The uninhabitable earth; Life after warming
I am currently enrolled in a class on climate change at the University of Pittsburgh through their Osher Life Long Learning Institute. Since the topic is so relevant to the climate issue today, it filled up quickly and has lead me on a search for articles and books on the subject. I am overwhelmed with the amount of material that is available, and it seems like more information is becoming available daily as more research and studies are being completed.
The subject for this article is from a recent book that was just published and is available at the Uniontown Library. The author is David Wells and he asks us to forget for a minute if the change is man-made or natural. The facts are clear, the seas are rising, the ice is melting and the atmosphere has warmed. These are not opinions and much of what is being published today seems to confirm these facts.
I did see an article this week on Real Clear Politics that made a good case for the fact that hurricanes are not as severe and frequent as in the past, but after the recent visit of Hurricane Dorian to the Bahamas that could be in doubt. Wells feels that recent storms are just a preview of what is coming and it is coming fast. The refugee crisis developing in the Bahamas may be a preview of the future if the scientist鈥檚 version of climate change is correct. Well鈥檚 book has 54 pages of notes and references of studies and research on the subject and it sure makes a case for the amount of effort and material that is now available.
He opens the book with a view that if you think this is just about rising seas and melting ice you have barely scratched the surface of the real issue. In addition to hurricanes, the fires out West now burn year-round and 500-year floods pound our communities on a regular basis and floods displace millions of people annually. The cruelest impacts of climate change will be borne by those least resilient to face this tragedy. Global fate will be shaped so overwhelmingly by development patterns of China and India who have the burden of bringing hundreds of millions into the global middle class while knowing that the easy paths available to past industrialized nations are now paths to climate chaos.
A two-degree rise in the temperature and small increase in our seas does not seem like a lot, but it will lead to huge droughts and hamper food production. It will also bring more water and flooding. Two thirds of the world鈥檚 major cities are on the coast; so too are most power plants, shipping ports, naval bases, fisheries, deltas and rice paddies. Current rises if continued will put a trillion dollars of American real estate under water. Even inland flooding is becoming a problem. Between 1995 and the present 2.3 billion people were affected and flooding killed 157,000.
We have all seen the pictures of the ice melts. Since the 1950s Antarctica has lost 13,000 square miles of ice shelf, Greenland loses a billion tons of ice each day and just recently lost one of its major glaciers to melting. Wells goes on to discuss other problems that will develop including food shortages, disease, violence and homelessness. Loss of species, barrier reefs, methane leaking from the permafrost in the Arctic may also be on the horizon. In 2018, scientists revived a worm that had been frozen for 42,000 years and in Alaska researchers have discovered remnants of a 1918 flu that killed many millions.
The author concludes with the argument that we the present generation owe it to our children and grandchildren to at least look at this as an important issue. We could be wrong and that鈥檚 okay, but what if there is something going on and we can do things to mitigate but our stubbornness makes for no action and down the road our kids look back and think 鈥渢hose before us could have done something.鈥�