Climate Change Is Accelerating.
Actually, we should call it climate destruction.
Normally I try to stay away from politics here, although this George Orwell quote comes to mind:
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.1
But when the Republican Party selects a Speaker of the House who questions climate science and doesn’t believe that burning fossil fuels has anything to do with global warming, and when that happens on the same day that I’m writing about the dire situation we’re in – well, I can’t help but mention this.
The reason why I became vegan more than 20 years ago, after many years as a vegetarian, was mainly because I couldn’t condone the cruelty which is the price you pay when you eat dairy products. Or anything else produced by the agricultural industry. Yes, the health benefits were a welcome bonus, as was the realization that vegan foods require way fewer natural resources. But first and foremost I couldn’t stand the suffering of the animals, my fellow sentient beings. For a number of years now a second, equally important reason has been added: the human-caused warming of our planet. A plant-based diet is but one step to mitigate its dire effects; many more are needed.
In this post, I will focus on the Arctic, which is heating up nearly four times as fast as the globe overall. This has a number of deeply disturbing results:
Surface air temperature has risen. In June of 2020 for example, a Siberian town in the Arctic Circle reached 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The average high temperature is in the high 60s.2
The albedo feedback is impacted: snow and ice reflects almost all the sun’s energy back to space (albedo), which means that the surface temperature remains more or less the same. But Arctic sea ice decline creates a feedback loop which accelerates the speed of the temperature rise and leads to more of the ice melting. More rain instead of snow falls.
Permafrost is thawing. About a quarter of the landmass of the Northern Hemisphere (about 7 million square miles) is – or rather was – permanently frozen. This soil layer is rich in organic matter, and when it thaws it releases an enormous amount of carbon dioxide and methane, accelerating the warming. Lakes are disappearing, the ground collapses, and hillsides are sliding.3
Clearly, these various results of rising temperatures in the Arctic have detrimental effects for the native animals. Let’s have a look at some of them:
Loss of sea ice is putting polar bears in jeopardy. They use the ice as platforms to hunt from, and when too much ice melts in the summer, they’ll have to go hungry or even starve. Prolonged fasting affects cubs and yearlings most, and mother bears won’t be able to raise their offspring to an age of independence.
Polar bears are the first species to be listed under the Endangered Species Act because of a direct link between their survival and climate change. The ICUN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List of Threatened Species categorized the polar bear as vulnerable in 2015.
Just like polar bears, ringed seals require sea ice to live and reproduce. And because they are the main item on a polar bear’s menu, their decline in numbers further endangers the bears. Ringed seals are their most important food source.
A female ringed seal gives birth to her pup within a lair that she constructs while pregnant. She digs it in a snow drift that formed over one of her breathing holes (ringed seals live below the frozen ice during winter and spring; they each maintain several holes and keep them open by scratching the ice with their fore flippers). Usually, the lair’s snow cover hardens because of steady wind and provides protection for the newborn pup – both from the cold and from hunting bears. The ringed seal babies can fatten up until they have more than quadrupled their weight by early summer when the ice starts to break up. That’s when they become a needed source of fat for hunting bears.4
Both creatures are severely threatened by the rapidly warming weather in the Arctic. The protective lairs of the seals melt and collapse early; the immature pups are exposed to the bears but have little nutritional value because they haven’t accumulated any fat yet. And that’s what the polar bears desperately need in early spring.
Another animal threatened by climate change is the arctic fox, the only canid that changes its coat’s color: white in the winter, brown and blond in the summer. Perfect camouflage! ICUN lists them as “Least Concern”; however, their last assessment was in June of 2014, and they are classified as critically endangered in Norway, endangered in Sweden, and extinct in Finland.5 While this was caused in large part by the fur trade, arctic foxes face scarcity of prey: those living inland hunt lemmings, voles, and other small rodents, and those living in coastal areas feed on seabirds, fish, and other invertebrates. Since lemmings need snow burrows to protect them in the winter, rising temperatures lead to a situation similar to that of ringed seals and polar bears. The lemmings’ burrows collapse and many of them die, leading to food scarcity for arctic foxes.
There are other species threatened by a warming climate in the Arctic, such as walruses and reindeer, and the message is clear by now: temperatures in the Arctic are rising at an alarming rate with dire consequences not only for the flora and fauna of the region but for the rest of the world. Maybe you’ll figure I’m preaching to the choir. Anybody interested in my Substack probably thinks along similar lines as I do. But I’m asking you: what can we do? What can be done? I am convinced that we need a paradigm shift, a systemic reset. Something that changes our collective minds from seeking pleasure and convenience and more and more “stuff” to caring for others, for the environment, for whatever is around us. Not “me” but “us”. A new mindset that connects all the dots, that isn’t driven by profit seeking but by commitment to Truth and Goodness. Is such a fundamental “re-set” possible? I’ve no idea; but without it the future seems bleak.
Next week we’ll look at the Antarctic.
Valid points and valid worries - our existence has never been in such peril as it currently is. The situation seems hopeless because so many factors drive the behavior of idiot politicians who like to dance in their 15 minutes of fame. At the forefront is how the international monetary system works - money controls everything, and our world system is solely based on money. Nothing changes until that bit changes...