This memo begins with a look at what's happening in the Arctic and ends with a thought-provoking, weirdly soothing video entitled The Real Meaning of Life.
Every year, about this time, I find myself thinking about what impacts the rapidly melting ice in the Arctic Ocean will have on our species. I am talking about near-term impacts (five to ten years) and, also, long-term impacts that may put our long-term existence as a species in jeopardy.
Last week, after checking out the latest from the NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data Center), I contacted a few of the "big picture" scientists who were featured in Outcry.
Here is what I wrote to them on April 15:
Gentlemen,
As I begin writing my SOS Memo #102, I would like to request your input regarding a few questions. Below is a screenshot of the current situation in the Arctic as of this week.
Here is a handy link to that graph on the NSIDC website. I'm sure you check it often.
Sea Ice Extent. The image below has four smooth lines: the decadal lines beginning with the 80's at the top, followed by the green 90's, followed by the black 00's and the blue 10's, representing the average for the past ten years. The dotted red line, of course, is 2012 (record low year) and the dark green line just above it is 2020.
As you are well aware, none of those smooth lines ever touch, clearly showing that the ice loss is happening throughout the year, not just in the summer. As the chart clearly shows, we're more than halfway from the average minimum level in the eighties to an ice-free in the Arctic in the month of September, perhaps as early as this year.
I have provided a series of notes below the graph and I welcome your comments. I am just a reporter here; you guys are the rare "big picture" scientists.
We could extrapolate the trends and conclude with some degree of certainty that the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free in mid-September before the end of this decade. And possibly a lot sooner. Then what? At that point, ALL ice in the Arctic will be new ice and therefore subject to earlier melting the following spring.
That means that the annual ice-free period will be longer each year as the self-reinforcing feedback loops kick in, resulting in the acceleration of decline of the ice - until the Arctic is just another ocean with no floating ice anywhere.
Dr. Peter Wadhams made this comment. Upon receiving my request for input, he wrote:
One thing to note from the start is that although 2012 remains the year with lowest absolute minimum ice extent in summer,
2020 has become the year with the lowest ice extent averaged over the whole year. Note the way that 2020 held the minimum record through spring and autumn months.
What might the rapidly melting ice in the Arctic suggest when it comes to our future as a species? Let's hear from Dr. Lovelock on that question?
James Lovelock, born 7-26-19. Alive and well at 101
I like the way he thinks, although the reality of what he is predicting doesn't bode well for our future as a species. The following quotes were taken from the 3-minute video that follows:
From a Gaia point of view, when we first started interfering with the atmosphere, nothing much happened. It was accompanied by its ordinary regulating mechanisms - but when it gets too much that Gaia can't cope with it, I'm afraid that it's going to play absolute mayhem with our civilization in the next ten or hundred years.
(He made that statement eleven years ago -- and it appears that the "mayhem" has begun in earnest)
When you see the whole picture, it is really fearsomely bad - I mean things like the very rapid melting of the floating ice near the North Pole. As the floating ice melts, less sunlight is reflected back into space by the dazzlingly white ice and more and more sunlight is absorbed by the ocean.
Just the melting of the floating ice in the Arctic Ocean will add as much heat to the Earth as all of the CO2 we have put into the atmosphere to date. And this is why I'm afraid that there's vey little we can do about all of our efforts to reduce emissions.
There is no morality about it. If the Earth improves as a result of our presence, then we will flourish. If it doesn't, then we will die off. I fear that not many of us will survive - perhaps at best about a billion - possibly a lot less than that. How they will die - it'll be by starvation, by war, by disease - who knows?
Here's that compelling 3-minute segment of his BBC documentary that aired in 2010? Click the image below:
What are other "big picture" scientists saying now -- 11 years after Lovelock's assessment? A few days ago, I reached out to a few of those scientists who were featured prominently in our book, Outcry. I asked them a few questions about our future as a species.
While their responses were similar, I will share below what I heard from
Dr. Peter Wadhams, who is arguably the world's leading authority when it comes to the connection between the melting of ice in the Arctic, climate change and our future on this planet.
1. What kind of "mayhem" (as Lovelock says) will be inflicted on our civilization in the next 100 years?
He doesn't specify, which is probably wise because there are so many disasters which are possible and which may interact to cause overall mayhem. Who expected Covid? Yet in many ways Covid can be thought of as a product of human interference with nature.
2. Might Lovelock's predicted deaths of over 90% of all humans
result, in large part, from starvation due to the loss of insects and their important roles with regards to our food crops? 2018 scientific paper: The importance of insects in agricultural systems.
It could be, because nobody is expecting it. No one
objects when mass pesticide campaigns are conducted with neonicotinoid pesticides which kill everything, including bees. Who cares about bees? No-one recognizes their global importance.
3. Will food crop failures be scattered around the world or will they be more focused in certain regions with above-average rise in temperatures?
I think it will be in northern mid latitudes where the weather extremes due to jet stream divergence occur.
4. Will there be some pockets of the world that won't be affected for the next few decades? Or centuries?
Weirdly, it might be the tropics - they got away quite lightly when it came to Covid.
5. Why aren't more world leaders aware of just how desperate our situation is becoming? I doubt that any of the G20 leaders have any clue about what we're dealing with here.
Biden has some awareness. But on the whole you can write off the whole tribe of politicians. Still, it isnt just climate where they are hopeless. A student of English history would look at the utterly hopeless British appeasement politicians of the 1930s - Chamberlain and the like - and how they left the country almost helpless in the face of Hitler's threat. Luckily we had Churchill, but who have we got now?
Pretty compelling stuff, right? Although you may find the early part of this SOS Memo a bit depressing, please bear with me as I try to lighten things up a little, starting now.
In last week's Memo, I shared a link to
the new DNI report about the many challenges that our civilization faces in the future. A few days later, an opinion piece by the editorial board of the
New York Times put another spin on it in this opinion piece:
Why spy agencies say the future is bleak.
There were many compelling reader comments following that column. This one was my favorite -- from Castro in Sydney, Australia:
I read the entire DNI report and immediately upped my wine budget, stopped shaving, and no longer buy green bananas.
Saving the best for last. I am delighted to share with you a strangely uplifting video that I found last week. As mentioned earlier, regarding our future on this planet, I found it to be "weirdly soothing."
Sometimes we take ourselves and the human species too seriously. Last week, I found this 2019 video that has been seen almost two million times. It runs about 12 minutes.
It actually made me feel a tad better about the dilemma we humans all face. Maybe it will help put things in perspective for you as well.
If you watched the above, you may appreciate why I am going to share the same bottom line that I wrote last week. It just seems appropriate -- especially following a video that suggests that we stop taking our lives so seriously.
The Bottom Line. Regarding our uncertain future as a species, I am not suggesting that we give up and just go with the flow. That's because I still believe that it is possible for for us Homo sapiens to figure things out and manage to survive and thrive for many centuries or millennia to come.
That said, how can we give our biosphere the best chance of keeping us alive for awhile longer? As I have covered in the last two SOS Memos, we will likely fare much better, for much longer, if we just follow this simple advice
from another recent NY Times column:
What nature needs is for us to get out of its way and let its systems function in the manner that billions of years of evolution enabled them to do.
We need a different kind of infrastructure entirely, one that accommodates the natural world and puts the long-term needs of ecosystems before the knee-jerk urges of all of us so eager to get back to life as we knew it.
Obviously, we are nowhere close to living in harmony with nature. We're not even having robust conversations about such a goal. For that reason, I must conclude that without an entirely new economic model for "keeping score" on this planet, we Homo sapiens are probably on our last legs.
Wanting to end today with a positive thought, I wrote two weeks ago about an idea that just might help us move rapidly toward a more sustainable civilization. It features one of the USA's 2020 presidential candidates and you can access it here: A promising new "Sunrise for Humanity"
