Spring keeps coming earlier each year. Why you ask? Well, I bet you all can answer that question, being the smart and well informed people that you are, but for the rare and random drive-by reader who is unaware of what’s causing my nasal passages to swell with mucous, here it is:
Washington’s famous Japanese cherry trees are primed to burst out in a perfect pink peak about the end of this month. Thirty years ago, the trees usually waited to bloom till around April 5.
In central California, the first of the field skipper sachem, a drab little butterfly, was fluttering about on March 12. Just 25 years ago, that creature predictably emerged there anywhere from mid-April to mid-May.
And sneezes are coming earlier. On March 9, when allergist Dr. Donald Dvorin set up his monitor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, maple pollen already was heavy in the air. Less than two decades ago, that pollen couldn’t be measured until late April. […]
“The alarm clock that all the plants and animals are listening to is running too fast,” Stanford University biologist Terry Root said.
Blame global warming.
The fingerprints of man-made climate change are evident in seasonal timing changes for thousands of species on Earth, according to dozens of studies and last year’s authoritative report by the Nobel Prize-awarded international climate scientists. More than 30 scientists told The Associated Press how global warming is affecting plants and animals at springtime across the country, in almost every state.
What is happening is so noticeable that scientists can track it from space. Satellites measuring when land turns green found that spring “green-up” is arriving eight hours earlier every year on average since 1982 in the northeastern United States.
And the time to do something to halt this inevitable catastrophe for our planet is quickly running out:
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“Paleoclimate evidence and ongoing global changes imply that today’s CO2, about 385 ppm, is already too high to maintain the climate to which humanity, wildlife, and the rest of the biosphere are adapted,” [James Hansen, NASA climate scientist] writes, with eight co-authors, in a draft paper that has not been accepted for publication. Policy makers had aimed to slow carbon emissions so that the concentration does not reach 450 parts per million, or ppm, double the pre-industrial concentration.
“Realization that we must reduce the current CO2 amount has a bright side: effects that had begun to seem inevitable, including impacts of ocean acidification, loss of fresh water supplies, and shifting of climatic zones, may be averted by the necessity of finding an energy course beyond fossil fuels sooner than would otherwise have occurred,” Hansen writes. “We suggest an initial objective of reducing atmospheric CO2 to 350 ppm, with the target to be adjusted as scientific understanding and empirical evidence of climate effects accumulate.” […]
“The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II,” Hansen writes. “The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.”
In short we need to roll back our carbon levels to those not seen since 1988 if we want to prevent a global die off of monumental proportions. It means an end to selfish, narcissistic thinking. It demands global cooperation, not delay and obfuscation. It requires us to rethink the way in which we live our lives:
We need to conserve energy. That’s the cheapest way to reduce carbon. Screw in the energy-saving lightbulbs, but that’s just the start. You have to blow in the new insulation — blow it in so thick that you can heat your home with a birthday candle. You have to plug in the new appliances — not the flat-screen TV, which uses way more power than the old set, but the new water-saving front-loading washer. And once you’ve got it plugged in, turn the dial so that you’re using cold water. The dryer? You don’t need a dryer — that’s the sun’s job.
We need to generate the power we use cleanly. Wind is the fastest growing source of electricity generation around the world — but it needs to grow much faster still. Solar panels are increasingly common — especially in Japan and Germany, which are richer in political will than they are in sunshine. Much of the technology is now available; we need innovation in financing and subsidizing more than we do in generating technology.We need to change our habits — really, we need to change our sense of what we want from the world.
Do we want enormous homes and enormous cars, all to ourselves? If we do, then we can’t deal with global warming. Do we want to keep eating food that travels 1,500 miles to reach our lips? Or can we take the bus or ride a bike to the farmers’ market? Does that sound romantic to you? Farmers’ markets are the fastest growing part of the American food economy; their heaviest users may be urban-dwelling immigrants, recently enough arrived from the rest of the world that they can remember what actual food tastes like. Which leads to the next necessity:
This is the problem we face. A world where we need to stop increasing carbon emissions by 3% each year, and start decreasing them, immediately. We need to use less electricity until we can find non-carbon emitting alternatives. We need, perhaps more than anything, the political will to demand our leaders take this threat seriously, or at least as seriously as we take celebrity gossip and the latest electronic gizmo that everyone must have.
For what you can do to leave a smaller carbon footprint, may I suggest clicking on the links found in Egarwaen’s recommended diary The Choice We Have to Make. They give you a wealth of information about what can be done by ordinary citizens to begin to address this problem. And one thing we can do is insist our Presidential candidates make this issue a priority, because regardless of whether you are a diehard Clinton supporter or an Obamamaniac, we need both Democratic candidates to promise that reducing carbon emissions will be job one whichever one takes office next year. Time is running out. Let’s not waste any more of it.