Will plants and animals be able to adapt to climate change? For many of them, probably not.

One way in which deniers often try to say there’s no reason to worry about climate change, even if it is happening, is by saying that species will just adapt to it, and everything will be just fine. There are a number of other arguments tied up in this one, but only a couple of them are directly relevant to answering this argument. First, there is the question of the scale of the change. If we look at the current temperature, and assume that this is as warm as it’s going to get, then really, there’s no cause for alarm. Indeed, the letter from the Hudson Institute makes the case that in the last ten thousand years we have seen climatic changes like the current one, and in some cases higher temperatures. The article does NOT note that those events were regional, not global, and it also fails to take global CO2 levels into account.

NOTE: The relationship between CO2 and global temperature is not under debate by any reasonable people, and I don’t have space to address that issue here, so if you want to look into that, either send me a note and I’ll discuss it later, or go here and see if you can find your answers. It will have to suffice, for now, to say that the influence of CO2 on atmospheric temperature has been tested, calculated, retested, and confirmed repeatedly from the late 1800′s, through the military’s development of heat-seeking missiles, and is now the field of fourth-grade science fair projects.

So – while regional temperatures, may have risen comparable amounts in the last couple thousand years, what about CO2 levels? Since that’s what’s driving this temperature increase, and we know that when CO2 increases, it takes time for the temperature to rise in response, how does today’s CO2 level compare?

Temperature and CO2 since the last ice age. Data sources: Vostok, Law Dome, Mauna Loa.

The Five Scariest Things about Climate Change

Not sure if these are the five SCARIEST things, but with so many to choose from, there’s no need to be picky!

Discussions with strangers

So one of my hobbies is discussing climate change with people online, mostly on Huffington Post. I do this for a couple reasons. One is that it gives me a reason to keep up-to-date on what’s up in the world, and the other is that it gives me a chance to help provide solid information to those who may have use for it. Not all of my comments are worth reading, but a minority of them are pretty useful, and I’ve found myself going back to refer to them.

The ones that I think are good take a fair amount of time to research and put together, and so I’m going to start pasting some of them here, both for my own future reference, and for the benefit of anybody who might find it useful.

I’ll post the comment I respond to, and the conversation thereafter, along with a link to the whole thread. Other people’s comments will be in a different color from mine.

So here’s the first, without further ado (discussion excerpt below the fold):

More news from the Permian

In my first post on this blog, I discussed one of the possible connections between the “Anthropocene Warming Event”,  and the Permian-Triassic extinction, also known as “The Great Dying”.  Basically, one hypothesis about the extinction event, and its pattern – oceanic extinction preceding terrestrial extinction – is that a sharp decline in oceanic dissolved oxygen led to a proliferation of anaerobic bacteria, which generated hydrogen sulfide, which filled the oceans with poison, and eventually began to leak out of the water onto the land as a toxic gas.

Now another piece of that event’s puzzle has come up, and that is mercury. In a study published in the journal Geology, Sanei, Grasby, and Beauchamp used sedimentary analysis to look at oceanic mercury content from that time period, and found that there was a dramatic increase in mercury levels. The increase in mercury was caused by a high amount of volcanic activity (thirty times the present-day levels, according to the authors), as well as the burning of massive coal seams ignited by the volcanism.

This caused a mercury buildup that overwhelmed the systems that normally absorb the metal, adding to the ocean’s toxicity.

The authors specify that the present levels are far below the ones they measured from the Permian-Triassic boundary era, but Beauchamp added, “We are adding to the levels through industrial emissions. This is a warning for us here on Earth today.” (more and a video below the fold)

Underestimating Changes: Ocean Acidification Edition

One of the recurring themes in climate science has been that while skeptics and deniers repeatedly say that proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming are unnecessarily alarmist, the reality is, much of that “alarmist” science actually falls short of reality. The downside of building predictive models for the future based on past data, is that the future we’re trying to predict is unprecedented in human history.

And so, once again, we find that when we get around to looking at reality, things are a little farther along than we expected. The most recent illustration of this is a study published in the journal  PLoS ONE . In the discussion, the authors state:

The salient conclusions from this comparative dataset are two-fold: (1) most non-open ocean sites are indeed characterized by natural variation in seawater chemistry that can now be revealed through continuous monitoring by autonomous instrumentation, and (2) in some cases, seawater in these sites reaches extremes in pH, sometimes daily, that are often considered to only occur in open ocean systems well into the future [46]. (emphasis mine)

 Ocean acidification has been one of the more concrete aspects of the changes going on today, but even though it’s so easily measurable, it seems it may have been underestimated.

It’s a serious problem too, as it means that the water is less hospitable to anything with a calcium carbonate exoskeleton. Clams, mussels, lobsters, crabs, zooplankton, and coral are all already showing signs of thinner shells, dissolving reefs, and the ill health that comes with living in an environment that makes your outer layer slowly dissolve.

The oceans’ ecosystems are collapsing, under assault by rising temperatures, chemical pollution, spreading zones of low oxygen, and the persistent lowering of their pH as more and more of the CO2 we emit is absorbed. As a species, we still rely VERY heavily on oceanic fisheries for food, and now, even if we WEREN’T over-fishing, the world the fish live in is becoming uninhabitable, and is almost certainly doing so faster than they can adapt to.

Personally, I don’t think this is reversible anymore. I suppose if we stopped all fossil fuel use TODAY, the acidification might stop, or even reverse, but that’s not happening. It’s time to take a serious look at how to ease into a world in which there are NOT lots of good fish in the sea.

Why I give a damn

There’s a lot about climate change that is depressing, and a lot about it that’s frustrating, and every once in a while, it’s important to remind myself why I don’t just give up, shut it out, and live day to day.

There are a lot of reasons, obviously, but one of them is that my life is richer because of the current diversity of life. I’m not talking about medicines discovered in the disappearing Amazonian rainforests, or about the rolling landscapes in movies, or the joy of “just knowing they’re out there”, though those are all nice, I’m talking about my personal interactions with wildlife. As someone who has been obsessed with animals from a young age, I’ve sought them out, and so I’ve had a number of opportunities to see the diversity of life firsthand. In Tanzania, I got to watch lion cubs playing in the bushes, and I had a tiny bird basking on a rock a couple of feet from me in the frigid sunrise on Kilimanjaro. At Yellowstone I got to wake up in -10F weather to go out and watch wolves running across a snowbound field.  There have been many, many other experiences, both exotic and commonplace, at home and abroad, but for now I’m going to talk about just one in particular.

Oceanoxia, opening statement

In the original Godzilla, the only weapon capable of bringing down the monster is Daisuke Serizawa’s terrifying Oxygen Destroyer, which somehow destroys oxygen in water, and reduces all life in its area of effect to mere bones. While we are not at risk of anything quite like that happening, there IS a tangentially related danger, and it is what inspired the title of this blog.

One of the likely effects of a warming planet is the eventual shutdown of the “ocean conveyor” currents that help oxygen and nutrients cycle between the surface and the deep ocean. If the poles warm enough to keep the water on the surface from sinking, the bottom of the ocean will eventually lose all of its dissolved oxygen as it is breathed in and not replaced by the photosynthetic organisms on the surface (which are also declining). This means that the only organisms capable of surviving down there will be ones that don’t breathe oxygen – anaerobic bacteria.  On the surface, this isn’t a problem, but as things get warmer, and those bacteria multiply, the seas will fill with toxic chemicals created through anaerobic respiration.

The best example of this is Green Lake in Fayetteville, NY – a lake with an anoxic bottom layer that has become filled with hydrogen sulfide. This has happened in the oceans in the past, and may have been a significant factor in massive extinctions. One hypothesis as to the cause of the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, when something like 95% of all life on the planet died, is that this deadly gas buildup leaked out of the ocean, and covered much of the Earth’s land masses in poisonous gas.