Mass Extinction

Note: This post is relevant

A recent report has garnered some attention for its declaration that we have entered Earth’s sixth Mass Extinction – the first since the disappearance of the dinosaurs. They also state that humans, as a species are at risk of going extinct.

I’ve got lots to say about all this, but right now I want to address how we know what we know.

Most people not involved in the study of plant and animal populations don’t have a very clear idea of how scientists come to conclusions like this. There’s no reason they SHOULD, but having an idea of how we know what we know can act as a defense against those who say things like this are all made up.

When I was in college, I spent one week on some islands in the Bahamas (terrible, I know), studying a population of iguanas. I was part of a group of around 10 people led by a biologist who had been doing this for 20 years. This species only lives on three islands, and was almost extinct when he started studying them.

20 years later, with the help of the Bahamian government, they were doing quite well, and he had a massive amount of information about the iguanas, how long they lived, how many there were, what their breeding habits were, and so on.

This was achieved by spending between two weeks and a month on the islands about once a year.

This same biologist was doing similar studies of turtles in a couple places in Indiana, Nebraska, and probably a couple other places I’m not remembering.

I also spent time in Tanzania, and talked to biologists there who were studying everything from plants to elephants.

I also talked to scientists at the New England Aquarium that monitor fish and sea turtles populations all along the East Coast of the United States.

When I worked for a state department of natural resources, I spent two summers doing similar work to what I had done with the iguanas and turtles, this time with snakes. There were fewer of us studying many more populations, so it took us a full summer to cover about half the significant habitats in the state.

I also did some filing work for that department, going through the records of citizens reporting in about animals they had seen.

Now I regularly interact with people who are doing the same thing with bird species – counting them, weighing them, and monitoring how their populations have been changing for the last 50 years.

I’ve also been talking to people who’ve collected plant and bird records from scientists and hobbyists going back in to the 1800s.

This is just the tangential experience of one person, who studied biology as an undergrad in one college, and worked for a couple science-related organizations afterwards.

In the U.S. alone, there are thousands of colleges and universities that do similar kinds of research at different levels. Every state has an agency that ALSO hires scientists to do research. Every state also has people who closely monitor wildlife for their own reasons – hunters, birdwatchers, reptile enthusiasts, frog enthusiasts, fishermen, and so on.

Many of the colleges I mentioned ALSO do research in other countries all over the world, but all of those countries also have their own researchers and institutions doing their own work.

This work involves individually counting lizards, or snakes, or turtles, or birds, insects, or fish, or mammals, or plants, or sometimes number of flowers ON plants.

On every continent, in every country, in every habitat in all conditions of all seasons, there are thousands of people constantly monitoring the myriad of organisms we share our planet with – and in some cases rely on.

All of these people also share their data, and publish it, and cross-check it, and add it in to common databases that cross international boundaries. All of this work goes back generations, and as the human population has grown, so to has the number of people studying the world we live in, as well as our capacity to do so.

That is how we know that species are going extinct. That is how we know that the climate is changing – because for every person I mentioned who’s studying life on earth, there’s also someone studying the planet’s past, and someone studying the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and someone studying how those chemicals behave in different conditions.

The entire planet is changing all around us, and everybody who’s watching can see it.

Priorities, or: My issue is (not really) more urgent than your issue

I’ve said many times that climate change is different from other topics of activism, because it is, more than anything else, one issue that will affect all other issues. Do you care about war? Climate change will make war more likely. Do you care about “the environment”? Climate change is affecting ever ecosystem on the planet. Do you care about civil rights and social justice? The elevated stresses of food shortage, high temperatures, and economic troubles will exacerbate the kind of tribalism that fuels prejudice. The list goes on.

The problem I find myself facing is that I can’t honestly say that any of these issues are separable – either from each other or from climate change. If there’s a war going on in your area, that is a far more immediate concern than where your energy is coming from, or whether you can work on reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels. If you’re struggling to make ends meet, you’re not going to have time, energy, or money to spend on political change, or even on self-education about the complexities of climate science. If you fear for your life every time you see a police car, that’s an issue of immediate and unavoidable importance.

All of these are issues of vital importance. They all matter. They all need to be worked on for their own sakes, AND they all need to be addressed as part of acting on climate change. The problem is that we only have so much energy. There are a few human dynamos out there who manage to be really and truly active in every issue they care about, but for mosts of us, that kind of energy is beyond our grasp. In addition, all of these issues (and many that I haven’t discussed) deserve the full attention of smart, dedicated people, not a fraction of that attention.

And so we are left with a classic conundrum. We can’t address the serious obstacles to climate action without addressing money in politics. We can’t address money in politics without addressing low voter turnout. We can’t address low voter turnout without addressing voter suppression efforts. We can’t address voter suppression efforts without addressing institutional racism, and the chain goes on. I could have made the same series of connections with a dozen issues, and the reality is that NONE of these issues can wait till other things are solved.

Black people will not and should not wait to fight back against the systemic war that has been waged against them in this country since before the American Revolution. Women will not an should not ignore the problems of rape, harassment, and prejudice in our society. Non-heterosexual and non-cisgendered people will not and should not shelve their fight for equality and safety in a system that still allows for them to be treated as less than human. And almost none of the people I just mentioned fall into any one of those categories. The fact that white, cisgendered men like myself are the only group that does NOT have to actively fight for the right to live in peace shows just how important all of these battles are, and how important it is that we help our fellow humans even in struggles that do not directly benefit us.

And action on climate change cannot wait. It has waited for too long. It is now over 50 years since we knew enough to start taking action with confidence that it was the right course. I can think of well over a dozen examples, off the top of my head, of plant and animal species that are changing radically in response to the planet’s rise in temperature, on every continent on the planet. This is happening now, and it has only just begun

So what should those of us who are pouring our energy into climate change be doing about all this? Well, to be honest I don’t know. Not really. But I have an educated guess. In my opinion, the single most important thing we can do is make it easier for others to help out. We can pour our efforts into making it clear what can be done in people’s daily lives. We can work to make the science accessible and understandable for as many people as possible. We can make sure to tell people about ways THEY can take action. We can experiment in our own lives and spread the results of our experiments. We can write letters to politicians and pass them around for other people to sign and send in. We could even do things like writing scripts for those who want to call congresspeople – to get a clear, concise message across.

It’s good to engage in demonstrations, but I fear that our power structure has gotten all too good at shunting such protests to the side, and ignoring them. We have to recognize that climate change, and the actions required to address it, not only represent a challenge to the most profitable industry on the planet, they also represent a challenge to the quasi-religious rule of free market fundamentalism, and the actually religious philosophies that say that God is in control, and that the world will end soon by God’s hand, so none of this matters, or if it does, we should be HELPING bring about the end, so we can all get to our afterlife and enjoy heaven. These ideological forces are much, much harder to fight against than a set of business practices or confusion about climate science, or misinformation about the actions that can be taken. There are entire worldviews that are directly contradictory to the reality of human-made climate change, and those are what stand between us and a better future. And we need to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to fight against those ideologies.

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.

In search of a climate theory

There are a number of scientific theories that we rely on in day to day life, whether we think about them or not. These various and sundry chemical, biological and physical theories are used daily in research and development of technologies, medicines, cleaning products, development strategies etc. and they are taught regularly in schools precisely because they are so useful.

The theory of anthropogenic global warming is a useful theory, but it is, on the whole, a sub-theory – a set of hypotheses born out of the larger concept of a planetary climate that effects and is effected by the life that moves within it.