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One. The Crisis of the Anthropocene

Contents Overview ............................................................................................................................................ 2 Holocene and Anthropocene Eras ...................................................................................................... 3 Over-Population ................................................................................................................................. 4 Cheap Fossils ..................................................................................................................................... 5

Climate Crash..................................................................................................................................... 6 Atmospheric CO2 ...................................................................................................................7 Other GHGs ............................................................................................................................7

Atmospheric Oxygen ..............................................................................................................8 Temperature ...........................................................................................................................8 Really Hot Weather ................................................................................................................9

The Big Melt ..........................................................................................................................9 Albedo and the Cryosphere ..................................................................................................11 Precipitation .........................................................................................................................11

Rising seas ............................................................................................................................12 Extreme Weather ..................................................................................................................13

Drought .................................................................................................................................13 Pests and Infectious Diseases ...............................................................................................14 Carbon Sequestration ...........................................................................................................14

Mass Extinction ............................................................................................................................... 15 Water shortages ................................................................................................................................ 18

Deforestation .................................................................................................................................... 19 Peat Bog Loss .................................................................................................................................. 20

Pollution ........................................................................................................................................... 21 Phosphorus and Nitrogen .....................................................................................................21 Herbicides, pesticides, chromium, mercury, asbestos ..........................................................22

Air Pollution .........................................................................................................................22 Waterborne pathogens, algae, and jellies .............................................................................23 Ortho-phthalates, Malathion, chlorpyrifos, atrazine, neonicotinoids, azodicarbonamide,

polyethylene microbeads, brominated vegetable oil, high fructose corn syrup, lead,

radioactivity ..........................................................................................................................23 Bioengineering risk ..............................................................................................................25 Solid waste ...........................................................................................................................25

Land Loss ......................................................................................................................................... 25 Declining Oceans ............................................................................................................................. 26

Acidification, Oxygen Depletion .........................................................................................26

Thermohaline Circulation ....................................................................................................26 The Blob ...............................................................................................................................27 The Waste Gyre ....................................................................................................................27 Nitrogen and Algae ..............................................................................................................27

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Phytoplankton .......................................................................................................................27

Trawlers, ships, and noise ....................................................................................................28 Corals 28 Fisheries ...............................................................................................................................28

Industrial Agribusiness .................................................................................................................... 29 Crop failures .........................................................................................................................30 Pollinators .............................................................................................................................30

Auto Dependency............................................................................................................................. 30 The Scope and Pace of Change ........................................................................................................ 31

An Overview ........................................................................................................................32 Misconceptions ................................................................................................................................ 32

Overconsumption? ...............................................................................................................32 Declining population? ..........................................................................................................32

Too many old people? ..........................................................................................................33 A Good Graph .................................................................................................................................. 35

A Good Quote .................................................................................................................................. 36

Overview This lesson focuses on the devastation of a planet by a species. The following lessons will

cover philosophical, religious, and poetical aspects as a crisis of human culture; the new science

of how evolution relates to brain, learning, and mind as a cause of the crisis; the need to expand

economics from money measurement to include non-monetized values; the most overlooked

economics of the crisis—transportation pricing reform; walkable neighborhood systems to

achieve values of affordability, sustainability, mobility, health and safety, design, and

community; the application of these ideas to transform access to Cal State East Bay from drive

alone to cost-effective rapid shuttles; and land development from the campus to downtown in

support of non-auto modes and a higher quality of life.

Science, though often behind the actual pace of change, is still our best source of

knowledge. For the first time in the history of the earth, a species by its own conscious

decisions is ending one geological epoch, the Holocene, and starting another, the

Anthropocene. In the blink of an eye in geological time, a single species is degrading the habitat

of all life. Life itself, however, is certainly not threatened, just the quality of human life and

nature as we know it. Some tipping points have already been passed, costing many lives, dollars,

habitats, and species. More tipping points and reduced carrying capacity are predicted by most

scientists.

A tipping point occurs when an accumulation of small changes causes a larger system to

change even faster. Carrying capacity is how much life a given ecosystem can prudently

support. Sometimes, if that capacity is exceeded, there are mechanisms, like die-offs of an

excessively high population, which can restore a balance. But, also, carrying capacity itself can

be degraded in ways for which there is no practical recovery.

As individual human beings, our lifetimes are so short, our physical size is so small, our

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intelligence is so limited, and our understanding is so constricted by culture, that it seems unlikely

that humanity can deal with the crisis. The problem is too large to comprehend.

For decades, scientists of many disciplines have been discovering and warning about a series of

interconnected threats to human welfare.

To take one example, in May 2013, the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere,

consisting of more than 1,000 scientists, signed a consensus report at Stanford University stating

that “Earth is rapidly approaching a tipping point. Human impacts are causing alarming levels of

harm to our planet. As scientists who study the interaction of people with the rest of the biosphere

using a wide range of approaches, we agree that the evidence that humans are damaging their

ecological life-support systems is overwhelming.”

"By the time today's children reach middle age, it is extremely likely that the Earth's life-support

systems, critical for human prosperity and existence, will be irretrievably damaged by the magnitude,

global extent, and combination of these human-caused environmental stressors, unless we take

concrete, immediate actions to ensure a sustainable, high-quality future.”1 Michele Marvier, chair of

environmental studies at Santa Clara University, says that “humans dominate every flux and cycle of

the planet's ecology and geochemistry.”

A recent article in Nature stated “Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and

irreversibly, from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we

review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a

planetary critical transition as a result of human influence. Human ‘forcings’ far exceed, in both rate

and magnitude, the forcing evident at the most recent global scale state shift, the last glacial-

interglacial transition.”2

Holocene and Anthropocene Eras Scientists are discussing how to designate the end of one geological era and the beginning of

another. About 60,000 years ago, human beings began spreading north into Eurasia and the

Americas, hunting megafauna to extinction, and cutting down and burning forests. The Holocene,

with its benign climate, started with the end of the last Ice Age and the beginning of Neolithic

Revolution about 11,700 years ago. Agriculture brought with it an ever-expanding transformation of

landscapes by cultivation, increased grazing, deforestation, loss of megafauna, changes in the courses

of rivers, and more population. The Neolithic changes, however great in some ways, did not affect

the sustainability of the earth for human habitation.

One criterion for designating the change in Era is the start of the unsustainable exponential

changes that have affected Earth ecology as a whole. The date could be as early as 1750 when the

Industrial Revolution was just getting started in Western Europe, changing the chemistry of the air

and the oceans due to burning coal. Similarly, the Anthropocene could start when carbon dioxide

levels shot past some average of preceding millennia, or when some of the hottest years occurred.

1 http://consensusforaction.stanford.edu/see-scientific-consensus/consensus_english.pdf

2 David Roberts, “We’re about to push the Earth over the brink, new study finds,” Grist.org, June 7, 2012, David

Perlman, “Close to ‘tipping point’ of warming,” S.F. Chronicle, June 7, 2012)

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These start dates coincide with over-population, loss of biodiversity, cheap fossil fuels, and

other problems.

The driving forces of the Anthropocene are: over-population, cheap fossil fuels, climate

crash, mass extinctions, water shortages, deforestation, peat bog loss, pollution, land loss,

declining oceans, industrial agribusiness, and auto-dependency. This lesson also covers three

misconceptions about overconsumption, declining population, and too many old people.

Over-Population In 2015, the world had 7.35 billion people. Millennium Alliance: “Seven billion people alive

today will likely grow to 9.5 billion by 2050, and the pressures of heavy material consumption among

the middle class and wealthy may well intensify.”

From 1950 to 2016, world population tripled from 2.6 billion to 7.4 billion, and it continues to

climb by more than 1.5 million people a week. World population is expected to reach 9.6 billion by

2050. J. Joseph Speidel, a professor at UCSF's Bixby Center on Global Reproductive Health, says,

“The annual increment is rising quite dramatically. …We are still adding about 84 million people a

year to the planet.” The addition in just 62 years will be greater than the human population growth

for the thousands of years leading up to 1950. The World Resources Institute, an environmental

think tank, estimates that by mid-century the world will need 70 percent more food because, as

people grow wealthier, they eat more meat, requiring more grain to feed livestock.

Falling birth rates do not quickly translate into falling growth rates because of “demographic

momentum.” At the beginning of the transition the average age of the population has a large

proportion of younger women. Population rises for decades due to births to the large number of

these women in their child-bearing years. It took 12 years to add the last billion by 2011 and will take

14 more years to add the next billion, a slow decline in rate still allowing a huge increase in numbers.

In developed countries, falling birthrates are outweighed by the impacts of increased “problem

consumption” per capita. Problem consumption refers to consumption which places the most stress

on the earth. The United States is expected to grow from 313 million people to 400 million.

California has 38 million people, including 10 million immigrants, and has grown 10 percent in the

last decade. By 2050, projections show 51 million people living in the state, more than twice as many

as in 1980.

In many less developed countries, high population growth is being reduced somewhat by

famine, hunger, disease, civil violence, and war. At least 2 billion people are malnourished, which

increases death rates and reduces birth rates. Also, given lack of family planning, about half of

unplanned pregnancies end in unsafe abortion. Nevertheless, in sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan and

Yemen birth rates are exceptionally high. In 2012 UN demographers sharply raised their population

projections, adding another billion people by 2100 and reaching nearly 11 billion. African fertility

rates have peaked at more than five births per woman. From now until 2050, poor countries will add

the equivalent of a city of 1 million people every five days, said a report last year by the Royal

Society, a leading British scientific organization.

Civil violence and war are caused in large part by over-population and climate change. In

Darfur, a peaceful relationship between herders and farmers became impossible with a decades-long

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drought and too many people, leading in 2003 to violent conflict and large permanent refugee camp

cities kept alive by international aid. In many places, what seems to be entirely sectarian and political

conflict has underlying population pressure problems, such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Syrian

Civil War, various al Qaeda and Daesh kinds of groups, Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the

Rwanda genocide, and, perhaps worst of all, eastern Congo.

The Guttmacher Institute, a family planning research group, said more than 40 percent of the

world's 208 million pregnancies each year are unplanned. Half of US pregnancies, about 3 million a

year, are unintended, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned

Pregnancy, a Washington advocacy group.

Population growth is primarily caused by the low status of poor women, especially in less-

developed countries. Low status refers to a number of related problems—poverty, low education,

lack of legal protections, lack of jobs, lack of health care and family planning, and abuse by

dominant males. Rising status always lowers birth rates, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or culture.

The Guttmacher Institute said it would cost $4.1 billion a year in a US budget of $3.8 trillion to

provide family planning for the 222 million women in the world who lack access to family health

services. Another cause of population growth is political opposition to improving the status of

women including in the U.S., where Republicans in Congress oppose funding that would allow poor

women to choose how many children they have.

Cheap Fossils Fossil fuels—coal, tar sands, oil shale, petroleum, natural gas—are burned for electricity,

transportation, agriculture, cement, and aluminum, and used in consumer products like fertilizers

and plastics. When a single source of energy is so dominant, we are dependent on it. We cannot

easily shift to alternatives. According to the US Department of Energy, fossil fuels supply 78.1% of

the US economy.

By far the largest responsibility for the historical accumulation of greenhouse gases on a per

capita basis is the US, followed by Western Europe. Recently industrializing nations, including

China, have tiny cumulative amounts.

“Peak oil” refers to the gradual increase in the cost of extracting oil, causing higher prices,

decreasing demand, and declining production. As peak oil is reached, the volume of extraction

declines. Peak oil was reached years ago in the US. In 2010, the International Energy Association

announced that peak oil may have occurred internationally in 2006. The price of gasoline has been

erratically ratcheting up, but was lowered by the Great Bush Recession and is still low at the time of

this writing. Conventional petroleum is geologically less available, at the same time that rapidly

growing economies demand more oil. Most Americans are likely to continue to buy gasoline and

blame politics, oil companies, and speculators for a problem inherent in the earth’s crust. The timing

of the upward price ratchet is unpredictable. The website, http://crudeoilpeak.info/global-peak, has

excellent data on the past, but less certain projections for the future.

Unfortunately, the benefit peak oil is being more than offset by other fossil fuels, which seem

well short of any peak. Higher oil prices so far only serve to stimulate more extraction of

unconventional oil from risky deep ocean platforms and of dirty oil from tar shales and sands.

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Recent over-production of foreign oil relative to economic growth has suppressed prices.

Consumption, nevertheless, is increasing. In 1980 the US Energy Information Agency reported

world consumption of 63,122,000 barrels per day, rising to 91,253,000 barrels per day in 2103.

While conventional oil is peaking, the earth’s crust appears sufficiently generous in other fossil

fuels to assure the demise of the climate that supported human development. However much fossils

increase the money economy, they are causing decline in the whole economy, the one that includes

the environment. Fossil fuels are dramatically under-priced relative to their real cost and compete

unfairly with non-fossil alternatives—solar, wind, photovoltaic, geothermal energy, ground-source

heat pumps, energy efficiency, conservation, non-auto modes, and efficient land use.

Whole economy and transportation pricing reforms are discussed in following chapters.

Climate Crash The problem of climate crash is variously referred to as climate change, global warming, and

greenhouse gases (GHG). It is not a crisis of the earth or of life in general; they will do just fine. The

problem is the collapse, in the blink of an eye in terms of geological eras, of a system supportive of

humans and other species dependent upon the Holocene climate. The Millennium Alliance states,

“more, faster, climate change than since humans first became a species.” Climate change is

happening faster than forecast for the last 20 years and falls well outside the range of historic

variability. The planet was about as hot as it is now about 115,000 years ago, before the evolution of

the human species. Oceans then were about 25 feet higher.

People have altered the composition of the atmosphere. Burning fossil fuels is the major cause

of carbon dioxide and global warming, followed by loss of capacity for sequestration, methane,

nitrous oxides, fluorinated gases, and smaller sources. About 57 percent of global emissions and 84

percent of US emissions come from fossil fuels.

No issue has mobilized more scientists with more consensus despite the enormous complexity

and scope of the issue. Every year, about 450 scientists help write the State of the Climate Report,

which is published by the American Meteorological Society and has about 225 pages of text. The

hottest year on record, 2015, broke dozens of previous records—CO2 higher than ever before in

millennia of human history, temperature records broken, heat energy stored by the ocean, lowest

aquifer storage levels ever, loss of Arctic sea ice and glaciers, walrus and penguin populations down,

toxic algae blooms up, brutal heat waves killing thousands of people.3 Greenhouse gas emissions

rose 41 percent from 1990 to 2008, and they continue to rise.4

3 https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/bulletin-of-the-american-meteorological-society-bams/state-

of-the-climate/

4 Dahr Jamail, “Climate Disruption's New Record: Carbon Dioxide Levels Reach Highest Point in 15 Million

Years,” Truthout, 29 February 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35008-climate-disruption-s-new-record-

carbon-dioxide-levels-reach-highest-point-in-15-million-years, citing

www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/monthly.html. The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin has more data.

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Atmospheric CO2

ScienceDaily, October 24, 2016, Source: World Meteorological Organization.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161024125717.htm

“Carbon dioxide (CO2) accounted for about 65% of radiative forcing by long-lived greenhouse

gases. The pre-industrial level of about 278 ppm represented a balance between the atmosphere,

the oceans and the biosphere. Human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels has altered the

natural balance and in 2015, globally averaged levels were 144% of pre-industrial levels. In 2015,

global annual average concentration of CO2 concentrations reached 400.0 ppm. The increase of

CO2 from 2014 to 2015 was larger than the previous year and the average over the previous 10

years.”5

Atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased from about 278 parts per million in the mid-18th

century to 408 parts per million as of April 20, 2016.6 CO2 increased 37 percent from 1990 to 2015.

The increase would be much greater were it not for the fact that About one-fourth of the CO2 that

goes into the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans and another one-fourth by the biosphere. “The

present concentration is the highest in at least the past 800,000 years and likely the highest in the

past 20 million years.”7

The pace of change is increasing. We are releasing carbon about ten times faster than at any

time in the known record, the past 66 million years, based on the chemistry and biology of deep sea

sediments. The ancient “PETM” (Paleocene- Eocene Thermal Maximum ) event released 4 billion

metric tons of CO2 per year; by 1974 humans were releasing about 37 billion metric tons of CO2

per year. By 2016 we have had an unprecedented four straight years of annual increases of two parts

per million of CO2. NOAA reported that 2015 had the largest single annual increase in CO2 since

records began.

The amount and rate of change are unprecedented in 66 million years, so science has no era to

compare to. We do know a bit from theory and the past, which is that changes can be strongly non-

linear. Little can happen for a while during some build up, and then rapid change, like the ounce of

snow that can melt a bit and cause an avalanche. We are geologically on our own.

Other GHGs

Methane causes 22 times more climate change than CO2 but is a smaller part of the atmosphere

and lasts a shorter time, only 20 years. In February 2016, methane spiked to an historic high of 3,000

parts per billion. Methane comes from ungulates, mainly cows, melting of methane hydrates, and

solid waste. Updated estimates of methane leakage from oil and gas operations are about 60 percent

higher than previously estimated.

5 ScienceDaily, October 24, 2016, Source: World Meteorological Organization.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161024125717.htm

6 https://www.co2.earth/

7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere, citing

http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig3-2.htm

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“Methane (CH4) is the second most important long-lived greenhouse gas and contributes to

about 17% of radiative forcing. Approximately 40% of methane is emitted into the atmosphere by

natural sources (e.g., wetlands and termites), and about 60% comes from human activities like

cattle breeding, rice agriculture, fossil fuel exploitation, landfills and biomass burning. Atmospheric

methane reached a new high of about 1845 parts per billion (ppb) in 2015 and is now 256% of the

pre-industrial level.

“Nitrous oxide (N2O) is emitted into the atmosphere from both natural (about 60%) and

anthropogenic sources (industrial, agricultural and domestic activities, approximately 40%),

including oceans, soil, biomass burning, fertilizer use, and various industrial processes. Its

atmospheric concentration in 2015 was about 328 parts per billion. This is 121% of pre-industrial

levels. It also plays an important role in the destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer which

protects us from the harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun. It accounts for about 6% of radiative

forcing by long-lived greenhouse gases.

“Sulphur hexafluoride is a potent long-lived greenhouse gas. It is produced by the chemical

industry, mainly as an electrical insulator in power distribution equipment. Atmospheric levels are

about twice the level observed in the mid-1990s.

“Ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), together with minor halogenated gases,

contribute about 12% to radiative forcing by long-lived greenhouse gases. While CFCs and most

halons are decreasing, some hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs),

which are also potent greenhouse gases, are increasing at relatively rapid rates, although they are

still low in abundance.”8 Fluorocarbons are used for refrigeration.

Atmospheric Oxygen

Atmospheric oxygen in the last few years has been dropping two to four times faster than CO2

has been increasing, and the decline has accelerated since 2002-2003.9

Temperature

Climate change means rising atmospheric temperatures at all levels: ocean, lake and land

surfaces, troposphere, and lower stratosphere. Few if any scientific data covering long time spans

show the remarkable tightness of temperature following CO2, including the rapid spike upwards in

recent times. That spike keeps requiring upward revisions of the y axis to show higher and higher

temperatures. As the y axis gets higher, the preceding millennia flatten downward to the bottom of

the chart. Average temperatures have risen 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (F.) since the 1800s, with higher

increases toward the poles and lower increases around the equator. As the atmosphere holds more

heat, temperatures rise. The seasons move “pole-ward,” with earlier springs and later falls. The rate

of warming has increased since the 1800s, with nine of the hottest ten years occurring since 2000.

January 2016 was the hottest January on record.

In 2015-2016 the United States had its warmest winter ever, 4.6 degree F. above normal. New

8 ScienceDaily, October 24, 2016, Source: World Meteorological Organization.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161024125717.htm

9 http://www.i-sis.org.uk/O2DroppingFasterThanCO2Rising.php

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England had its warmest winter and the maple sugar industry continues moving north. Squid on the

West Coast are also moving north, even to Alaska. California’s squid harvest dropped 64 percent

from 2014 to 2015 and Oregon’s went up. Cycles of ocean temperature, the warming El Niño and

the cooling La Niña, can accentuate or depress long term warming trends annually. Alaska’s winter

was 10.6 degrees F., and in places 18 degrees F., above normal. The famous dog sled race, the

Iditarod, hauled snow a hundred miles down to Anchorage, and still had to cut three miles off the

start. All over the world countries and cities report record high temperatures.

This report could have hundreds of new record temperatures from all over the world for 2015,

and all would have to re-reported for even higher temperatures in 2016 (Scientific American, NASA

and NOAA).

Really Hot Weather

Climate change means longer and more intense heat waves. While some hot weather will occur

in dry areas allowing sweat to cool the body, in other areas climate change increases both

temperature and humidity, with devastating results for productivity, health, and mortality. Some

models indicate that the current trajectory of warming, if continued to the year 2100, would cause

some areas where people now live to be too hot for humans to survive.

In 2013, temperatures in Australia rose so much that weather maps had to add two new colors

to express the new extremes. In Portugal record heat, from the usual low 80s going to the 100s, has

led to out-of-control wildfires.

In 2016 in Bihar, India, a heat wave, combined with dryness, crowded flammable shacks, winds,

and open fire cooking, led to almost 80 deaths as fires swept through shanty towns. Weeks of heat

and drought in much of India have killed crops and livestock and reduced drinking water below

daily needs. In major Indian states, lakes and dams have dried up and aquifers have fallen to 22

percent of capacity. Tankers of water are sent into the worst spots. Over 300 people have died from

the heat, with temperatures around 111 degrees Fahrenheit.10

In July 2016 a heat wave covered most of the US, with some areas reaching 115°F. On July 22,

nearly 124 million people were under an Excessive Heat Warning, Excessive Heat Watch or Heat

Advisory (The Guardian, from the WMO).

Hot weather induces more air conditioning using electricity, much of which comes from

billions of tons of fossil fuels per year (Salon). Air conditioning has a double whammy, heating air

outside more than it cools air inside, and increasing CO2.

With temperature records being broken in thousands of places year after year, it is hard to pick

one example out, but, to pick one, Deadhorse, Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean hit 85 degrees in 2016.

The Big Melt

Glaciers, the Greenland Ice Cap, and the polar ice caps are rapidly melting. Arctic floating ice

has shrunk precipitously in extent and volume, opening historically new sea routes. In January 2016,

the Arctic averaged 13.5 degrees above average with record low levels of sea ice extent and volume.

10

SF Chronicle 4/30/16

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The extent has dropped from the high six millions of square kilometers in the early 1980s to the mid

three millions in 2015. In mid-2016, Arctic sea ice was disappearing at a rate of 29,000 square miles

per day (Guardian July 7, 2016, National Snow and Ice Data Center). Orcas from the Pacific Ocean

are now swimming into Arctic waters where narwhales are an easy kill. Soon there will be no

summer ice in the Arctic.

Antarctic ice shelves are unstable. In 2002 in Antarctica an ice shelf the size of Rhode Island,

which usually dropped chunks of ice off its slowly advancing edge, instead suddenly disintegrated

into the ocean. After 12,000 years as solid ice, the Larson B was gone; 3,250 square kilometers of ice

shattered into thousands of ice bergs. The glaciers once blocked by the ice shelf are now moving

more quickly toward the sea. As the ocean rises slightly, sea water laps a little higher on Antarctic ice,

speeding up the big melt. The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is being melted from below by warm,

dense saltwater. Since it is above the ocean now, if it falls it will raise sea levels by several feet. So far

about a kilometer of thickness has been lost. The inertia of climate change will continue to melt ice

even if temperatures suddenly stopped rising.

Greenland has enough ice to raise sea levels twenty feet. “Greenland is warmer than it has been

in about 120,000 years, and climate-disrupting feedback loops have begun. Since 2000, ice loss has

increased over 600 percent, and liquid water now exists inside the ice sheet year-round, no longer

refreezing during winter.”11 Some dust is left by sublimation, which is ice just evaporating rather

than melting into water. Other dust comes in on the wind, often over thousand mile distances.

Darker ice increases the rate of melting. Ponds and streams form on the surface and find holes and

crevasses, called moulins, that go down to ground and out to sea. The moulins lubricate the ice from

below as it slides toward the sea. As the ice melts, the surface gets increasingly dark from dust,

which increases its absorption of heat and accelerates the melting. Plants now exposed by the melt

have been carbon dated to 44,000 years ago. The high ice near Uummannaq, a village in

northwestern Greenland, has melted so much that now the sun rises above the village three weeks

earlier. The ice sheet on thawed ground is melting from below and sliding to sea more rapidly than

ice sheet on frozen bedrock. Just over half of the ice sheet is now on thawed ground.

The glaciers in Glacier National Park are a small fraction of their former size and will probably

disappear. Its former 150 glaciers are now down to 25 and shrinking rapidly (National Geographic

video essay). NASA reports that Alaskan glaciers are losing over 75 billion tons of ice per year,

causing erosion. The big melt is significantly increasing river flow below glaciers on a temporary

basis, often causing erosion due to flood-level flows..

The loss of ice in the Far North is not just starving polar bears that have less and less ice to

hunt seals. Alaskan natives, with one foot in tradition and the other in a motor boat or ski mobile,

are facing declines in fish, marine mammals, and caribou. Many houses are sinking into melting

permafrost. The Alaskan Highway, as the permafrost softens beneath it, is breaking up with large

fissures and cracks, and bulges and dips. It is becoming more difficult to deliver supplies to rural

villages and North Slope oil drilling. Ironic, yes.

11

Greenland Reels: Climate Disrupting Feedbacks Have Begun, 5 March 2015, by Bruce Melton, Engineer, CEO of

Climate Change Now Initiative, a Truthout Report, http://truth-out.org/news/item/29462-greenland-reels-climate-

disrupting-feedbacks-have-begun, accessed 3/5/2015

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The Alps are warming faster than the global average, and over the last 160 years Europe has

lost half of its Alpine glaciers. Glaciers in Latin America are disappearing. Bolivia in forty years has

lost almost half its glaciers.

Albedo and the Cryosphere

Albedo is the reflectiveness of the earth’s surface for bouncing sun energy back into space. The

whiter the surface, the more the albedo. The cryosphere is the vast frozen (less frozen) landscapes

around the poles and at high elevations: floating ice, land ice, permafrost, and snow cover.

The big melt is replacing vast areas of Arctic white ice with dark areas of land and sea,

deceasing albedo, as mentioned for Greenland. As white ice diminishes, the dark ocean absorbs

more heat, accelerating climate change.

The frozen tundra in Siberia and Canada has large amounts of solid methane hydrates in

permafrost. The warming is melting the snow exposing darker permafrost below, which increases its

absorption of heat and releases methane into the air. The volume of methane is so great and the

pace of melting is so fast that it constitutes a "methane bomb." Evaporating methane has left large

craters on the Yamai Peninsula of Siberia. In the tundra of the Siberian arctic, fountains of methane

and carbon dioxide bubble up from below, jiggling the tundra on their way to becoming pockets of

high concentrations of 7,500 parts per million of CO2, 19 times greater than normal, and 375 parts

per million of methane, 200 time normal (Siberian Times).

The pace of the big melt, methane, and albedo is non-linear, where the process feeds on itself

and accelerates.

Precipitation

Warming causes more evaporation. As the atmosphere continues to warm, it holds ever more

water. Increased evaporation leads to less equatorial precipitation more precipitation toward the

poles because warmer equatorial air holds moisture and cooler temperate air hold less. As wet air

cools it drop its water. More evaporation means more precipitation leading to floods. The patterns

of rainfall also become less predictable, leading to too much rain after too much drought.

Snow. Snowpack in the northern Rockies and Sierra Nevada is shrinking. Ski resorts suffer

financial losses as temperatures rise and shorten the season and artificial snow costs for water and

electricity go up with declining snow. The ski season has already been reduced over the last 50 years

by about a month or 20 percent. Artificial snow uses about 500,000 gallons of water per acre.

“Artificial snow-making now helps to cover 88 percent of American ski resorts…” Some resorts will

close; others will operate further up their mountain. “The winter sports industry contributes $66

billion annually to the nation’s economy, and supports more than 960,000 jobs across 38 states,

according to the Outdoor Industry Association.” “Between 1999 and 2010, low snowfall years cost

the industry $1 billion and up to 27,000 jobs.”

Rain replacing snow will reduce what snow may already be on the ground, reducing albedo,

increasing early spring flows and decreasing later run off. Over the last 47 years, spring snow cover

in the Northern Hemisphere has shrunk by over one million square miles, equal to the area of

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Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Temperatures over 60 degrees at the Winter Games in Sochi cancelled two test events in February,

2013. The loss of snow leads to “forest fires, drought, mountain pine beetle infestation, degraded

river habitat, loss of hydroelectric power, dried-up aquifers and shifting weather patterns. ...more

than a billion people around the world — including about 70 million in the western United States —

rely on snowmelt for their fresh water supply.”12

The monsoon in India now delivers much more rain, in 2016 flooding affected 1.2 million

people and submerged large areas of farmland (Reuters).

In summer 2016, rainstorms in China killed hundreds of people, displaced over one million

people, and destroyed tens of thousands of homes and buildings (ABC.net.au July 6 2016).

In 2016, historic flooding in Louisiana killed seven people and 20,000 had to be rescued.

Rising seas

Climate change means rising sea levels and coastal flooding, and erosion. Sea-level rise is due to

thermal expansion of water, the big melt, and ice sheet collapse. Rising seas and storm surges will

cause major damage to coastal cities, ports, and coastal areas. About 100 million people now live less

than 3.3 feet above mean sea level. Low-end projections call for a rise in sea level of 0.6 to 1.9 feet

by 2100; high-end projections suggest seas rising by 2.6 to 13.1 feet. Sea level rise to the lower

estimates would flood large parts of major cities worldwide and force the permanent resettlement of

millions of people. Bangladesh has a very large population with millions of people living at low

elevations. Cyclones periodically cause massive flooding and drinking water turning salty, aggravated

by global warming.

The Alliance of Small Island States is concerned with the survival of its members, The

Maldives, a nation of islands in the Indian Ocean, is just two to three meters above sea level. With

rising seas and too many storms inundating the land, there will be about 150,000 climate refugees,

assuming they survive. Nauru is smaller (8 square miles, 10,000 people) and even more threatened,

and may become uninhabitable before it goes under water. Strip mining of phosphate has rendered

80 percent of the island useless. With no aquifer or lake, drought has reduced a limited water supply.

Meanwhile, Kiribati, and small island nation, has leased land on Fiji to have a place to go..

“The oceans are rising faster than at any point in the past 28 centuries,” primarily caused by

human GHG emissions."13 “In the last six years, oceans have risen by five millimeters per year,

which is a rate not seen since the ending of the last Ice Age – and it is accelerating.”14 More flooding

occurs from precipitation, thermal expansion of the ocean, melt water from land-based glaciers,

rising oceans, and extreme storms. These storms will cause periodic flooding in coastal communities.

Already global warming is causing most tidal flooding on the US East Coast, killing lawns and

12

Porter Fox (features editor, Powder magazine, author of “Deep: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow.”), “The End of

Snow?” Opinion, NYT Sunday Review Feb. 7, 2014

13 NYT Feb. 22, 2016. Stefan Rahmstorf, Professor of ocean physics, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact

Research, German, paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

14 Jamail, as cited above

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trees, polluting fresh water, blocking streets, and stranding new islands.15 The outer islands of

Chesapeake Bay are becoming too marshy for habitation. The long fight to save the Everglades is

probably over. They will not be drained for development, but flooded by the ocean along with much

of the rest of Florida. The coastline of Louisiana is disappearing faster than in other mainland

coastal states, and maps are increasingly inaccurate.

Non-linearity makes it hard to predict how soon and how deep coastal cities will be inundated.

Whether this flooding will happen is not much debated.

Extreme Weather

Climate change means increasing intensity, duration, and frequency of storms. Rare weather

events—500 and 1,000 year storms—are happening more frequently every year.

Increased heat energy in the ocean and atmosphere increases the intensity of extreme weather

events. Large storms--hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, high winds—are striking higher sea levels and

pushing more water into coastal areas and cause massive flooding (Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm

Sandy). Hurricanes are generated by surface seas getting warmer than the air above so more heat

creates stronger storms. However, warming also affects the higher atmosphere, generating wind

shear effects that disrupt potential storms. The balance between these two forces is unclear as to

trends in the number of storms, but when conditions are right, the storms are stronger.

Drought

Since the 1970s droughts have become longer and deeper in most of the world, even as

increased precipitation comes to latitudes closer to the poles. The drying of large landscapes is called

desiccation, and it includes surface humidity, total column water vapor, and the upper troposphere.

Drought lowers the rate of photosynthesis and increases plant death. When dead plants decompose,

they release CO2 back into the air. Drought increases particulates, discussed below.

In the Eastern Mediterranean, the 1998 to 2012 period was the driest period since 1100 or

longer. Drought is not just bad for one year, but dries out soil and shrinks aquifers, causing effects

over several years.

On equatorial and southern temperate land masses, which have little water, droughts are

increasing, so the African Sahara is expanding and the Sahel is shrinking. As mentioned above, as

drought shrinks agriculture and populations increase, bloody civil conflict and population dislocation

increase too. The Syrian Civil War starting in 2011 was preceded by decades of shifting rainfall and

rising temperatures and then three years of severe drought, which pushed people off the land,

crowding into the cities. War in Iraq and chaos in Syria has led to murderous religious fanatics

controlling large parts of both states, although as of 2016 they were losing the battle. Hundreds of

thousands of people have died and millions have been internally displaced and become international

refugees.

More than 60 million people worldwide, two-thirds of whom are in eastern and southern

Africa, already have chronic food shortages due to ongoing droughts (UN Food and Agriculture

15

Benjamin Strauss, Climate Central, New Jersey

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Organization, UN).

The Central Valley in California supplies two-thirds of the U.S. fruits and vegetables and is

going through six years of drought, the worst in 1,000 years. In October 2016, 120 million

Americans were in drought areas.

Pests and Infectious Diseases

Warmer weather supports higher survival rates for pine beetles and fungi. Plant pests can cause

severe ecological and economic losses. Some infestations result from natural insect cycles, while

others are caused by global warming bringing pests into areas once free of them and weakening of

plants by drought. Invasive insects cause at least $77 billion in damage, according to a study of over

700 studies compiled by Nature Communications in 2016 (Dahr Jamail, “Climate Disruption’s Legacy,”

Truthout, Nov. 6, 2016).

Over the past two decades, millions of acres of western North American forests have been

killed by pine beetles whose populations have exploded as a result of warmer winter temperatures —

previously, extreme winter cold prevented abundant beetle survival. The beetle kill reduces wood

production and sales, and lowers property values in developed areas.

A warmer climate spreads infectious diseases. With hotter weather and rising seas, “vector

ecology” –habitat for mosquitoes, flies, and ticks—is expanding, spreading endemic malaria, dengue

fever, encephalitis, hantavirus, Rift Valley fever, Lyme disease, chikungunya virus, West Nile virus,

and Zika virus. Mosquitoes carry malaria, which has killed millions of people over centuries. More

recently the Zika virus has been causing small infant brains and mental disability. As temperate

regions warm, costly and debilitating mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria are expected to

increase in both developed and developing nations. Indeed, expansion of West Nile virus into the

United States beginning in 1999 has already occurred, and bluetongue virus, a costly livestock

disease carried by midges, has expanded northward into central and northern Europe in the past

decade. Human-health costs caused by climate change are anticipated to be $2-4 billion per year by

2030.

White-nose syndrome has quickly killed millions of bats in 25 US states and five Canadian

provinces since the winter of 2007-2008. The disease is caused by a white fungus,

Pseudogymnoascus destructans, which infects the muzzle, ears, and wings of hibernating bats. The

loss of bats has allowed insect populations to grow.

On the Yamai Peninsula of Siberia thawing of permafrost released anthrax from a reindeer

carcass infected decades earlier. Dozens of people were hospitalized and several families flown out

of the area and biological warfare troops quarantined the area..

Carbon Sequestration

Sequestration means taking carbon out of the air, which can lower GHG in the atmosphere.

Green plants sequester carbon by using photosynthesis and sunlight to convert CO2 and water into

carbohydrates, storing CO2 in the plant. . NASA researchers estimate that tropical rainforests

absorb 1.4 billion metric tons of CO2 annually.

Loss of capacity for sequestration is a major cause of climate change, and the capacity for

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sequestration is diminishing. The ocean holds huge amounts of carbon dioxide, but increasing

acidification reduces its ability to sequester it. Loss of forests reduces the capacity for sequestration

on land, then plant decay releases CO2 back into the air.

Mass Extinction Scientists have identified the Anthropocene as the sixth mass extinction in the earth's 540

Michael Slezak, “The world is warming faster than we thought,” New Scientist, 5 October 2014

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26317-the-world-is-warming-faster-than-we-

thought.html#.VEV9k2eFnvW

Scientists may have hugely underestimated the extent of global warming because

temperature readings from southern hemisphere seas were inaccurate.

Comparisons of direct measurements with satellite data and climate models suggest that the

oceans of the southern hemisphere have been sucking up more than twice as much of the heat

trapped by our excess greenhouse gases than previously calculated. This means we may have

underestimated the extent to which our world has been warming.

Paul Durack from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California in the US and

colleagues have compared direct and inferred sea temperature measurements with the results of

climate models. While these three types of measurements together suggest that our estimates of

northern hemisphere ocean warming are about right, a different story emerged for down south.

The team estimate that the extent of warming in the southern hemisphere oceans since 1970

could be more than twice what has been inferred from the limited direct measurements we have

for this region. This means that together, all the world's oceans are absorbing between 24 and 58

per cent more energy than has previously been estimated by direct in-situ measurements.

Wenju Cai from the CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research

Organisation].in Melbourne, Australia says the results mean the world is warming faster than we

thought. "The implication is that the energy imbalance – the net heating of the earth – would

have to be bigger," he says.

"There has been a general acknowledgement in the literature, that southern-hemisphere

estimates of ocean warming are likely biased low," says Durack. "Our study is the first to

attempt to quantify the magnitude of what this generally acknowledged underestimate is, using

as much information as is available."

The study covers the period from 1970 to 2003. Cai says that, during that time, while the

northern hemisphere has been well sampled by cargo ships and projects led by wealthy countries

north of the equator, very few direct measurements have been taken in the south. So it's not

surprising that the in-situ measurements have been wrong. "But this is huge," says Cai.

"One could say that global warming is ocean warming," Gregory Johnson and John Lyman

at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote in a commentary

accompanying Durack's paper. "Quantifying how fast, and where, the ocean is warming is vital

to understanding how much and how fast the atmosphere will warm, and seas will rise."

Since around 2000, a network of buoys called the Argo floats have been collecting more

accurate global ocean data, so more recent measurements of the southern hemisphere are more

reliable.

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million-year history, and a major reason for declaring a change in geological age. The last such mass

extinction was the extirpation of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Since 1970, global wildlife

populations have fallen by about 58 percent on average.16 “It is estimated that one-third of all reef-

building corals, one third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all

mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.”17 A quarter of

known mammal species, 43 percent of amphibians, 29 percent of reptiles, and 14 percent of birds

are threatened. African elephants in nature may be extinct within a decade.

The Millennium Alliance: “Not since the dinosaurs went extinct have so many species and

populations died out so fast, both on land and in the oceans.” As human population and its

preferred species grow, other species shrink. Each year, humans appropriate up to 40 percent of the

earth's biomass, the product of photosynthesis, earth's basic energy conversion necessary to all life.

“Currently at least 20-40% of assessed species — amounting to a minimum of 12,000-24,000

species — are possibly at increased risk of extinction if mean global temperature increases 2.7 to 4.5

F (1.5-2.5oC). Current emissions trends are on track for a 7.2 degree F (4 degree C) rise in global

mean temperature by 2100, which would put many more species at risk. The situation with

population extinctions is much worse, with much higher extinction rates in the basic unit of

biodiversity that supplies ecosystem services.”18 (These services are provided by “natural capital” and

are listed under Land Loss below.)

Biodiversity is collapsing because of appropriation of biomass, climate change, habitat

fragmentation, dams, taking freshwater from rivers and wetlands, destruction of habitat by

conversion to other uses, pollution, invasive species, deforestation, illegal wildlife trade, over-

hunting, and over-fishing. Habitat fragmentation is caused by roads and urbanization, with road kill

further reducing survival. Extermination of wolves, lions, grizzly bears, and other top predators

allows too many elk, deer, coyotes, and other animals, and leads to the degradation of young trees

and stream habitat used by birds, fish, and amphibians.

“…Elephants, rhinoceroses, and tigers are being hunted to extinction to sell their tusks, horns,

or other body parts to be made into curios or for purported health products. For example, the

demand for ivory from elephant tusks, primarily from Asian markets, has driven the price high

enough that elephant poaching has now become a lucrative source of income for international crime

rings and terrorist organizations. Other species are being over-utilized as marketable food—this is

especially a problem for many ocean fisheries, such as those for Bluefin tuna and Atlantic cod.

Demand is outstripping supply for such species—there are now seven times as many humans on the

planet as there are wild salmon. In the same vein, the dramatic and rapid clearing of rainforests is

motivated by immediate economic profit. In all of these cases, the one-time gain in profit (which

benefits relatively few people) is a pittance compared to the loss of natural capital, which supplies

important benefits locally and globally for the long term. In economic terms, it is analogous to

16

World Wildlife Fund and Zoological Society of London, Living Planet Report, 2016

17 Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, 2014

18 Millennium Alliance, pdf 4-6

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spending down the principal of an investment rather than living off the interest.”19

Monarch butterfly populations are collapsing. Sixty million butterflies used to thrive on a hardy

plant, milkweed, which is being eliminated by existing cultivation and the expansion of cultivated

area, now totaling 155 million acres of farmland. Much of the expansion is to grow subsidized corn,

soybeans, and biofuels. In addition, the use of genetically modified seeds allows the use of an

herbicide, Monsanto’s Roundup. Milkweed not killed by cultivation is wiped out by Roundup. As

the extent of milkweed shrank by about 80 percent, so have Monarch populations. Logging and hot

weather have also caused loss of butterflies.20

Large forests in Indonesia are destroyed for palm oil, causing a collapse of the orangutan

population. Large forests in Brazil are destroyed for timber, cattle, and soybeans at the expense of

the species and natural values of the rain forest and its sequestration of greenhouse gases.

“Even in poorer nations that don't have the impact that the average American has on the

planet, population as it grows squeezes out other species because people need space to live, and the

other species need space to live, ” said Jeffrey McKee, an anthropologist at Ohio State University.

Other wealthy countries have similar impacts, but less per capita, than the US.

California alone has 157 known endangered or threatened species.

Species have evolved in specific narrow temperature ranges. They move pole-ward if they can.

However, if they are at the north end of a northern hemisphere island, they are in trouble. If they are

wolverines, the toughest animal on the planet, north out of Glacier National Park means running

out of mountain and high cold and they are probably doomed. Species respond differently to the

changes.

Climate change is changing seasons with different effects on different species. In Alaska the

earlier spring means insects hatch earlier, but the birds that eat them have not learned to come

earlier fast enough and fewer survive.

While some species can move poleward, others can only go up in elevation, mountain can run

out of up. In the Monteverde Cloud Forest of Costa Rica, the golden toad ran out of altitude and

was extirpated. Two rare insects in Glacier National Park are disappearing as warmer weather dries

up the streams they need to survive. Less sea ice is reducing polar bear populations, which depend

on the ice to hunt seals. As trees and other plants move north and seasons change, species like bees,

insects, and birds may have their places and timing for pollination and seed dispersion thrown off.

See also pollinators below.

Orcas are declining as their primary food, chinook salmon, decline. Seals, pelicans, terns, and

cormorants and more are listed as endangered or threated. The effect goes into the ocean as

diminished fresh water flow reduces the plume of brackish water reaching the Farallones, a national

marine sanctuary. Beaches and tidal marshes are maintained by sediment dropped from large spring

19

Millennium Alliance p. 9

20

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/01/monarch_butterfly_decline_monsanto_s_roundup_is_killing_

milkweed.html

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flows; with less water, they erode.21

Many of the concerns about the crisis are pragmatic, like food scarcity and flooded cities, but

some concerns, like biodiversity, are more spiritual or philosophical. We value the plants and animals

we don’t eat, the beauty of nature, and the fascination of the less-touched world. We may not have

to share the planet with non-pragmatic species, but we may choose to, for reasons having to do with

what it means to be human. In wildness is the preservation of the world—poetry, not money. What

have we become when the call of the wild falls ever more silent?

Water shortages Millennium Alliance: “Cities and farmlands that rely on the seasonal accumulation of snow pack

and slow spring melt, arid regions that apportion water from major rivers, and regions that depend

on water from glacier melt all are at risk.”22 World water shortages are increasing; 1.1 billion people

have inadequate access to water. As diets improve, demand for food higher up the food chain uses

more water.

Humans appropriate more than half the world's fresh water. Dams modify water flow in more

than 60% of the world’s large rivers. The Nile, Indus, and Ganges rivers have been reduced to a

trickle. Only 2 percent of major US rivers run unimpeded to the sea. California's Sacramento-San

Joaquin River Delta has been entirely re-engineered.

California has diverted so much water from the Bay Delta system that its historic ecology has

collapsed. The salmon, steelhead, and striped bass are gone, leaving the tiny Delta Smelt as the

remaining, barely surviving, indicator species. A federal court recently ordered water released into

the Klamath River to prevent fish kills, at the expense of farmers who wanted the water.

The Colorado River is 1,400 miles long and has 15 dams, so water does not reach its historic

end at the Sea of Cortez. In December 2012, the Interior Department said by mid-century the

Colorado River will not support demand from the seven states it supplies, including California. The

main reason is expected population growth in the region from 40 million to as many as 76 million

people. “Phoenix continues to grow at one of the highest rates in the country,” said Jerry Karnas,

population and sustainability director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “There is no discussion

about what the future Phoenix is going to do when the Colorado River is done.”

21

Bay Institute, http://thebayinstitute.org/sf-bay-freshwater-starved-estuary, Reported in SF Chronicle, October 15

[?], 2016 22 Millennium Alliance p. 5

A Drop in Biodiversity Is Putting the World at Risk

Julie M. Rodriguez, Care2: While many of us have heard about the accelerating rate of extinction in areas like the Amazon, British researchers behind a new paper found that the issue is actually incredibly widespread. By their estimates, a disturbing 58 percent of the planet's surface has experienced high rates of species die-off.

Read the Article

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As glaciers recede, their supply of water also diminishes. Similarly, ancient aquifers in the

world's bread baskets, including the Ogallala in the American Great Plains, are being drained. As

rains diminish and the climate dries in some areas, increased pumping from falling aquifers becomes

more expensive due to the cost of electricity and deeper wells. The San Joaquin Valley has sunk

many feet in some places due to over-pumping of aquifers.

Lakes dry up. Lake Poopo outside by the village of Llapallapani, was once Bolivia’s second-

largest and is now a dry, salty expanse. Many of the local people became climate refugees,

emigrating to survive.23 Baher Kamal, Inter Press Service July 31, 2016

Drought and mismanagement dried up the Pilcomayo River in Paraguay and the river bed is

littered with dead caiman and fish carcasses for 435 miles (National Geographic, July 2016).

High quality water is often polluted by human, consumer, and industrial waste. There is no

shortage of polluted water, but the cost of purification is very high.

Deforestation Droughts, bark beetles, cattle grazing, logging, palm oil, wildfires, farming, and urbanization are

rapidly reducing forests globally, Deforestation has taken about 11,000 square miles per year for the

past 16 years, roughly the equivalent of clear-cutting Massachusetts in one year.24 “Millions of trees

have died off across Europe, the US Southwest and California…” (Inside Climate News Je 29 2016).

Tropical and subtropical forests support the most biodiversity on land. High resolution satellite

photographs were used to measure forest loss in 34 countries over 20 years. During the 1990s and

2000s, the net loss of tropical rainforests globally increased by 62 percent. From 2000 to 2010,

tropical rainforests shrank by 6.5 million hectares (16.1 million acres) per year.25

23 Baher Kamal, Inter Press Service July 31, 2016

24 Millennium Alliance, pdf p. 11

25 Kim, D.-H., J. O. Sexton, and J. R. Townshend (2015), Accelerated deforestation in the humid tropics from the

1990s to the 2000s. Geophys. Res. Lett., 42, 3495–3501.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL062777/full

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Climate change is killing forests.

Hot weather and the drying of forests are causing wildfires to increase in extent, frequency,

duration and intensity around the world. According to the Global Fire Emission Database,

CO2 emissions in Equatorial Asia, including serious forest fires in Indonesia in August-

September 2015, were more than twice as high as the 1997-2015 average. [Science Daily, op.

cit.] Satellite image analysis of forest fires in Siberia reveal that millions of acres have recently

been burning year after year. In Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology reports more fires and a

longer fire season.

In 2016 the National Academy of Sciences reported that increasing temperatures were

causing an increase in wildfires in the western US. In 2015 late season wildfires in Alaska were

burning spruce and tundra in the far northwest.

Drought is weakening trees allowing massive infestation by bark beetles: 66 million trees in

the Sierra Nevada of California are dead. The largest clear cutter in the state, Sierra Pacific

Industries is cutting trees healthy, green trees as fast as ever. Douglas fir, a major timber source,

is growing more slowly due to heat and lack of water.

“California’s biggest wildfire was just a 40-acre canyon blaze west of Yosemite National

Park on Aug. 17. In just a few days, the Rim Fire grew into a monster, menacing foothill

communities and incinerating landscape with 200-foot flames burning at 1,200 degrees.”26 The

Rim Fire of 2013 burned 402 square miles. So far in 2016 in California 3,750 fires have burned

over 200,00 acres (313 square miles). In Oklahoma and Kansas a large wildfire burned 72,000

acres. These increased fires need to be distinguished from epochal fires that occur naturally,

such as the Yellowstone fire that hopscotched across the landscape and helped ecological

succession and renewed habitat.

Peat Bog Loss Peat bogs cover about 1.6 million square miles or 3 percent of earth land surface, mostly in

northern latitudes in Canada, Alaska, Europe and Russia. Peat is a spongy fibrous mass of sphagnum

and other mosses having chemicals that inhibit decomposition. Peat bogs grow slowly over

thousands of years as growth exceeds decay. The bogs sequester many tons of carbon and contain

more carbon than all the world’s trees and plants. Peat resists burning, because sphagnum moss

holds a lot of water. Usually, only the top few inches will burn. A small amount of peat is used as

fuel, mulch, or flavoring for Scotch whiskey.

Climate warming and drainage can dry out the bogs, allowing deeper, more intense burning as a

firs can feed on itself, with a smoldering heat drying out more moss, causing months of burning. A

few minutes can release hundreds of years of stored carbon. “The world has already had vast

releases of carbon from peat, in Indonesia. Last year, bogs that had been drained for agriculture, and

were drier because of El Niño-related warmth, burned for months, creating a haze visible from

space and causing widespread health problems. At their peak in September and October, the fires

26

Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics FSEEE, Sep 5, 2013

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released more carbon per day than was emitted by the European Union.”

Canada: “The enormous spring wildfire that destroyed much of Fort McMurray, a city of

90,000 people 150 miles east of here, burned bogs as well as trees. In June, the trees were no longer

on fire outside the town, but crews were overturning peat with backhoes in an effort to extinguish

smoldering hot spots….In a large wildfire in May 2011 that burned in and around the town of Slave

Lake, about 80 miles south of here, some peat continued to burn through the winter, until spring

rains and melting snow finally extinguished it.”27

Pollution Millennium Alliance: “Environmental contaminants in the air, water, and land are at record

levels and increasing, seriously harming people and wildlife in unforeseen ways.”

Pollution of water, air, and land comes from burning fossil fuels, hazardous chemicals, oil

spills, excess nutrients, salinization, and solid waste and harms both humans and species in

nature. 100 million tons of synthetic chemical compounds are produced each year. Many of these

man-made chemicals are now found in small amounts in human breast milk.

“At least 125 million people are now at direct risk from toxic wastes produced by mining

and manufacturing. As of 2010 air pollution caused up to 6 million premature deaths per year.

Environmental exposures are thought to contribute to 19% of cancer incidence worldwide. Millions

of people drink water from aquifers contaminated with cancer-causing arsenic or harmful microbes.

All total, as of 2010, the number of years lost due to illness, disability or early death (disability-

adjusted life years, or DALYS) from environmental hazards is probably greater than those lost to

malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS combined. An emerging concern is the effect of hormone-

simulating chemicals, such as endocrine disruptors, which may be affecting human growth,

development, and health on a large scale. For instance, endocrine disruptors have been linked to

earlier onset of puberty and obesity. The latter also leads to increased incidence of heart disease and

type II diabetes.”28

Phosphorus and Nitrogen

Phosphorus and nitrogen are major ingredients of fertilizer and essential for large scale food

production. Farmers, however, use more than is needed, which goes into water runoff. Phosphorus

is the major cause of water pollution worldwide. It causes dead zones of water depleted of dissolved

oxygen, toxic algal blooms, death of other aquatic life, and health hazards. Decades of run-off from

agriculture, human sewage and industrial practices have deposited large amounts of phosphorus in

lake bed sediments. People continue to add about 10 million tons of phosphorus every year. Plants

and animals recover slowly, if at all, even if new phosphorus is prevented, because stored

phosphorus takes a long time to be used up. Due mainly to phosphorus pollution, forty percent of

lakes in Europe do not meet the water quality standards of the EU Water Framework Directive.29

27 Henry Fountain, “As Peat Bogs Burn, a Climate Threat Rises, New York Times, Aug. 8, 2016

28 Millennium Alliance pdf p. 14

29 Water Research, University of Southern Denmark, July 8, 2016, http://www.journals.elsevier.com/water-research

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Herbicides, pesticides, chromium, mercury, asbestos

“Herbicides, pesticides, and various chemicals used in plastic production contaminate many

waterways directly, and then are taken up by organisms and bioamplified through food chains.

Virtually all human beings on Earth carry a burden of these persistent chemicals, many of which are

endocrine disruptors. Pharmaceuticals meant for humans or livestock, and subsequently flushed into

drains or otherwise finding their way into rivers and lakes, disrupt growth and development of

amphibians and fish.”30

“Traces of pesticides and industrial pollutants are routinely found in samples of soil or tree bark

from virtually any forest in the world, in the blubber of whales, in polar bear body tissues, in fish

from most rivers and oceans, and in the umbilical cords of newborn babies.

“…Oil spills routinely contaminate oceans and coastlines, as well as inland waters and land

areas. as is the ubiquity of hormone-disrupting or cancer-causing chemicals such as bisphenol-A

(commonly known as BPA). Activities such as mining, manufacturing, and recycling of electronic

equipment have not only concentrated dangerous pollutants locally, but also distributed them

worldwide, notably harmful substances such as lead, chromium, mercury, and asbestos.”31

The adverse effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and use of Corexit, an oil dispersant,

continue to affect Alaskan coasts and waters. The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 was the

worst oil spill disaster in US history. BP’s use of Corexit and other toxic oil dispersants made the

problem worse by moving oil beneath the surface, where it sank, formed tar mats, and washed

ashore, where it will last for decades. The EPA has promised new regulations by August 2018, 17

years after initiating review of dispersants.

In 1993, hexavalent chromium pollution by PG&E was exposed by Erin Brockovich in a

famous case, but chromium continues to be a widespread problem at lower levels which are still

above EPA standards. About 200 million Americans have excess chromium in their drinking water

(http://www.ewg.org/research/chromium-six-found-in-us-tap-water). There is an excellent

interactive map at http://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2016-chromium6-lower-48.php.

Air Pollution

The most recent comprehensive report dealing with air pollution comes from the World Health

Organization using new methods of satellite measurements, air shed models, and over 3,000 ground

level detectors. Air pollution exceeds recommended limits for 92 percent of world population. Air

pollution causes acute respiratory infections, emphysema, and generally reduces health and

productivity. Air pollution causes about one in nine deaths, about 6.5 million people annually, about

half from indoor air pollution and half from outside. Two-thirds of the deaths are in Southeast Asia

and the Western Pacific, and the victims are disproportionately women, children, and the elderly.

The major causes of death are cardiovascular diseases, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary

disease, and lung cancer. Sources of air pollution include coal-fired power plants, motor vehicles,

30 Millennium Alliance pdf p. 15

31 Millennium Alliance pdf p. 14

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kerosene and wood-burning cook stoves, solid waste burning, certain industries, and dust storms.32

Types of air pollution include ozone, carbon monoxide, particulates, and air toxics

Hotter weather causes more air pollution, which causes more asthma and cardiovascular

disease. Smog itself is ozone, an invisible gas with an extra ozone molecule, volatile O3 instead of

stable O2. Ozone causes a burning sensation in the lungs, and many other problems. Smog in

produced when cooler air, which is heavier, nevertheless stagnates on top of warm air and sunlight

acting on hydrocarbons and nitrous oxides produces ozone. Ozone is usually accompanied by

particulates that creates grey haze. Many cities are far above federal air quality standards for safety.

In Beijing, one of the world’s worst, during January 2013 had air so polluted air it could be seen

from space.

Air toxics are a relatively small problem, such as metal plating industrial emissions, aerial

spraying, or a hazardous materials outdoor dump being close to a sensitive land use like a school or

neighborhood.

Particulates are particles of sulfate, nitrates and black carbon so small that they the float in the

air. Particulates are classified by size into two categories, between 10 and 2.5 microns (PM10) and

less than 2.5 microns (PM2.5), which are so small that they penetrate deep into the lungs and

cardiovascular system, posing the greatest health risks. They are a major cause of asthma, especially

devastating for children. Climate change—heat, drought and desiccation—increase particulates.

Waterborne pathogens, algae, and jellies

Worldwide, rising seas, more precipitation, more flooding, and warmer temperatures degrade

both surface and subsurface water for 2.6 billion people, more than one-third of the human

population. They lack basic sanitation services and are thus exposed to waterborne diseases, which

include cholera, cryptosporidiosis, campylobacter, leptospirosis, and toxic algae blooms. Such

diseases have seen a remarkable increase (Centers for Disease Control).

Warmer, nutrient rich water from fertilizer runoff are causing unprecedented huge algae blooms

and jellyfish masses in most oceans. Swarms of millions of jellyfish can clog up water intakes of

utility plants (New Scientist). In Florida, a thick, hazardous green algae increased by warmer water

covered many beaches (National Geographic News, July 2016).

Ortho-phthalates, Malathion, chlorpyrifos, atrazine, neonicotinoids, azodicarbonamide, polyethylene microbeads, brominated vegetable oil, high fructose corn syrup, lead, radioactivity

Ortho-phthalates are 30 hormone-disrupting chemicals used in plastics and approved as food

additives. They probably cause reproductive, developmental, and endocrine problems. They pose an

especially acute danger of low childhood IQ, genital defects, and learning disabilities in infants. They

32

Truthout, Oct. 3, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37845-nine-in-10-people-worldwide-live-with-

excessive-air-pollution. See http://maps.who.int/airpollution/ for an interactive map.

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rub off from plastics into food. They are banned from toys.

Malathion and chlorpyrifos are organophosphate pesticides, a class of insecticides found in 87

percent of human umbilical cords and linked to delayed cognitive development in children. They are

used on corn, wheat, watermelon, and other crops. After decades of delay, in April the EPA finally

released a more rigorous analysis of malathion and chlorpyrifos and found that they probably hurt

97 percent of the species protected by the Endangered Species Act.

Small amounts of the herbicide atrazine, the second-most used pesticide in the U.S., can

devastate amphibians. Atrazine is a hormone disruptor that at low doses causes hermaphroditic,

demasculinized frogs. It has contaminated some drinking water and aquifers and causes birth defects

and cancer in humans. Atrazine was banned in Europe in 2004. Over 70 million pounds are dumped

each year with enough in many rivers to kill frogs. “A new, frightening analysis by the

Environmental Protection Agency has shown that atrazine is present at high enough concentrations

in rivers, ponds and streams to kill frogs and salamanders outright. And it's likely harming most

species of mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles, especially in the Midwest where its use is

highest. … [A]trazine is used so extensively on U.S. crops, lawns and fields that it's the most

common pesticide contaminant of ground-, surface and drinking water. Research out of UCLA has

shown that atrazine chemically castrates and feminizes male frogs even at concentrations lower than

the level allowed in drinking water. And in humans exposure correlates with elevated cancer risk,

irregular menstrual cycles in women and low sperm counts in men.” CBD, 7/11/2016

Small amounts of neonicotinoids can cause honey-bee colony collapse disorder. Massive use

of antibiotics in animal feed breeds drug-resistant E. coli bacteria, whose populations then expand

rapidly. These superbugs resist more and more antibiotics, and have become a growing cause of

human death.

Food has become less healthy. Azodicarbonamide, banned in Europe and Australia, is

commonly used in American bread, and, when baked, can produce urethane, a carcinogen. Tiny

polyethylene microbeads are used in toothpaste, soap, skin products, and industrial cleaners. They

are not entirely removed by sewage treatment. As microbeads find their way to the oceans, they

accumulate in sea life up the food chain and absorb contaminants, with deadly results. Brominated

vegetable oil, an endocrine disruptor, is used as a flame retardant in upholstery and as a flavor

dispersant in drinks. It is found in human tissue, and is correlated with a variety of health problems.

High fructose corn syrup is used in soft drinks and many food products. Fructose is metabolized

differently from other kinds of sugars, contributing to excess body weight, diabetes, heart disease,

and obesity. Drinking diet soda does not avoid problems; even one soda per day is correlated with a

61 percent higher chance of having a heart attack or stroke. Another study found a 20 percent

increased risk of health disease among men who drank one soft drink, diet or with sugar, per day.

Lead poisoning is a chronic problem in old low income neighborhoods with lead paint in

housing causing permanent mental deficiency in children. Programs to chelae lead for the body and

to remove lead paint go forward but the problem is still age. Lead pipes are safe enough with pure

water but the slightest acidic content causes leaching and poisoning of drinking water, as occurred in

Flint Michigan in 2015. Authorities failed to relate the chemical composition of the river water to

the lead pipes that would be carrying it.

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Radioactivity has been an evolutionary background reality and a minor pollutant since the

Strontium 90 scares of the 1950s. Radioactivity regained attention as radioactivity from the Japanese

Fukushima Daiichi Reactor melt-down drifted across the Pacific Ocean to the West Coast of North

America. Radioactivity has proven deadly from the earliest research to the bombing of two Japanese

cities in World War II. In theory and most practice, radioactivity is one of the most strictly regulated

pollutants, but the difficulty of failsafe nuclear energy and the possibility of nuclear war and nuclear

terrorism are still there. Generally, concern for background radiation from nuclear fallout has fallen

into the political background, but it is still with us, and will be for over 100,000 years.

Nuclear waste, and especially radioactive contamination from accidents at nuclear plants, is a

growing problem. Permanent nuclear waste sites have not been located, leaving spent fuel to

accumulate at the reactors where they were used.

In northwestern Greenland, US radioactive waste and biological and chemical waste were

buried underneath more than 100 feet of ice. "If the ice melts, the camp's infrastructure, including

any remaining biological, chemical and radioactive wastes could re-enter the environment and

potentially disrupt nearby ecosystems."33 It is not yet exposed, but will be. The government's

decision to did not consider global warming.

Bioengineering risk

Bioengineering is not usually thought of as a pollutant, but at the micro-scale of DNA it could

be considered to be one, much like an invasive species in a habitat. So far, research and industry

safeguards have prevented acute problems, but secrecy about Genetically Modified Organisms, lack

of consumer choice, and industry assurances motivated in part by profit-seeking do not inspire

confidence. Wind-blown GMO seeds have already contaminated some organic crops. We are still

learning the most basic things about DNA, let alone how it can safely be manipulated.

Solid waste

Annual plastic production weighs about as much as all human beings and most of it becomes

solid waste in garbage dumps or the ocean. Some solid waste dumped on land finds its way into the

ocean and then back onto beaches.

Land Loss The Millennium Alliance: “Wholesale loss of diverse ecosystems — we have plowed, paved, or

otherwise transformed more than 40% of Earth’s ice-free land, and no place on land or in the sea is

free of our direct or indirect influences.”

The land lost to nature is usually the most biologically productive land, with 12% to crops, 29%

to pasture, and 3% to urban uses. Urbanization by low density sprawl and pavement often destroys

prime farmland. Mines taking resources out of nature and landfills returning waste to nature are also

part of land loss.

The increasing need for food and decreasing yields due to climate change, salinization, soil

33 University of Zurich, Geophysical Research Letters Bulletin, American Meteorological Society, cited by Reuters

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erosion, soil depletion, soil dryness, and conversion to other uses will require converting more

marginal, unfarmed land to crops. Land loss means loss of economically valuable “nature services”:

“moderating weather; regulating the water cycle, stabilizing water supplies; filtering drinking water;

protecting agricultural soils and replenishing their nutrients; disposing of wastes; pollinating crops

and wild plants; providing food from wild species (especially seafood); stabilizing fisheries; providing

medicines and pharmaceuticals; controlling spread of pathogens; and helping to reduce greenhouse

gases in the atmosphere.”34

Declining Oceans The huge thermal mass of the oceans has slowed the warming of the atmosphere. By the same

token, reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be slow to have an effect because of how long it will

take the oceans to release their heat and reduce their CO2. The oceans process CO2 more slowly

than the atmosphere. Some problems are special to oceans; others are ocean versions of continental

problems.

Acidification, Oxygen Depletion

Calcifying species include animal plankton at the base of the food chain, coral, clams, oysters,

and other shell fish. They need an alkaline (higher pH) sea to use CO2 to form shells, skeletons, and

coral composed of calcium carbonate. Acidification is deforming and killing oyster seed and young

oysters. On the Pacific Coast, the three hatcheries that supply seed to oyster farms are losing half

their crop to acidification.

About one fourth of the CO2 released by human activities is absorbed into the oceans, where it

becomes so concentrated it becomes acidic (lower pH) as carbonic acid. Acidity dissolves calcium

carbonate or prevents its formation. For example, in California tide pools, during the day

photosynthesis converts CO2 into sugars and oxygen and at night the process reverses, using oxygen

and releasing CO2, increasing acidity, and dissolving calcium carbonate, with night dissolution

outpacing daytime formation. Ocean oxygen level have been falling. 35 The two trends combine to

slow calcium-based ocean life.

Thermohaline Circulation

Global ocean currents are caused by earth rotation, varying water temperatures, and varying

salinity, with cold, saline water sinking and flowing in generally the reverse direction of warmed, less

salty water masses. This thermohaline circulation system moves tropical heat toward the poles,

overturns surface water with deep water, brings up nutrients from cold ocean depths, and affects

rainfall and temperatures on land. The North Atlantic Oscillation reverse flow occurs off the east

coast of Greenland, pulling warming water northward as a continuation of the Gulf Stream and

warming easterly flowing air, which makes Northern Europe habitable. It is the reason for major

European cities being north of major North American cities. This is system has generally been stable

34

Millennium Alliance, pdf p. 8

35 http://www.i-sis.org.uk/O2DroppingFasterThanCO2Rising.php

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but small changes in the jet stream, salinity, temperature, and value of melting ice can cause major

change is global currents.36

The Blob

Just as in the atmosphere, the oceans have weather. In early 2014 a heat wave initially detected

in the northeastern Pacific moved down the coast of North America with water four degrees

warmer than surrounding ocean. Sea lions lost their food source and pups died of starvation on

beaches. Skipjack tuna, a tropical species, moved up off the coast of Alaska.

The Waste Gyre

A garbage gyre at least twice the size of Texas swirls in the Pacific Ocean. Turtles, birds, and

other ocean life ingest plastic or are entangled by debris and die. As calcium-based life declines, algae

increase.

Nitrogen and Algae

Nitrogen can be a fertilizer, but in excess is a problem for oceans as well as on land. Human

activity surpasses nature as a source of nitrogen emissions, altering the planet's nitrogen cycle.

“Excess nitrogen from farm fertilizers, sewage plants, livestock pens, and coal plants eventually ends

up in waterways and makes its way to the oceans, where it stimulates prodigious algal growth. Decay

of the dead algae then sucks all the oxygen out of the water. The result is a dead zone where marine

life is greatly reduced. Most coasts of the world now exhibit elevated nitrogen flow, with large dead

zones occurring near major population centers.”37 “We can't just continue dumping nitrogen into

the ocean at the same rate and expect everything to be fine,” Santa Clara University's Marvier said.

Phytoplankton

Phytoplankton are small plants floating in the ocean using sunlight and ocean nutrients to

proliferate. They absorb carbon dioxide and produce about two-thirds of atmospheric oxygen and

are at the base of the ocean’s food chain. Some parts of the oceans are seeing declines because of

the above factors, ultraviolet solar radiation, and algae blooms. A decline in circulation has caused

problems in the Indian Ocean. “A rapid loss of phytoplankton threatens to turn the western Indian

Ocean into an ‘ecological desert,’ a new study warns. The research reveals that phytoplankton

populations in the region fell an alarming 30 percent over the last 16 years.”38

On the other hand, after ice melts, sunlight warms the darker ocean waters, favoring the

growth of plankton. Then chlorophyll and other pigments in plankton absorb even more solar

radiation and raise the water temperature further. The synergy of melting ice and plankton growth

can amplify warming by as much as 20%. The benefit from oxygen versus the harm from warming

has not been assessed.

36

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/O2DroppingFasterThanCO2Rising.php

37 Millennium Alliance, p. 14

38 Phytoplankton rapidly disappearing from the Indian Ocean, Science News, Vol. 189, No. 5, March 5, 2016, p. 11

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Trawlers, ships, and noise

Ocean habitat is degraded by huge bottom trawlers damaging the ocean floor. Ships hit slow

ocean mammals like right whales and manatees, injuring and killing them. Loud sonar noise is

painful for whales and dolphins.

Corals

Coral reefs are created over centuries by tiny animals, polyps that live symbiotically with green

algae. The algae photosynthesize carbon dioxide into sugars that feed the polyps, which then excrete

calcium carbonate that gradually build a coral structure. The world’s coral reefs are called the

“rainforests of the sea” because they host one fourth of all marine species and nurture fish stocks

feeding over one billion people.

With too much heat and sunshine, the algae produce toxins instead of sugars. The polyps can

tolerate some of this, but too much and they eject the algae and die, called bleaching, and colorful

reefs teeming with life become shattered white ghosts. Coral reefs are disappearing as warming,

over-fishing, acidification, sewage, and excess fertilizer pollutants cause massive bleaching.

Over half of coral reefs have been destroyed or degraded. Some regions have lost 90 percent of

their coral reefs. In 2015, a strong El Niño heated oceans from Africa to North America and caused

the longest known bleaching in history.

In April 2016, a marine biologist diving 30 feet below water lever off Kiritimati atoll in the

Pacific Ocean found an entire reef covered with red brown algae growing over dead coral. The

Kiritimati bleaching was part of a global mass bleaching event, the third in recorded history.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the largest in the world, had until recently 620 miles of pristine coral.

In 2016, a survey of 520 component smaller reefs found 516 with bleaching, a loss of about 20

percent, the largest bleaching event ever recorded.39

After four years of bleaching, 2013 to 2106, about 85 percent of Guam’s coral has bleached

(Washington Post Aug 3 2016.

Fisheries

A third of world fisheries are exhausted or degraded. Tuna and cod have been mentioned, but

there are also bill fish like marlin and swordfish and bottom fish whose populations have collapsed.

Sharks and other species of predator fish are in decline. Besides coral, mangrove forests also nurture

fish stock, and a third of mangrove forests have been destroyed or degraded.

California has had major declines from 2012 to 2015 in sea urchins, sardines, crab, squid, and

salmon.40 Kelp is the rain forest of the ocean, a rich habitat supporting thousands of species. An area

off the coast of California near Elk, once rich in red sea urchin, abalone and kelp, in 2016 was

barren landscape. The kelp does not grow well because of water too warm and predation by an

39 Michelle Innis, “Climate-Related Death of Coral Around World Alarms Scientists,” NYT, April 9, 2016

40 The discussion of these species below is taken from Tara Duggan, Seafood’s new normal,

http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/california-seafood-collapse/, SF Chronicle, Oct. 30, 2016

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explosion of purple sea urchins. The North Coast kelp forest declined 93 percent from 2008 to

2014. The 2016 urchin harvest was down 90 percent. The Pacific sardine industry in 2007 brought

in. $8.2 million. In 2014-2015 the population fluctuated more than normal, crashing to about one-

tenth the size it had in 2007, closing the fishery for two years so far. Sea lions have been dying of

starvation in large numbers.

Dungeness crab in 2015 became toxic due to an unprecedented algae bloom that lasted four

months. From 2014 to 2015, the California fishing harvest value dropped 43 percent, $109 million

(NOAA).

Eighteen dams in California block access to high cold water streams with gravel beds for

spawning; some flows have been disconnected since the 1950s. The ecosystems of San Francisco

Bay are collapsing due to excessive water diversion from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers

causing decreased flows, lower water levels, and more salt intrusion. The Tuolumne River has 80

percent of its flow diverted and the San Joaquin River has 90 percent diverted. Increased salinity

reduces plankton growth at the base of the food chain, and increases the invasive overbite clam,

which consumes plankton. Less water kills fish. The delta smelt and five more fish species are

severely endangered and dozens of others are in severe decline. Before the Tuolumne was dammed,

130,000 salmon spawned in its headwaters, carrying nutrients from the oceans far inland to fertilize

the base of the food chain, supporting trees, aquatic insects, raptors. Insects feeding on dead salmon

become the food of the next generation. Millions of baby salmon are dying on their way to the

ocean because the water is too warm. Some seasonal runs of salmon are close to extinction. In 2014

and 2015 warm water killed 95 percent of winter-run salmon. In 2015 under 500 salmon returned to

the Tuolumne. About one hundred species depend on the salmon.

Industrial Agribusiness Modern agriculture is both a cause of the crisis and a victim of it. The political influence of

agribusiness, both large corporations, particularly Monsanto, and organized farming interests, has

caused subsidies for unhealthy crops, mismanagement of aquifers, and no regulation of dangerous

chemicals.

“For mass producing toxic chemicals, aggressively running small farms out of business, and

recklessly promoting genetically engineered seeds that exacerbate food scarcity globally - again. Last

year, Monsanto lobbyists attached riders to the Farm Bill and other legislation to prevent its GMO

products from being regulated. Now, the corporation wants full immunity from any federal laws that

are placed on genetically modified crops while communities wait for results from environmental

impact studies.” -Corporate Accountability International,

https://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/campaigns/corporate-hall-shame

Large tax subsidies go to corn and soy, reducing their price and resulting in unfair competition

with fruits and vegetables, more cows and methane emissions, cheaper meat, and ethanol for biofuel

that produces more GHG than it reduces. Poor regulation of GMOs causes problems for adjacent

farmlands trying to stay organic. Subsidies reduce the cost of gasoline and the cost of transport,

creating unfair competition with locally produced food.

Mismanagement of aquifers has cause steadily falling water levels, increased pumping costs, and

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ground subsidence. The lack of regulation of pesticides and fertilizers has resulted in storm runoff

polluted by excess fertilizer and animal waste producing algae blooms, loss of milkweed, amphibians,

and butterflies. Excessive use of antibiotics is causing the emergence of resistant bacteria, and

monoculture and excessive use of herbicides is causing emergence of resistant weeds and plant

diseases. Chemical fertilizers replacing mulch gradually uses up the organic matter in soil and the

nitrogen fixing bacteria and worms that enrich and aerate the soil. Soil become harder and less

absorptive of rain, which runs off more quickly with erosion and sediment. The soil losses its humus

and tilth, or natural fertility. Corn subsidies reduce the cost of high fructose corn syrup, a major

cause of obesity. Artificial coloring, flavoring, and preservatives added to foods are unhealthy for

some people. The result is nutritionally negative food at a high cost to the environment.

Crop failures

New climate patterns will change which crops can be grown in which areas. Some regions are

projected to experience overall declines: for instance, cereal crop production is expected to fall in

areas that now have the highest population density and the most undernourished people, notably

most of Africa and India.

Key crop-growing areas, such as California, which provides half of the fruits, nuts, and

vegetables for the United States, will experience uneven effects across crops, requiring farmers to

adapt rapidly to changing what they plant. Tropical areas are losing crop productivity while those

toward the poles get a warmer growing climate. Climate change reduces yields by decreasing rainfall

in many large farming areas.

The New York Times reported that by the first months of 2013, United States taxpayers had

already paid $7 billion to subsidize farmers for crops that failed because of extreme drought, and

that figure is anticipated to rise as high as $16 billion.41

Pollinators

The human food supply depends on pollination. Seventeen percent of pollinators with

backbones—hummingbirds and bats—are going extinct. The causes are reduced diversity of crops,

pesticides (especially neonicotinoids), habitat loss and urbanization, disease, parasites, pathogens,

and climate change The largest single use of neonicotinoids, bee-toxic insecticides, is seed coatings

for crops like corn. Almost all U.S. corn uses seeds coated with neonic chemicals. 89% of the

coating washing off the seed and contaminates the wildflowers, soil, and water. Corn acreage in 2016

is three times higher than prior to seed coatings being used. A United Nations analysis of all

scientific known papers warns that twenty percent of species of wild bees, butterflies, and other

pollinators are shrinking toward extinction..42

Auto Dependency 41

Ron Nixon, “Record Taxpayer Cost Is Seen for Crop Insurance,” Jan. 15, 2013.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/us/politics/record-taxpayer-cost-is-seen-for-crop-insurance.html?_r=0

42 AP Feb. 27 2016. Simon Potts, Director, Center for Agri-Environmental Research, University of Reading

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Auto dependency is caused by cheap fossil fuels and the underpricing of autos in terms of the

whole economy, including non-monetized values. The world is rapidly increasing the number and

use of cars. Other modes of transportation, especially walking and bicycling, are shrinking in

proportion. Underpricing drives land use dispersion, resulting in a suburban system which makes

healthy and sustainable modes uneconomic and unavailable. In the US 88% of trips are made by car.

Californians own 32 million registered vehicles for 29 million people aged 16 and older. Auto

dependency is a major factor in the mass extinction, climate disruption, pollution, land, and ocean

problems discussed above.43

A sudden disruption in supply or increase in price would disrupt the monetary economy. More

transit can be implemented quickly but is not cost effective for dispersed land uses. Land use to

build walkable neighborhoods can respond only slowly. Non-fossil autos are not yet competitive.

Overcoming auto dependency will take time.

The Scope and Pace of Change It is hard to find a scientific journal dealing with nature that does not have articles concerned

about the scope and pace of change. It is equally hard to find an average American with any

significant knowledge about the crisis. The journal, Nature Climate Change in 2016 published a major

article reporting that the rate warming is fifty times faster than that during periods of coming out of

past ice ages, with now irreversible sea level rises pushing upwards of a quarter of the human

population away from coasts. NASA reports that February 2016 was the warmest February ever

measured, up 2.83 degrees Fahrenheit above the preindustrial baseline.44 The poles warm above

average, and parts of the Arctic were 29 degrees warmer than baseline. In 2016 Nature Geoscience

reported that carbon emissions are higher than the highest found in fossil records going back 56

million years. In general, scientists have erred on the side of caution, which is not, in fact, the

scientific thing to do. As a result, realities have generally outstripped expectations, and new reports

show more degradation that was previously predicted.

Science is not fully scientific; it has a culture of caution and fear of criticism. Many scientists

have muted saying what they really think when, in fact, the science calls for political action. Former

NASA scientist James Hansen, who says “we have a global emergency,” and similar scientists are

getting it right. Fortunately, more scientists are now debating if the 2015 Paris Accord is somewhat

inadequate or totally inadequate.45

43

Major source: Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle Washington correspondent, SF Chronicle, Sept. 3,

2013

44 Eric Holthaus, “Our Planet’s Temperature Just Reached a Terrifying Milestone,” Slate, March 12 2016.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/03/01/february_2016_s_shocking_global_warming_temperature_rec

ord.html

45 James Hansen et al., March 22, 2016, release in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

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An Overview

Climate Disruption outstrips our ability to model worst-case scenarios, as it is happening so

much faster than was ever anticipated. Sixty-three percent of all human-generated carbon

emissions have been produced in the last 25 years, but there is a 40-year time lag between global

emissions and climate consequences.

Since the industrial revolution began, the human species has increased the average global

temperature by .85 degrees Celsius. In December 2010, the UN Environment Program

predicted up to a 5 degrees Celsius increase by 2050. A 3.5 degrees Celsius increase would

reduce food to the level of oceanic plankton and trigger temperature extremes that would

severely limit terrestrial vegetation and our ability to feed ourselves.

Humans have never lived on a planet with temperatures 3.5 degrees Celsius above baseline.

An increasing number of climate change scientists now fear that our situation is already so

serious, and so many self-reinforcing feedback loops are already in play, that we are in the

process of causing our own extinction, even in the course of the next few decades.

A scientific report published last year revealed that in the near-term, Earth's climate will

change 10 times faster than at any other moment in the last 65 million years. Science already

shows that we are currently experiencing change 200 to 300 times faster than any of the

previous major extinction events.

From Truthout, March 17, 2014

Misconceptions This section looks at three issue alleged to be major ecological and economic problems.

Overconsumption?

Some writers claim problems are caused by general over-consumption. However, we enjoy

consumption and we need consumption. Some consumption is far more harmful than other, and

reform should concentrate on that, not some vague, unattainable and undesirable goal. A good catch

phrase is to focus on bads, not goods, and on over-consumption of fossil fuels and dangerous

chemicals. Market prices fail to include non-monetized, external costs. Too low a price degrades the

whole economy, the one that includes the environment. We cannot mandate in detail a sustainable

economy because it is too complex, but we can have prices which drive us toward one, with

sustainable consumption replacing undesirable consumption over time.

Declining population?

Some claim stable or declining populations will not have the labor force needed for economic

growth, and therefore we should encourage more population growth. There is, however, no “birth

dearth.” World fertility rates have fallen from 4.9 births per woman in the 1960s to the current 2.6,

which is still too high. By contrast, about half the world—Japan, Western Europe, China, Vietnam,

Brazil, Iran, Thailand, and other emerging economies—has birth rates below the 2.1 rate needed for

CSUEB, Sustainability, 3 semester units, first day. p. 33

Creation Care, Chapter One: Crisis of the Anthropocene p. 33

zero growth. The advanced democracies use productivity per person, not more people, to get

growth or, increasingly, to enjoy a high quality of life not well-measured in monetary terms. The

United States, the world's third-largest country in population behind China and India, and the only

rich country still growing, recently saw its birth rate fall to 1.9.

The improvement in the status of women has driven birth rates down through education,

economic opportunity, legal protections, family planning, and, to a small extent, therapeutic

abortion. Across cultures, women, if they can, choose to live a better life with fewer children.

The revolution in the status of women, however, is incomplete. The high costs in time and

money of children still primarily falls on women so, with improved status and given a choice, they

reduce the burden. Once a developed country chooses to tax itself to ease the cost of children, and

even make it pay, women are ready, willing, and able to have more children, because few things in

life can be more fulfilling. In most industrialized countries, the birth rate has been declining, but

Sweden and France, by focusing on gender equality, have successfully recovered a replacement birth

rate.46

We don’t have any clear idea of an ideal population or of how to have “growth without

growth,” that is, a stable population increasing its sustainability and growing in other ways. We know

that population growth is problematic, whether because of poverty or affluence, but we don’t know

how much is enough. Technology is also a great cause of negative impacts. As we enter an era of

stable or declining population, we need some debate on these issues.

Too many old people?

The ratio of older people to younger is increasing, in theory imposing an increasing burden

on younger workers to provide for the retired. The problem can be solved to some extent by raising

the age for “old” and thus adjusting the ratio. An older age for old is justified. Health and the ability

and desire to work are increasing faster than longevity. Many older people want to work at jobs they

choose. There should be incentives for older people to work. If, for example, there are tax penalties

like loss of retirement income if one works, people are likely to work less for money. In my case, I

retired to avoid income loss and tax penalties. I now work voluntarily on sustainability analysis and

advocacy. My wife retired but working almost fulltime at caring for grandchildren so that our kids

can work for money. Rebalancing incentives for working by seniors can solve the age ratio problem,

if it exists at all.

Alas, poor Shakespeare—I knew him , Horatio.

Yesterday, and today, and tomorrow,

Race in this rapid pace from day to day,

From the first syllable of recorded time;

And all our todays have lighted fools

The way to climate death. Out, out, brief fossil!

46

Steven Philip Kramer, The Other Population Crisis: What Governments Can Do about Falling Birth Rates

CSUEB, Sustainability, 3 semester units, first day. p. 34

Creation Care, Chapter One: Crisis of the Anthropocene p. 34

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor denier

That struts and frets his minute upon the media

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by idiots, full of falsity and certainty

Signifying failure.

CSUEB, Sustainability, 3 semester units, first day. p. 35

Creation Care, Chapter One: Crisis of the Anthropocene p. 35

A Good Graph

CSUEB, Sustainability, 3 semester units, first day. p. 36

Creation Care, Chapter One: Crisis of the Anthropocene p. 36

A Good Quote

Nicholas St. Fleur, “Signs of the ‘Human Age,’” NYT, Jan. 11, 2015

Welcome to the “Anthropocene” — a new epoch in our planet’s 4.5 billion year history.

Thanks to the colossal changes humans have made since the mid-20th century, Earth has now

entered a distinct age from the Holocene epoch, which started 11,700 years ago as the ice age

thawed. That’s according to an argument made by a team of scientists from the Anthropocene

Working Group. Scientists say an epoch ends following an event – like the asteroid that

demolished the dinosaurs and ended the late Cretaceous Epoch 66 million years ago – that

altered the underlying rock and sedimentary layers so significantly that its remnants can be

observed across the globe. In a paper published Thursday in Science, the researchers presented

evidence for why they think mankind’s marks over the past 65 years ushered in a new

geological time period. Here are a few examples:

Modern Agriculture

In the last century, fertilizers used in crop production doubled the amount of nitrogen and

phosphorus in the soil. Signals of these chemicals found within lake strata are now at their

highest levels in the past 100,000 years.

Aluminum

Rarely found in its native form before the 1800s, global production of aluminum has

increased by 98 percent since the 1950s.

Concrete

Pervasive since World War II, concrete is now the world’s primary building material. The

amount produced in the last 20 years is enough to cover each square foot of the planet with

three ounces of concrete.

Plastic

The amount of plastic produced each year weighs roughly as much as all humans on Earth

combined. Some is recycled, but most gets discarded to landfills or ends up in the ocean.

Plastics, along with aluminum and concrete, decay very slowly and will leave behind

identifiable fossils, called “technofossils,” in the geological record.

Nuclear Fallout

Fallout from thermonuclear weapons detonated in the mid-20th century generated clear

signals of carbon-14 and plutonium-239 across the globe that will be detectable in sediments

and ice for at least 100,000 years.

Landfills

Materials disposed in landfills and used in construction and mining have introduced the

greatest number of new minerals to the environment since the Great Oxygenation Event 2.3

billion years ago.

Urban Structures

Humans have transformed more than half of Earth’s land surface with buildings, roads,

mines, farms and landfills, among other uses.

Dams

In the past 60 years, large dams have been constructed worldwide at a rate of one per day.

Each will last for 50 to 200 years, interrupting the flow of sediments to the ocean and

disrupting the formation of rock layers.