One year ago, representatives of 168 nations met at the U.N. headquarters in New York for the ceremony opening the Paris Climate Change Agreement for ratification. It was a day of optimism and celebration. Earth Day 2017 finds little justification for either celebration or optimism.
Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970, at a time when the public was rapidly becoming sensitive to environmental concerns, especially water and air pollution. Climate change was not a major issue. At the time, the atmospheric CO2 level was 325 ppm, on April 20th of this year it was 409.76 ppm, an astonishing increase of 26%.
Of great concern is that not only the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing, the rate of increase continues to grow. Earth Day 2017 marks the first Earth Day that we have firmly crossed the 400 ppm mark, a level of atmospheric CO2 that may never again be seen by our species.
On this Earth Day we are seeing increasing indications that future releases of methane, a potent but relatively short-lived, greenhouse gas have been underestimated. And we now have a far better knowledge of the melting of ice shelves and glaciers that we did a year ago. We now know that the ice is melting not only from the top down, but from the bottom up and internally due to warming ocean waters. Grounded ice shelves act as a barrier, preventing inland glaciers from flowing into to the ocean, As the bottom of the ice shelves melt and they become free-floating and the barrier to glacial movement is removed. Consequently it is now generally felt that the predicted sea level targets in the Paris Agreement may be significantly underestimated.
Overshadowing all else is the major political upheaval in the United States resulting from the election of Donald Trump as President and a Republican majority in the Senate. With control of the Senate Trump has been able to fill the upper echelons of government with personnel dedicated to dismantling our government while enriching the ultra-wealthy. Exactly how much they can accomplish has yet to be determined, but they can do significant "damage". Actions already taken by President Trump's use of presidential powers have made it impossible to for the United States to come even close to meeting its commitment to the Paris Agreement. At best our level of emissions will remain at the 2016 level. Actions announced by the administration, but not yet implemented, would drastically reduce government regulatory and science capabilities. Reduction of these capabilities will require legislative and/or budgetary action by Congress and would undoubtedly result in a number of lawsuits which will delay implementation.
On a personal note, I have just returned from participating the Washington D.C. March for Science. It was discouraging to realize that in some instances we have lost what we rallied for on Earth Day 1970 and that the two signature pieces of legislation attributed to that Earth Day, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, are now the top two environmental laws targeted for dismantling. In spite of a cold, rainy day I strongly suspect that the pre-march prediction of 75,000 participants was greatly exceeded. I am optimistic that the energy and enthusiasm exhibited at today's march, at the March for Women, and that I anticipate for next Saturdays People's March for Climate, will be maintained and result in a far greater political awareness and involvement. It is our only hope.
I'm not much of a Trump fan, either, but not for his climate comments. He's merely another in a long line of war mongers, pushing more and more war, more and more tyranny, and more and more globalist corporate nonsense.
I applaud the desire to "save the planet." Nearly 10 years ago, Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" was one of my favorite films. I had long known that humans are trashing the planet and that we need to do far more. I had studied climate science since the mid-70s and at least understood the basics — enough to calculate effective temperatures and optical thicknesses of atmospheres (greenhouse effect). But then about 5 years ago, one of my more intelligent, younger brothers asked a question that got me thinking. It started me questioning the level of climate alarm and its details.
For instance, I knew that we currently live in an Ice Age. So, why again was "global warming" a bad thing? Researching climate history and its effects on humanity, I discovered that the greatest disasters to civilization occurred during bouts of global cooling. When the Earth cools, there's less evaporation, less rain and more failed crops. When people starve, they riot!
As a young man, Isaac Newton was pressured by his mother to learn farming. The late 17th century was smack dab in the middle of the Little Ice Age and people were hurting for food. Young Isaac ignored his mother's advice and pursued science, instead. We can be thankful of that.
It's funny that so many people don't trust corporations and their rampant greed, but still get their news (and science) from the corporations which are owned by the same people who own Big Oil, Big Food, Big War, etc.
There is a catastrophe happening in climate, but it's not from warming and its not from carbon dioxide. CO2 has been at starvation levels for millions of years. In fact, when CO2 fell to 800 ppm, plants worldwide freaked out enough to evolve C4 species, in parallel, in order to cope with the CO2 starvation. And merely 15,000 years ago, CO2 came within 30 ppm of Lovelock's mass extinction level. If that had happened, we might have lost all C3 species — 85% of all plants and nearly 99% of all food crop species. No more coffee, toast and jam for breakfast. No more OJ, beans, oats, apples, etc.
We live in an Ice Age. Those 2 little white things at the poles should not become larger. Otherwise, we'd be headed for real disaster. There's a good reason civilization had to wait for the massive, end-of-Younger Dryas global warming to get started. Glacial periods are brutal. And the Holocene is overdue to end. Why is the UN proposing more global cooling measures? In an ongoing Ice Age?