly twice as big as the US and Canada together. Not only has the temperature of Pacific Ocean surface waters been climbing since the mid-1970s, but evidence suggests that evaporation, air moisture, and rainfall over tropical waters has also increased, according to Nicholas E. Graham of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
Graham warns with typical scientific aplomb that while the climate changes since the 1970s could be natural, "there is disquieting similarity" between the observed changes and the early changes expected from an increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
"El Nino," a periodic shift in the Pacific Ocean which drives wild changes in weather worldwide, has been visiting more frequently in recent decades. Over the past century, El Ninos occurred about every three to five years, often offset by periods of ocean cooling called La Nina. Since 1976, though, there have been five El Ninos but just one La Nina. The most recent El Nino has lasted the longest of all, four years so far.
Ants Leetmaa, a climatologist at the National Meteorological Center, told New Scientist, "This is a new [climate] regime. What is happening is unprecedented in the last 100 years.... My personal feeling is the planet has changed-I think we're seeing the impact of global warming."4
Altered Climate-Altered Ecosystems
In the western Pacific waters off Southern California, zooplankton populations dropped 80 percent between 1951 and 1993, while the surface layer warmed 1.5 deg C, according to Dean Roemmich and John McGowan of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. They compiled data from 222 cruises covering a 130,000 square-kilometer region of water.
Zooplankton are tiny microscopic grazers that are of huge importance to life on Earth. They form the base of the oceanic food chain, feeding on the microscopic plants that remove massive quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow.
The Scripps researchers found that the zooplankton die-off is due to increased stratification caused by warmer surface waters. Upwelling of cold waters stirs up vital nutrients for the plankton. Stratification prevents colder deep waters from mixing with the surface layers. They warn that, "If there is a global temperature rise of 1 to 2 deg C in the next 40 years and stratification increases globally, the biological impacts could be devastating."5
McGowan told New Scientist that the zooplankton drop may well extend over far more of the Pacific Ocean than they studied, and that on the opposite side of the ocean, the Japanese Maritime Safety Agency is reporting an increase in surface water temperature of 0.7 deg C. He told Science, "If it's part of a natural cycle, then it'll reverse itself. If it is man- caused, we're in serious trouble."
Several species off California's coast that feed on zooplankton appear to be in decline. Stephen Ralston of the National Marine Fisheries Service found that rockfish reproduction off the central California coast has been "pretty much a disaster" in warm water years, which have grown more frequent. Richard Veit, of the University of Washington, found that the total abundance of seabirds off the coast of southern California declined by 40 percent between 1987 and 1994, and sooty shearwater populations dropped by 90 percent. "The bird and zooplankton declines match each other so closely, it sure looks like there's a strong connection," Veit said. David Ainley, of Point Reyes Bird Observatory near San Francisco, found that the population of cassin's auklet dropped by 60 percent since the late 1970s.6
Scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute recounted 45 invertebrate animal species (limpets, barnacles, anemones, chitons, sea stars) in one stretch of rocky intertidal beach that was surveyed in the early 1930s. In the past 60 years, the shoreline water temperatures increased 0.75 deg C, with summertime highs climbing 2.2 deg C.
As the waters warmed, eight out of nine species who favor warmer habitats to the south grew more abundant at the site. Five out of eight species that favor cooler habitat to the north declined. In all, the abundance of 32 of the 45 species changed, "indicating profound change in community structure."7
The ecological impacts of climate change are also being seen in the forests of the far north. At the harsh, far northern reaches of Alaska's white spruce forests, scientists have been drilling cores in trees for clues to climate change. They found confirmation that temperatures have warmed dramatically (about two deg C in the last century), and discovered that in the last 25 years, the trees grew very sensitive to how much rain falls, a sign of moisture stress due to warmer temperatures. The researchers, Gordon Jacoby and Rosanne D'Arrigo of the Lamont- Doherty Earth Observatory are also concerned that warmer temperatures are the cause of severe bark beetle outbreaks that have wiped out several million acres of southern Alaskan forests since the 1970s.8
In the subarctic region of northern Finland, researchers with the Global Treeline Project have watched the pine forests encroach steadily northward over the tundra since 1948. Around mountains, the pines have climbed on average 20 meters per "seed year", while on the flatter plains, pines have moved northward between 40 and 2,000 meters per seed year.9
While trees colonize some northern ecosystems where they had been absent, existing forests may be growing maladapted to the altered climate. Kevin Jardine, in an outstanding review of the threat to northern forests from climate change, cites studies showing that forest fires have grown more devastating along with rising temperatures in Canada and the western US since 1976, in Alaska since 1975, and in Russia since 1985.10
In the Swiss and Austrian Alps, plant species have shifted upwards over the last 70 to 90 years, while temperatures warmed in the region by 1.2 deg F. Scientists there concluded that, "There is no doubt that even moderate warming induces migration processes, and that this process is under way ... Global warming is already having a significant impact on plant ecology."11
In shallow ponds on Canada's Ellesmere Island, very near Greenland's west coast, researchers at Queen's University studied assemblages of diatoms, abundant and diverse one- celled algae species, preserved in the mud. In each pond, they found that, "diatom assemblages were relatively stable over the last few millennia but then experienced unparalleled changes beginning in the 19th century," which they conclude are "most likely related to climatic warming."12
At the other end of the world, researchers are observing the effects of a rapid climatic warming on the Antarctic Peninsula of about 2 deg C since 1964 that is stretching the growing season by about two weeks. Flowering plants that were extremely rare are spreading rapidly. Antarctic hair grass increased from 700 plants in 1964 to 17,500 in 1990, and Antarctic pearlwort increased from 60 plants to 380.13
Compared to the attention we give to the political maneuverings of various nation-states, we pay very little attention to the ecosystems of the Earth. We have no way to know the full ecological impact that climate change is having. We do know enough to recognize that tweaking the climate control of the planet has gone too far already.
Wake Up, Dammit!!
The American media, politicians, big environmental groups, and general public appear to be oblivious to what is becoming quite obvious: fossil fuel burning is changing the Earth's climate. There seems to be a pervasive fear of confronting the need to phase out fossil fuels as rapidly as possible.
In 1997, the nations of the world will gather again to decide whether to set a binding schedule for slashing CO2 emissions. This is crunch time for climate change. The survival of the Earth's rich biodiversity is critically dependent on climate stability, especially as habitat is shrinking and barriers to migration are growing.
Whether or not the American people wake up in the next 18 months to the reality of the climate crisis will probably spell the difference between survival and extinction for a whole lot of species. Earth First! may be the only movement in the US with the independence and fiery heart to speak the truth about climate change and to thrust it into the public's face through direct action.
Footnotes
1 Science, May 12, 1995, p. 802
2 Science, April 21, 1995, pp. 363-64
3 Science, February 3, 1995, pp. 666-71
4 "El Nino goes CRITICAL," New Scientist, February 4, 1995, pp. 32-35
5 Science, March 3, 1995, pp. 1324-26
6 Science, March 31, 1995, pp. 1911-12
7 Science, February 3, 1995, pp. 672-74
8 Science, March 17, 1995, p. 1595
9 Press release, Global Warming International Center, (708) 910-1551, June,
1995
10 The Ecologist, November/December, 1994, pp. 220-24
11 Nature, June 9, 1994, p. 448
12 Science, October 21, 1994, pp. 416-19
13 Science, October 7, 1994, p. 35
The Atmosphere Alliance publishes Life Support, a citizen's guide to climate change, and a newsletter, No Sweat News. Contact the Atmosphere Alliance at PO Box 10346, Olympia, WA 98502, (360) 352- 1763.