For those of you who have watched Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” you may be familiar with the overly pessimistic EPA official that claims that the world is already doomed. Rolling off various statistics, he states that someone has already been born who will die from a “catastrophic failure of the planet.” In the eyes of the EPA official, the Earth has been already irrevocably ruined. There is no going back for mankind.
Alarmed at how this interview is going, the news anchor rolls his eyes and tries to fix the situation–by treating him like a quack. In short, they act the same way you might do whenever you come across a new article that talks about how our world is doomed, and you roll your eyes to the heavens and sigh, “not this again.” I mean, if the world had ended every time a scientist said it would, we would all be dead right now.
Yet while stating that the world is ending may not be the best approach to the problem, the EPA official makes some important points. His facts check out, and while the words “catastrophic failure” may be a bit over the top, these words aren’t that far from the truth.
Before I begin, let me preface my statement by explaining exactly what role the oceans play in our world on a macro scale.
Have you ever cooled a hot pan using just water from a sink? If you don’t cook, maybe you’ve seen a blacksmith cool some molten metal in a tub of water. In both cases, very little water is used to cool off a very hot object without the temperature of the water changing significantly. The reason behind this, as you probably know, is that water has a very high heat capacity. To put it simply, it takes a lot of heat to warm water up.
Our planet has around 1,260,000,000,000,000,000,000 liters of water. That’s about a billion trillion liters. Or if it make this amount any easier to comprehend, a thousand million million million million liters. That’s a mind-boggling amount.
So how much energy do we need to raise the temperature of all of the water on our planet by one degree Celsius. If we do some simple math (if you want to skip this, just go to the next paragraph), it takes around 4.18 Joules of energy to raise the degree of one liter of water by one degree Celsius. To raise the temperature of all the water in our planet is 5.25 x 1021 Joules. Let’s divide that number by the amount of energy that one Hiroshima nuclear bomb produces, which is 6.3 x 1013 Joules. That leaves us with 8.3 x 107.
To sum it all up, you need 83 million Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs to generate enough energy to raise the temperature of the oceans by ONE DEGREE CELSIUS. Even when we talk about just the surface temperature of the oceans, that’s a TON of heat energy.
So the reason why I’ve kept on emphasizing the fact that water can hold a lot of heat is to drive home the fact that it’s very hard to change the temperature of the oceans. They fulfill the role of a heat sink, absorbing heat when there is too much, expelling heat when there is too little. In other words, they keep global temperature–and by extension, global weather–stable.
A huge reason why temperatures have been relatively steady since the 21st century is because they have been absorbing all the excess heat that has been building up within our atmosphere, and now that heat energy has been wreaking havoc on hundreds of ecosystems around the world.
The extra heat has not only been melting polar ice caps and ruining the habitats of animals that live in the polar regions, but it has also started to affect the many currents and cycles that make up the various weather phenomena we know today. The extra fresh water that coming form the polar ice caps will slowly, over the course of a century, stop the ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean that keeps Europe warm.
You may say, “so what?” I mean, it’s over the course of a century, why should we worry about it now? Well, part of the problem is that the current doesn’t have to completely stop for it to negatively affect many different ecosystems.
If the current slows down (and it is slowing down right now), less nutrients will make their way into lower latitudes, potentially causing certain species in lower latitudes to die off and negatively affecting the ecosystem. The nutrients that should have been distributed by the currents will then remain at higher latitudes, potentially causing certain species in higher latitudes to become too numerous and once again negatively affecting the ecosystem. And who can say that the Atlantic current will be the only current that will be affected.
We don’t depressingly little about our oceans, and there are many ocean currents that we aren’t aware of that may be ruined by the increasing climate, not to mention the El Nino and La Nina cycle.
The El Nino and La Nina are global weather phenomena that have the potential to change the entire global climate, and while the relationship between ENSO (this is what we call the El Nino and La Nina cycle) phenomena and global warming is not fully understood due to the huge variance in natural weather phenomena, we do know that sometimes El Nino causes a huge amount of heat to be expelled from the oceans into our atmosphere.
That’s a problem when your oceans have been soaking up excess heat for the last 20 years, and now scientists such as Kevin Trenburth suggest that the ocean will soon release the huge amount of heat that they have been soaking up, causing temperatures to skyrocket.
From NPR:
“[The oceans can’t soak up heat] for much longer than maybe 20 years, and what happens at the end of these hiatus periods, is suddenly there’s a big jump [in temperature] up to a whole new level and you never go back to that previous level again,” [Trenburth] says.
You can think of it like a staircase. Temperature is flat when a natural cool spell cancels out the gradual temperature increase caused by human activity. But when there’s a natural warm spell on top of the long-term warming trend, the story is dramatically different.
“When the natural variability or when the weather is going in the same direction as global warming, suddenly we’re breaking records, we’re going outside of the bounds of previous experience, and that is when the real damage occurs,” Trenberth says.
Our oceans are clicking time bombs. Sooner or later, the excess heat in the oceans will come out, and when it does, some ecosystems will inevitable be irrevocably harmed or even destroyed.
The ENSO phenomena is complicated and fundamentally important in our understanding of climate change, so for those who are interested, I found a fantastic blog post from Judith Curry’s blog that talks about the potential links between global warming and ENSO.
Yet there isn’t just one ticking time bomb that has landed on our doorstep. There’s two. Global warming will also cause sea levels to rise, and according to a recent 2011 NOAA report, 55 percent of the world’s population lives within 50 miles of the coast… Need I say more?
The large amounts of carbon that we have put into our atmosphere is also now causing ocean acidification. Our atmosphere and our oceans exchange carbon just like they do with heat. So when you increase the carbon content of our atmosphere, naturally the carbon content of our oceans goes up as well, making them become more acidic.
Acid dissolves things, in this case, it dissolves the shells of small sea organisms. Since Planktonic organisms that depend on calcium carbonate to form their shells are at the very bottom of the food chain; as a result, every organism who either directly or indirectly feeds on these planktonic organisms is finding it harder to find food now that these planktonic organisms are suffering.
On the west coast, sea stars are dying off in huge numbers. UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology explains this much better than I ever could on their website discussing the mysterious wasting disease that has drastically reduced the sea star population.
Sea stars along much of the North American Pacific coast are dying in great numbers from a mysterious wasting syndrome. Similar die-offs have occurred before in the 1970s, 80s, and the 90s, but never before at this magnitude and over such a wide geographic area. Pisaster ochraceus and many other species of sea stars have been affected by the current sea star wasting syndrome event.
The wasting disease has been linked to Denovirus, but we’re still far off from being able to fully understanding the sea star wasting syndrome that is killing hundred of sea stars from California to Alaska.
Now, since I’ve talked so much about climate change, you may think that I would like the construction of dams. And I do . . . kind of. While I love the fact that dams are a source of renewable energy, they completely destroy populations of fish like salmon. Fish ladders that allow fish to go upstream past the dam help a bit, but fish tend to shun them according to a study by Jed Brown of the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology and his colleagues.
Roughly 2 percent of the targeted number of American shad made it through Essex Dam on the Merrimack River in 2011 and close to 0 percent passed through dams on the Connecticut and Susquehanna. Restoration targets for river herring, two species of silver-colored fishes, are in the hundreds of thousands to millions of fish but in recent years, less than 1,000 herring on average have returned to these rivers from the ocean. Atlantic salmon numbers in the Connecticut River have been similarly low despite decades of restoration efforts.
Dams and sea walls are reducing the habitat available for fish such as herring, which is a staple food for many sea creatures. Every wetland, estuary, and coral reef that is slowly being destroyed is not only getting rid of thousands of species’ habitats, but are also fundamentally changing the ecosystem of the water and land around them.
Tons of sea turtles die from plastic in the oceans every year as well. What many people don’t know is that trash in the ocean doesn’t just kill sea organisms by suffocating them or trapping them in a place where they can’t get out. After a while, substances such as plastic are worn down into microscopic particles and consumed by organisms. In animals such as turtles. these particles cause them to develop cancer, eventually killing them when the tumor growth becomes too big for the body to handle.
Meanwhile, Japan and China seem determined to kill as many whale and sharks as they can despite international bans and warnings. But that doesn’t mean other countries are any better. Huge fishing ships get a ton of bycatch. While these ships are legally required to release these fish back into the sea, more often than not, the fish die anyway due to the trauma of being caught. Fish nets also drag along the bottom of the sea floor, destroying the habitats of thousands more sea organisms.
Even whale watching boats suck. The regulation surrounding whale watching is pretty lax, and the boats often cause undue stress to orcas and other whales (which in turn causes them to die). Whale watching boats are in fact the biggest danger to the orca population outside of decreasing prey populations.
And to put the cherry on top, the fish oil trade isn’t that great for the fish either.
Regulations in these industries are too lax, and as a result, every year thousands upon thousands of marine life are killed for no good reason other than profit.
The first thing that armies do when they are trying to destroy an opposing civilization is to poison their water. After all, water is the source of life. It is what we depend on. So why are we poisoning our own water?
So now that we are nearly at the end of this post, you as the reader may be thinking “why are you telling me this, what can I do about this?”
Well, the first thing you can do is be informed. Like it or not, these things are happening even now as we speak. The political debate regarding global warming and being eco-friendly is completely ridiculous. We need to recognize that the world as we know it is suffering.
Well, it’s not really suffering. But while earth may not suffer, the various organisms and delicate cycles present within nature that are being threatened by climate change are essential to the survival of homo sapiens, so we should care.
The debate within politics needs to stop, and politicians must focus on what polices we should have, not if we should have them.
Global warming is a phenomena caused by the human population. Small actions by every human has contributed to the problem, so there isn’t much one person can do about it; however, the good thing about this is that if everyone pitches in, everyone’s small action can have a pretty significant effect. Don’t use so much fertilizer on your lawns. Avoid companies that damage the environment. Put your plastic in the recycle bin. Vote for a politician concerned about the environment. Be more aware of what’s happening to your local ecosystem.
Small actions. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.
Note:
One criticism you might have is that this post deals with a lot of predictions and speculation, and I can’t do much about that. After all, we’re talking about the future here; however, based on the evidence we see now, the future isn’t bright.
An apt analogy might be that we’re speeding along a highway at night. There aren’t any street lamps, so we can’t really see ahead except for what our headlights illuminate. We’re pretty sure there are some potholes and rocks ahead on our path that we want to avoid, so some passengers in the car are yelling at the driver to slow down so we have a better chance of avoiding some of the obstacles ahead.
The problem is, we’re accelerating.
-Matt
It's Really Not Rocket Science 