Sustainability 101: Climate Change (Part 3: Doomsday)

I’ll admit, the above title is clickbait. My goal here is not to be pessimistic in any way, but to illustrate what the big deal is with a little more heat energy being trapped in our atmosphere. With an appreciation of what this means for us, we can better understand why governments and businesses are doing what they’re doing.

How bad can it get, really?

In my last article, I ended with this question. If you’ve been paying attention to the news at any point in the past decade, you likely already know what the highlights are. We can expect more storms, more droughts, colder cold snaps, hotter heat waves, mass extinctions, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and so on. All these things being true may seem conflicting and nonsensical to some, and I can certainly see why.

More Energy Means Wild Weather

In primary school we learned that temperature is a measure of heat energy. More energy in a system means more molecule movement and a higher temperature. We learned that this means there is more heat energy in summer and less heat energy in winter. It seemed simple, and following this logic we must be destined to a future of unrelenting fire rain if the temperature is rising – right?

Well, sort of. We’re not headed to apocalyptic fire rain – at least not until our sun turns into a red giant in 5 billion years – but the average temperature is going up. This is due to the trapped IR radiation (heat energy) that I wrote about in my last article. With more heat energy trapped in our atmosphere, we’re not only raising the temperature, we’re introducing more energy into the system.

With more energy trapped in our planetary system, we will have more water vapor in the atmosphere where water exists, hot and dry conditions worsening where water doesn’t exist, and warmer oceans. This leads to some understandable consequences like ice melt. It also contributes to come more complicated processes, like easier formation of large hurricanes because these feed off of heat energy in oceans. Another effect is destabilized jet streams, which allows for air normally trapped over the poles to move toward the equator. It’s this event that led to blisteringly cold periods over the mid-west of the USA in past years.

This is my car, under that snow mound circled with red.

NASA indicates that warmer oceans and destabilized jet streams can lead to more blizzards like this one above, from 2015.

There is a lot of information out there about how weather is impacted by this heat energy, and what local impacts may be. NASA has an informative page with regional breakdown of concerns for those of you in the USA.

Carex in the Coal Mine

So the weather will get wild, with more storms, floods, heat waves, cold snaps, fires... How will the plant and animal kingdoms cope?

I like to garden. It’s hard to do so in urban environments, but I do what I can. If you’re a US-based gardener like me you’re probably familiar with the concept of the USDA’s agricultural Hardiness Zones. Canada has a similar map. These zones show what sort of climate is present for growing conditions. They relate to lowest average temperature, taking into account data for elevation, exposure, and other things that effect micro-climates. Over time this map has been updated to include more recent data.

From this we can learn that the coldest temperatures are increasing across the country. For crops, this lengthens the growing season. However, combined with the projected increase in droughts, heat waves, and changes in precipitation patterns our crops will have an uphill battle to maintain food production.

So plants of direct importance to humans will likely see longer growing seasons, but also face harsh growing conditions. What about native plants? Unfortunately they will face even more difficult challenges. Many rare or endangered plants are more vulnerable to the threat of extinction by climate change impacts. This is because their conditions for survival – niche habitats or growing conditions – do not lend to hearty adaption to changing climate. Unlike animals who can move to more favorable locations (such as birds who are already changing their migratory patterns), plants cannot uproot themselves.

Some studies estimate that native plant species growing ranges may shift by up to 90 miles in the worst projections of climate change impacts. However, if this occurs too rapidly for plants to adapt and seed themselves to follow the trend, mass plant extinctions may occur. If the base of our food chain falters in this way, impact to animals further up the food chain is inevitable. This is where many warnings of mass extinctions originate from.

Human Impact

What does this all mean for us? As I presented above, our food sources may be disrupted and our ecosystems may experience extinctions. The land around us will be rocked by harsh and extreme weather phenomena, which may cause economic damage. Additionally, the health impacts of climate change may present significant human and economic impact. The CDC warns that there are many avenues of health concerns that originate from climate change. These include food security, water and insect-borne diseases, and physical danger from fires and weather events.

Though we human beings are an adaptive and hearty species, we face many challenges from climate change. There are many of us who are doing something about it, though. It’s not all nihilistic hopelessness.

We are taking action.

To be continued…

Thank you for joining me for this Sustainability 101 explanation. There is a lot of ground to cover in this series, so please join me for upcoming articles on subjects like climate change and science-based targets, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and solutions like RECs, carbon offsets, and carbon taxes.