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Recently many scientific reports have confirmed that the last seven years have been hottest on land and in the seas of planet Earth. Oceans store more than 90% of the planets net heat gain due to greenhouse gases. They cover more than 70% of the Earth’s surface and, being much denser than air, they hold heat better than air. The roughly 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide emitted by humans – more than half of it in the last 34 years – will not leave the atmosphere for at least several more centuries.

A series of marine heat waves occurred in the North Pacific, including the infamous ‘Blob” in 2014 – 2016. It disrupted the food chain by reducing phytoplankton productivity by starving many animals. 2021 saw another occurrence of the Blob in the North Pacific. (See article below). In addition to record ocean warmth, surface air temperature for the past several years was also the hottest on record. So is it time to step up with much more action?

Excerpt from "Influence of the 2014–2016 marine heatwave on seasonal zooplankton community structure and abundance in the lower Cook Inlet, Alaska" by Caitlin McKinstry. Access the full article here.

From California to Alaska, the Pacific Ocean experienced unprecedented warm water from 2014-2016. This marine heatwave known as “The Blob”, caused widespread die-offs of seabirds, declines in fish populations, and brought marine life from more tropical regions of the Pacific to the Gulf of Alaska like skipjack tuna and ocean sunfish. How this warm water affected the tiniest animals in the ocean, zooplankton, was not clear. The mishmash of microscopic animals that make up the zooplankton community form the base of the food web and are important food for fishes, seabirds, and whales. In Cook Inlet and its main arm Kachemak Bay, zooplankton have been collected for the past ten years. We looked at the individual species that make up zooplankton to see how this community was affected by the marine heatwave. We found that, like ocean sunfish and skipjack tuna, the abundance of copepods (shrimp like zooplankton smaller than a grain of rice) from warm water regions off the coast of California increased in numbers. One particular copepod species is the Corycaeus anglicus (see photo) which is a voracious predator of other zooplankton that could impact the “normal” zooplankton community in the Cook Inlet region.

by Martin Smith

This is a cautionary tale.

“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost:

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if I had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To know that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Scary stuff! Dying, consumed by passion or frozen by greed and hate? Death by global warming, I fear, would be a mixture of both.

Global warming didn’t happen overnight. It snuck up on us, sort of like death from old age after a profligate life. It has been fed by our dependence on fossil fuels to produce an ever growing demand for more and more energy, by the explosion of the world’s population and by our lust for an increasingly higher standard of living and longer lives. We did this without thinking about (then ignoring!) the consequences, and we expected somebody else to pay for it. But this is unsustainable. Something had to give. The consequences are staring us in the face, and we’re not ready to deal with them.

Climate scientists say the Earth is warming at a rate much faster than expected. Atmospheric greenhouse gases are record high levels and rising. In 2019 we lost an estimated 369 billion tons of ice worldwide. When the ice is gone, the Earth will warm faster. As the permafrost melts, land is sinking and massive amounts of trapped methane may soon be released, making matters even worse. Prolonged drought is turning some regions into deserts. Drier forests are burning. Tropical forests, which have served as a primary repository for removing and storing carbon dioxide, are being cut down and burned at an alarming rate to make way for agricultural land. Water sources are drying up; water conflicts are already surfacing in Western states. Tropical cyclones are more intense and move more slowly, increasing the likelihood of severe damage. Rain storms often train repeatedly over the same area, sometimes causing catastrophic flooding. As land becomes increasingly uninhabitable, people are beginning to migrate. Where will they go?

The cost of all this hasn’t sunk in yet. Hurricane Ida, which struck Louisiana and the northeast in August, caused an estimated $90 billion in damage. One storm. This summer’s unprecedented heat wave in the Pacific Northwest led to over 1000 deaths. Climate scientists said this heat wave could not have occurred in the absence of global warming. A recent report in the medical journal Lancet said that global health is declining because of heat and air pollution due to climate change. The Weather Channel has reported that if the planet warms by only 2˚C (we’re already at 1.1˚), the total cost in damage and economic loss will probably be nearly $30 trillion. If it warms by 3.7˚C, the cost might be as high as $550 trillion – more than all the money currently in the world. This is our apocalypse, it’s happening now.

Unfortunately we show no sign of solving this crisis. According to one poll, about 85% of young people believe we have already failed to deal with climate change. Will climate summits like the one in Glasgow produce any real results? Pushback from vested interests and, frankly, from our own selfish interests, have forced governments both here and elsewhere to negotiate away necessary measures that would directly address the problem. In the words of the old comic strip character Pogo, “We has met the enemy, and he is us.” We assume science will provide us with some magic answers, but right now they seem to be a long way off. We – and by this I mean all of us – are grieving the loss of a fantasy world where we can all have what we want when we want it and we can have it cheaply. And we are all deeply in denial.

Click here to read the remainder of this cautionary tale...

What % of U.S. electricity does coal still generate?

20%

(Source: WP Joshua Partlow, Coal's Hold is Much Tighter Than it Seems, 1/18/22)

Evidence suggests that oil and gas companies including ExxonMobil and Chevron have used per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or substances that can degrade into PFAS, in hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for oil and gas in more than 1,200 wells in six U.S. states between 2012 and 2020. The lack of full disclosure of chemicals used in oil and gas operations raises the potential that PFAS could have been used even more extensively than records indicate, both geographically and in other stages of the oil and gas extraction process, such as drilling, that precede the underground injections known as fracking.

PFAS have been linked to cancer, birth defects, pre-eclampsia, and other serious health effects. Toxic in minuscule concentrations, they accumulate inside the human body and do not break down in the environment – hence their nickname, “forever chemicals.” PFAS were widely used for decades in non-stick cookware, stain-resistant carpeting, fire-fighting foam and other products before their highly toxic characteristics became public around the year 2000. Chemical manufacturers Dupont and 3M had known about these chemicals’ environmental and health risks as early as the 1960s and ’70s but failed to sound the alarm.

Evidence related to the use of PFAS in oil and gas operations has not been previously publicized. The apparent use of PFAS in these operations adds an especially hazardous class of chemicals to the list of harmful substances associated with oil and gas extraction and is another potential route of exposure to PFAS. In recent years, a growing number of states have set limits on PFAS pollution in water as researchers have discovered hundreds of sites where PFAS from a variety of sources have polluted groundwater. In addition, fire departments are disposing of firefighting foam that contains PFAS. “Fire departments are scrambling to get rid of firefighting foam with PFAS in it because EPA says it’s toxic,” said Silverio Caggiano, who retired in June 2021 as Battalion Chief with the Youngstown, Ohio Fire Department and is a hazardous materials expert who has trained with fire-fighting foam that contains PFAS. “So if it’s too dangerous for us to use, why should oil and gas companies get to use it?”

Industry records indicating PFAS use in fracking in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming came to light as part of Physicians for Social Responsibility’s investigation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s review of three new chemicals proposed in 2010 for use in oil and gas drilling and/or fracking. According to records obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, EPA regulators worried that the chemicals could break down into products similar to PFOA, the most infamous PFAS, whose use has been largely discontinued in the U.S as part of an agreement between chemical makers and EPA. The regulators were also concerned that the degradation products of the three chemicals could be associated with severe health effects including male reproductive toxicity and tumors.

Despite these concerns, EPA approved the chemicals for commercial use, and EPA records show that one of the chemicals was used commercially for unspecified purposes at least as late as 2018. Records further indicate that the chemical was initially imported for commercial use by Dupont, a company that has agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle injury claims related to PFOA pollution. EPA records included only a generic name for the chemical: fluorinated acrylic alkylamino copolymer. More specific identifiers were withheld as trade secrets.

PSR searched for the chemical in FracFocus, a database run by non-governmental organizations where companies operating in more than 20 states disclose well-by-well fracking chemical use. While we did not find the chemical with the name that EPA had approved, we did find other chemicals with related names that had been injected into more than 1,200 wells, the most common of which was “nonionic fluorosurfactant” and various misspellings. Evidence suggests these chemicals are likely PFAS and/or PFAS precursors (substances that could break down into PFAS).

In light of these findings, PSR recommends the following:

Yes, it is time to step up with much more dedication, action and urgency.