It was a smokey, hazy, hot and exceptionally dry time at Glacier National Park. The air was often shrouded with a screen of wildfire smoke. Fires within the park, and outside, created havoc for all life. Whole portions of this vast park were closed down because of poor air quality and fire threat.
There had been no rain for two months. Temperatures ranged from 10 - 15 degrees above normal. A crispy-crunchy quality was evident in much of the vegetation there. This was a tinder box.
These conditions were replicated throughout the Pacific Northwest, Rockies, and California this summer. Not surprisingly, it has been a record-setting season for wildfires throughout these regions. In fact, the smoke trails generated by these fires have created a sort of pall across the entire country!
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| Forecast: Dry, Smokey and All Fogged Up |
But we learned much about the park, and about our society. There used to be 150 glaciers in the park, but now there are 25 small-to-almost-gone ones. Grinnell Glacier, one of the park's largest, in 1850 was about 1000 feet thick. Not so today:
It is normal for glaciers to come and go. It's all part of the ongoing warming and cooling cycles of Earth, known as the Glacial-Interglacial Cycle. For millions of years, the mountains of Glacier National Park were covered by ice sheets that were miles thick. They finally melted by the end of our last Ice Age (between 100,000 and 15,000 years ago). The smaller glaciers that filled the park when White Explorers first arrived were products of "The Little Ice Age", a mini-climate-cycle that lasted from roughly 1400 to 1800. It chilled Northern Europe and North America and artists painted what they experienced:
But Human-Affected Climate Change, as represented by greenhouse gases released by us in the act of living our lifestyles, serves as an accelerant to these normal warming/cooling cycles:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/Glacial-Interglacial%20Cycles
Annually adding 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air and oceans creates additional warming that affects weather patterns, ocean currents and dependent life on land and sea. Regions become arid... or moist. Ocean temperatures rise, killing coral reefs and their diverse ecosystems. Fish habitats change and become reduced, affecting their populations. Here's a useful look at where all the greenhouse gases come from:
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data
As human-effected carbon dioxide/greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere (and absorbed into the oceans), the overall air temperature increases. These gases are heat-trappers and they don't go away quickly - think multiple centuries. And in fact, they have caused record temps for 16 of the last 17 years:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/2016-was-the-hottest-year-on-record/
Yes, that is a trend all right! So... when air temps soar, weather patterns change. In particular, regions like the Arctic begin to experience warmer winters (and summers). Massive glaciers in Greenland are now in full-melt mode. Here's an example in a brief video form:
Hoo-boy! When Greenland glaciers melt away, they add a gazillion mega-gallons worth of cold, fresh water into the ocean, in particular into the "conveyor belt" known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). In the Earth's past, this has created long-lasting climate changes:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/crippled-atlantic-currents-triggered-ice-age-climate-change
and
https://phys.org/news/2017-02-greenland-ice-sheet-cool-subtropics.html
Wowzers. So, increased temperatures can create climate change that makes life absolutely bone-chilling as well as sweltering! Who knew climate change could be so conflicted? Meanwhile, in other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, higher temps are creating significant changes in Siberia, Alaska and Northern Canada. The deep, thick layer of perm-frost there contains oodles of methane gas and other greenhouse gas goodies accumulated and frozen over hundreds of thousands/millions of years worth of decayed organic material. It will thaw naturally, to a minor extant, as the Glacial-Interstatial Cycles occur. But with Humans adding accelerants into the Climate Change equation, the tundra will rapidly yield vast stores of Methane into the atmosphere, thus severely compounding the heat-trap uptick level. This is the worst-case scenario for many climate scientists:
http://www.thearcticinstitute.org/climate-change-arctic-security-methane-risks/
Another consequence of accelerated Climate Change is increased sea levels. Scientists are back and forth on this, but the consensus seems to be a general rise of up to 3 feet by the end of the century, based on how things are today. Ha-ha, say climate deniers, that's nothing - just back up a few steps up from the beach!
But as our friends in Texas and Florida now know, the difference 3 feet can make is all the difference in the world. A major hurricane approaches the coast, throw in a high tide and low pressure surge, and you have sea water flowing up and over seawalls/dunes/rivers and far into your neighborhood and home! Add many inches or feet of rain, and we have a real soggy situation, as played out recently in Houston:
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| (Houston: When your land-based home becomes the Titanic) |
Well. Mankind is possessed with self-awareness. Scientists around the world have been waving the red flags for some time now. Where is the USA, the traditional leader for global issues? How are we as a nation responding to this incipient existential crisis? Uh, it's complicated.
You see, in 2016, the Democrats nominated a woman who had a problem in getting people to trust her. She ran against a man who had even worse trust problems than her. In fact, he had myriad other problems. But she was depicted as being especially untrustworthy because while she had been Secretary of State she used a personal email server that had a possibility of being hacked by enemy states like Russia. So even though such a hack never happened to her server - as opposed to virtually every other government and political organization - she lost to the Bad Guy (who had been aided by an enemy state), even though she won by 3 million votes. The End. For now.
Up until that time, the USA was leading the world in ways to respond to this crisis. But our new President had declared Climate Change to be a hoax, mostly perpetrated by the Chinese government. He removed the USA from the Paris Climate Accord, leaving us with Syria and Nicaragua as the only earthly countries to not support it.
Trump appointed Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt was formerly the Attorney General for the State of Oklahoma. He helped defend the people against the entrenched Oil and Gas interests in Oklahoma as the phenomena of Fracking created hundreds of destabilizing earthquakes and fouled ground water reservoirs. Oh, right! He didn't do any of that. But his passionate stance for Big Business over the Environment landed him the EPA job.
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| "I won't evacuate, not when I'm having the best game I've ever played in my life!" |
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/09/07/at-a-moment-climate-change-is-hard-to-ignore-the-epa-is-being-pointed-elsewhere/?utm_term=.5566dc9143b8
What a pud. In addition to throwing out regulations, weakening the efficacy and moral of the very organization meant to defend our air and water quality, and being a general shill for Fossil Energy interests, Pruitt demonstrates a mean-streak shared by his boss. Check out the "EPA" response to a negative AP story about Hurricane Harvey:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/09/this-epa-statement-reads-like-something-youd-find-in-breitbart/
Yuck-o. Are there ANY elements within our federal government that understands what is happening and how it will affect us for years to come, and can do something about it? Why, yes, yes there is!!
Hooray for our Armed Forces! They have been studying Climate Change for years now. They can project how destabilizing all this is becoming globally. They know what an enormous National Security Threat it is:
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/06/02/trump-may-doubt-climate-change-pentagon-sees-it-looming-threat.html
In the end, we might be saved by the professionals in the Pentagon. Maybe. Or maybe the amoral money guys in this Administration will triumph in a Pyrrhic victory for Big Oil and Gas. All the more reason to remain actively engaged in this time of civic calamity. If these guys are willing to sell out their own families' futures, they are willing to do anything.
To help us with our ongoing resolve, let's give a listen to Spirit perform their great and ever-relevant song, "Nature's Way" from their 1970 masterpiece, "The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus":
1 comment:
We are doomed.
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