President Barack Obama journeyed to Alaska in the summer of 2016. He hiked to the edge of a glacier. Water dripped steadily to the ground from the edge of it. Obama drank part of a cup of herbal tea made with water from the glacier. Photographs of the glacier taken thirty years before showed how it had shrunk dramatically with the passage of time. Glaciers all over the world are now melting.
Scientists have proven the veracity of theories such as including gravity, evolution, relativity, and climate change. They have been proven with experiments, observational studies, plus hundreds of scientific papers and books. There are those who are skeptical about evolution and climate change. Most evangelical voters including Mike Pence have doubts about evolution. They have Creationism which is light on science. If you ask them to explain fossils, carbon dating, tree rings and other forms of proof they will say that God put it there to test our faith.
Tatiana Schlossberg has written a book Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have. She thinks that,”climate change is the most important issue in the world.” Her book outlines problems with food, clothes, garbage, plastic, carbon dioxide, methane and many by-products of civilization. Some people like organically grown food. A problem with that is the yields per acre of most organic crops are smaller than crops grown with nitrogen based fertilizers. Since world population continues to rise we will need rising amounts of all crops in the future. Many farms is the U.S. are monocultural growers. Their main crop is corn. The government subsidizes corn growers to produce corn. Yields diminish over time without rotating crops or growing more of a variety. One solution is genetically modified crops. They can repel insect pests and increase size, and other features of what is grown. We have accepted some of that here. GMO crops have been rejected in Europe.
The temperature of the air and the water is very gradually rising. Rain Forest on land have much higher concentrations of plant and animal life than on the rest of planet Earth. Corral Reefs in the oceans have much larger concentrations of fish and marine life than other parts of the ocean. Rain Forests and corral reefs are alike in that way. Ocean water are warmer now and a bit more acidic. 30% of corral reefs are dead. Rain forests have been cut down in large parts of South America, Indonesia and elsewhere.
Another recent book about climate change is The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace Wells. His book has a wealth of information about all aspects of climate change. He says that,”the world has, at most, three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can’t halfway your way to a solution to a crises this large.” The United States is not necessarily better off than the rest of the world. Clean fresh water is in short supply here, and elsewhere. Some cities in our country,”lose more water to leaks than they deliver to homes: even here leaks and theft account for an estimated loss 16% percent of freshwater; the estimate in Brazil is 40 percent. More and more people share finite resources.
The election will be unique in 2020. President Donald Trump has said that climate change is a hoax. Most Republicans are deniers. Some smart ones have decided not to run for re-election in Congress. If Trump is a still around to debate a Democratic challenger, there is sure to be at least one question on climate change. The Democrat will have plenty to say. You will only hear the sound of silence from our bombastic president.
Deuel Woodward resides in Chula Vista.
