the ice is holding up for now
When the arctic ice goes, life of earth will get bad for every living thing. Bad for us because our societies will crash and food and clean water will be scarce for billions of people. Bad for every other living thing because their habitats will change so quickly that they too won't have the shelter, food, and water that they need.
A couple of decades ago, I wrote to this crazy old scientist who lives in England, Dr. James Lovelock. He was talking about climate change in ways that made sense to me. He's still alive, living in England and engaged with the scientific community. But since he's 102 years old, I was surprised to see an op-ed from him this week in the Guardian.
"Almost 60 years ago, I suggested our planet self-regulated like a living organism. I called this the Gaia theory, and was later joined by biologist Lynn Margulis, who also espoused this idea. Both of us were roundly criticised by scientists in academia. I was an outsider, an independent scientist, and the mainstream view then was the neo-Darwinist one that life adapts to the environment, not that the relationship also works in the other direction, as we argued. In the years since, we have seen just how much life - especially human life - can affect the environment. Two genocidal acts - suffocation by greenhouse gases and the clearance of the rainforests - have caused changes on a scale not seen in millions of years."
A vast number of environmentalists have dropped Lovelock because of his position on nuclear power -- that is, Lovelock believes that wind, solar, waves and all won't be enough, that we should stop all fossil fuel burning now-right-now, and use nuclear until we get a better grip on large scale renewables. In his op-ed, Lovelock lectures about the properties of water -- how snow reflects heat back into space, how ice absorbs energy, and about how, when water is turned into vapor, humidity, it acts as a powerful greenhouse gas.
When reading about this stuff, it's good to know the phrase "global water amplification": water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases as temperature increases. What this means is that saltier oceans will get saltier, fresher oceans will get fresher; dry places will be dryer and wet places will get wetter. More extremes. And the water in the atmosphere is yet another positive reinforcement for global heating.
But Lovelock goes beyond the heat-trapping qualities of water vaper. "Much of the confusion over global heating comes about because of the huge quantities of heat needed to change the state of water. Few are aware that to melt a gram of ice takes 80 calories, enough heat to raise the temperature of 1ml of water to 80C. Try an ice cube in your boiling hot tea.
Then imagine how much heat was needed to melt large areas of the polar ice cap during the recent summer and how much hotter the world would have been if the ice had not been there. No wonder there is confusion about whether there is global heating or not."
Lovelock op-ed in the Guardian
And, well, we'll get to that place where most of the ice is gone. Most artic ice is already gone in the summer and the arctic is transitioning to an only-winter ice ecosystem. I wrote to Dr. Lovelock, sometime in the 'aughts.
What should we do, I asked. What can I do? His reply then was -- Enjoy life. Travel and see this beautiful world. Love your family. Which, ya know, is what you tell someone with a terminal illness. I told him that I was studying nursing. I wonder if he knew that I'd get it. Originally posted to Dreamwidth, were there are
comments. Dreamwidth comments. Note that ljgeoff can't get into her livejournal account so it'd be better if you left messages over on dreamwidth!