Climate Change: Penguins, Polar Bears & People

The western Antarctic Peninsula, that limp arm jutting out of Antarctica towards the similarly limp arm of South America’s Patagonian tip at Tierra del Fuego, is warming faster than any place on Earth. Wintertime temperatures have risen a staggering nine degrees Fahrenheit in 50 years. The polar seas off the peninsula, similarly, have risen nine degrees in just 13 years, defying expectations.

Things aren't looking good for these guys.

On Penguin Island, researchers with Lindblad Expeditions have recorded a 75 percent plummet in the number of Adélie penguins since 1980. Across the island, where normally 600 southern giant petrels can be found, now only 75 have been seen nesting.

It is the North Pole, not the South Pole, that has received the bulk of climate change reporting in the past two years, making Mother Jones recent coverage all the more interesting. The polar bear, as identifiable with the Arctic as Santa Claus, was reported to be dying out, evermore stranded on ice floes that have taken it to the endangered species list. Once a fantasy, the Northwest Passage is becoming a new reality, and Canada and Russia are investing billions building ports in their once-godforsaken northern reaches, ready to take advantage of new shipping routes.

Oil, the ultimate cause of this melting ice, has apparently found its own solution to the rising trend of pirates in the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Malacca: Skip the pirates, sink the icebergs and burn a path through a newly watery ocean. Adding insult to injury, new oil was discovered under areas once covered by sea ice.

The South Pole, on the other hand, gets a lot less press coverage. While the potential for exploitation and one-day settlement may exist on Antarctica, economic interests are not as obvious as with the better-known Arctic. The land remains far away and mysterious, a two-mile high continent of ice larger than Europe that receives less precipitation than any place on Earth.

University of Chicago climate theoretician Ray Pierrehumbert worries that the most devastating impact of climate change could be on natural ecosystems that have little direct dietary or monetary value to humans, much like these petrels and penguins. He doesn’t believe the impact on natural ecosystems has gotten enough traction in the press. “The systems that are hardest hit by climate change are natural systems,” Pierrehumbert says. “We just don’t have a good track record of even helping salmon survive dams. That’s a much easier technological problem than helping polar bears survive the loss of sea ice. My question is, how much do people care about animals?”

These poor penguins, while appearing cute and cuddly and cartoon-friendly, live in an obviously endangered ecosystem. Several species could be going the way of the great auk, and the flightless birds are declining faster than Pittsburgh, the shrinking steel city that has made them its mascot.

MEDIA GETTING BETTER

Pierrehumbert does take heart in the public reaction to the bleaching of the coral reefs and the listing of the polar bear under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

Additionally, he and other experts and media figures agree that journalistic coverage of climate change is better than it once was. “Ten years ago, the main fault was that the media would always try to balance any opinion by one scientist with some opinion by someone else,” says Pierrehumbert, who believes the mass media are doing a better job of respecting serious science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Science is just not open to debate like more familiar topics for journalists, such as politics, which require a sense of balancing two sides in the name of objectivity. “There may be 99 people who say ‘A,’ and may have very good reasons for saying ‘A’ is the right thing, and if you only quote one person who says ‘B,’ you don’t get the idea of the actual weight of the evidence,” he says.

Andrew Revkin of The New York Times notes that more than ever before, scientists have immediate access to the general public, managing Web sites such as realclimate.org, climatepolicy.org, and climateethics.org to set everything straight. But certain challenges remain.

Julia Whitty of Mother Jones states: “We know that since 2000 atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased 35 percent faster than expected, despite the pledges of 180 nations to rein them in. We’re aware that polar seas are defying the laws of expectation, warming, in places, a staggering 9 degrees Fahrenheit since 1995, opening the door for non-native plants and animals to cross the polar thresholds and claim new waters for themselves. We get that all this bodes poorly for penguins and humans alike.

Don’t we?”

GET THERE WHILE YOU CAN

Not that the Antarctic is suffering from any lack of interest among the tourist crowd. Whether directed by the wiles of computer animation in March of the Penguins, too much expendable cash, or sincere concern for this last, vanishing frontier, tourism to the uninhabited continent is at an all-time high. Making Julia Whitty’s coverage in Mother Jones all the more interesting, she reports that the tourists are starting to get in the way of the ornithologists trying to chart the continent’s birds while the penguins are still there.

The public still gets too much of the story and the science wrong and there is disagreement both on which direction the media should take or whether the media is the place where change can be directed at all.

Pierrehumbert says he spoke to Revkin about what makes a climate change story worthy of The New York Times, and they both agreed that the public only had so much interest in hearing the same story about, say, a certain species headed for extinction because of man-caused global warming. “There are only so many things that are really new. The problem is not primarily that the news media is not telling the new stuff; it’s that people don’t understand the old stuff. It’s not the job of the news media to tell people about the old stuff. You have to have enough hooks in the news to tell people that this is still an issue,” the scientist notes.

Anthony Perl, a Canadian urban studies professor, used an ironic metaphor to describe the public’s ignorance of climate change science, citing shallow reporting by the media. “I think that only the tip of the iceberg is being fully discussed in the mainstream media, and all this stuff below the water line is somehow unclear,” Perl said. “Until science is clear, the story is not ‘ready.’ And I’m afraid the media has bought into it. By its nature, science is a question of uncertainty.”

This guy's got a pretty big carbon footprint.

In Perl’s search for a solution to the North American energy and climate crisis, he wrote a book advocating a radical departure from the gasoline-powered private automobile and the jet plane to a transportation system based on electrical mass transit: buses, mass transit light rail and high-speed intercity trains, much like in Europe or Japan.

Perl said some scientific studies have shown airplanes may cause many times more damage from carbon emissions pollution than previously thought because jets send their emissions directly into the high atmosphere while they’re in flight. He said such emissions have two to eight times the impact of ground-level engines. But the science is not universally accepted and goes against the official word of the airline industry, leaving the media skittish. “It’s a big piece of news that routinely gets ignored,” Perl said.

Max Boykoff, however, an Oxford University research fellow, warns in Nature that climate change must be reported more carefully to help distinguish widespread scientific agreement from legitimately contentious issues. “To the extent that mass media fuse all climate-related issues into a gestalt as ‘the climate change debate,’ the public is poorly served. It contributes to continued illusory and counterproductive debates within the public and policy communities.”

SORTING THE DUBIOUS FROM TRUE PERIL

Pierrehumbert says it is hard for the media and the public to grasp the epoch time scale of climate changes, compared to the relatively short-term effects and recovery from traditional man-made environmental degradation. “It’s not like other air pollution problems where if you fix it, the thing turns normal in a couple of years. Every time we ratchet up the CO2 level, you’re committing the earth to climate change at that level for a 1000 years, and some aspects of it actually last for more than a 1000 years and you just can’t ratchet it back.”

There is little doubt in the scientific community that the steady rise in CO2 levels are courtesy of human activity, namely, fossil fuel combustion. The impact of this warming is much more debatable. Will icebergs sail across an underwater Florida? Pierrehumbert said that is dubious. But how high will the oceans rise? What just will the climate of the next hundred years look like?

“We have turned our atmosphere into an artifact. With the atmosphere now composed of so many greenhouse gases, we don’t know what the future holds,” said Scott Stine, a geoscientist at California State University, East Bay, who studies climate through the ancient lake beds of the Great Basin.

“Scientists see persistent disputes as the normal stuttering journey toward improved understanding of how the world works. But many fear that the herky-jerky trajectory is distracting the public from the undisputed basics and blocking change,” wrote Revkin.

A blissfully ignorant public could not be called out anymore than by Whitty’s piece on the Antarctic pleasure-seekers aboard her lady the National Geographic Explorer.

A vocal contingent of confused ignoramuses and global warming denialists were aboard this tourist ship, as Whitty recalled, able to see with their own eyes drastic changes to the Antarctic landscape from just 20 years ago and still peering over the bow in disbelief about “this global warming business.” “The two groups manage to exhibit all five stages of climate-change denial: There’s nothing happening; we don’t know why it’s happening; climate change is natural; climate change is not bad; climate change can’t be stopped. The true believers discover each other mostly through shared incredulous silence.”

GORE: CARBON-FREE BY 2018

Al Gore has caught the "HOPE" bug.

Al Gore himself believes political will could be built to move to a carbon-free electricity system in 10 years, the same amount of time it took for man to reach the moon after a similar, seemingly radical call by President Kennedy at the dawn of the 1960s.

“There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenges of a present danger,” Gore wrote in a recent issue of Mother Jones. Such a call to action is possible, Gore wrote, and carbon levels can be returned to the “magical” threshold of 350 CO2 parts per million in the atmosphere, as addressed in a separate essay in the magazine. (The atmosphere historically contains 275 CO2 parts per million, and now is up to 385 parts per million and climbing.)

The Europeans have been taking these issues seriously for a decade, and in 2008, both major American political parties put up candidates who promised to address the issue seriously. The victor, Barack Obama, has vowed to make the issue integral to the nation’s economic recovery. As the Earth’s climate worsens for mankind and other species, the American public must follow their lead in recognizing the problem.

But obviously, difficulties remain and an unscientific debate has been allowed to go on for too long. The media are less at fault for this misinformation than they once were. But steps should be taken, whenever new science is released, to gently and firmly repeat the basic premise behind this global warming business: Humans, by burning massive amounts of carbon fuels, have released gases that warm the earth, setting off climatic changes with potentially devastating consequences we are only beginning to understand.

As Charles Darwin said, offering similar advice in regards to that other supposedly debatable scientific theory, evolution: “[T]hus only can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.”

Is Nuclear Power Worth Another Look?

In the early 1950’s, at the Dawn of the so-called “Atomic Age,” then President Eisenhower made a pledge to turn the awesome destructive power of the atom to peaceful means. Perhaps as an attempt in some way to redeem the United States for the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the administration felt it was America’s responsibility to develop nuclear energy as a source to provide “clean and inexpensive” electricity for all of the nations of the world.

A half-century later, amid cost overrun’s, a near-meltdown at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and tons of nuclear waste in this country with no where to go, the dream of nuclear power has all but died. Or has it? In the quest for clean sources of energy and decreased reliance on fossil fuels, there seems to be a renaissance of sorts for the nuclear power industry. Even once ardent foes are starting to take a second look at nuclear energy.

Why is the sleeping dragon of nuclear energy once again rearing its head? The old arguments in favor of nuclear energy are still the strongest. From a Greenhouse Gas standpoint, nuclear power plants are emissions free. They also do not produce any other harmful compound emissions such as sulfur dioxide, which is produced in abundance from coal-fired plants and other industrial processes and is a cause of acid rain and respiratory illness. Compared with fossil fuels and even natural gas, sources for uranium and potentially thorium are abundant mostly in “friendly” democratic nations. Advocates point out that despite using decades old technology, there has not been a single accident of any kind involving any of the nations on-line nuclear power plants in the more than 30 years since Three Mile Island. The nuclear industry has been quick to jump on the renewed interest in a nuclear solution to global warming and our energy appetite. Proponents say that a push toward hybrid and eventually full electric vehicles will increase the need for electricity consumption to recharge these vehicles, primarily in the overnight hours. They then argue that the costs to run nuclear plants for longer hours is less then for coal-fired plants. As a result of this logic, we are now seeing the first applications for the construction of new nuclear power plants in this country since the Carter administration.

However, before we go any further with this, we should all slow down there a minute. Just because there has not been a major incident at any of the currently operating plants since Three-Mile Island, doesn’t mean that there haven’t been many, largely unreported near misses. This includes a 2002 near meltdown in Ohio of the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station. During refueling operations it was found that a buildup of boric acid had eaten a hole into the steel cap on the top of the reactor. A spokesman said that had the cap been eaten away merely one-third of an inchmore, one-third of an inch–a plume of radioactive steam would have engulfed the containment dome, and Ohio would have been the site of the Three Mile Island of the 21^st Century.

Also, let’s not forgot the continued nightmare of nuclear waste disposal. The Yucca Mountain Repository was supposed to be paid for largely by the industry when it opened in 1998. It is still stalled and will likely remain so for some time. Outstanding liabilities aside (the industry sued the federal government for breach of contract and won), if the facility opened tomorrow, experts say it could only house the waste that has already been generated by existing plants, which waste sits in “temporary” concrete drums. Plus, there are infrastructure and waste transport issues with a central repository that have never been fully addressed.

Fermi, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and their contemporaries, the best and brightest minds of the 20^th century, saw what they had wrought in the aftermath of Hiroshima. They proposed the idea of nuclear energy in the hope that the same destructive forces they unleashed upon the planet could also be turned to some good. It was a noble idea. However, as metaphorically foretold in Godzilla and many other “Giant Atomic Monster” movies of the era, nuclear energy is a beast, a tiger by the tail, which can never be fully controlled.

If not nuclear, then what? The major technological hurdle to get over for wind and solar is their problems with intermittence. In other words, how to keep the energy generating when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. The major technological hurdle to nuclear power is still how to keep the beast caged or how can we ensure that another Chernobyl can never happen. An additional hurdle is figuring out what can we do with the tons of waste and byproducts that can be turned into weapons of mass destruction by a rouge state or non-state terrorist actor.

When looking at the problems of nuclear power versus other alternatives, I know which problem I would rather throw my money at. Despite what some politicians, big utilities, and other special interests would have you believe, nuclear power is expensive, dangerous, currently relies on outdated technology, and ultimately depends on humans to run it properly. Humans can and do make mistakes, and the consequences of “operator error” at a nuclear plant are far worse than any level of any accident involving any other current energy source. It will take much more research, money, and time to find a way to eliminate all of the problems with nuclear power. Instead, we should concentrate our efforts in developing alternatives for coal-fired electricity with renewable energy from the wind, the sun, and the earth herself.

If the minds of the best scientists of today are impelled in the same way that those who worked on the “Manhattan Project” were a half a century ago, which result do you think is more practical or more likely? Maybe President Eisenhower was right. Maybe we do owe the world something for its first, and thankfully only, Atomic War. However, lets not pay that debt by looking backwards at nuclear, but rather forward to renewable technologies like solar and wind. Sleeping dragons, like dogs, should be left to lie.