September 29, 2014 from Linda Moulton Howe, Reporter and Editor, Earthfiles to Earthfiles Facebook members: My September 26-26th Earthfiles reports and COAST broadcast included a half-hour with the Science Director of the National Audubon Society about the serious extinction threat to half of North American birds this century as climate warming is rapidly changing habitat food supplies. The facts are real: eggs are not being laid. Or if laid, the chicks are dying - 100% in some places in 2014 because of drought. For example, the Atlantic Puffin no longer have the same fish to catch the Puffin have had for centuries because their normal food supply has gone further north into cooler waters. Thus, the only food the Puffin have had to feed their chicks in past year have been a new species of fish that is too large to go down the mouths of Puffin chicks and they have all died. Estimates of the atmospheric CO2 concentrations prior to 1958 can be made by analyzing the bubbles in ice at different depths in ice sheets, for instance in Antarctica. This analysis shows that there were about 280 parts per million of CO2 in the Earths atmosphere prior to 1800 AD, at least as far back as 1000 AD and probably for the past 1 million years. By 2014, CO2 has now reached 400 ppm, the figure that scientists have long worried about could be a tipping point into climate change that will affect Earth for a long time to come. Since graduating from Stanford University in 1968 with a Masters Degree in Communication, my producing-writing-editing-directing-reporting beat has always been science, the environment, medicine and — since 1979 and my investigation of animal mutilations — real X-Files. In 1977, while producing medical and science programming for the ABC station in Boston, Massachusetts, WCVB-TV, where I was included in a station Peabody Award for excellence in science and medical productions, I interviewed Prof. Michael B. McElroy, Professor of Environmental Studies whose focus has long been the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, including interactions with the biosphere, and evolution of planetary atmospheres. My interview with him in 1977 included the subject of his efforts to develop computer models for increasing CO2 that was even then a topic of concern among scientists. Prof. McElroy told me that their computer science was new and they had no way of modeling the role of oceans at the time, but what they could model about CO2 indicated that by the turn of the 20th to 21st century if CO2 increasing emissions were not slowed, the projection for the 21st century was increasing swings of temperatures, intense rains from more water absorbed in warmer air, more fires in lands parched by drought, increasing storm intensities, the loss of some islands and a lot of southern Florida to rising seas as mountain glaciers and Arctic ice melt because of jet stream and wind patterns expected to change over the future decades that would make the Arctic warm more rapidly. Without being able to include 2/3s of the Earth — its oceans and seas — Prof. McElroys computer projections and discussion with me for a TV program in 1977 were quite accurate when looked back from September 2014. Today, scientists have been reporting how much CO2 has been absorbed by the oceans in the past half-century to the point that waters are now becoming so acidic that oysters in Puget Sound are dying in masses while other marine creatures dependent upon shells to survive are also dying in the increasingly acidic oceans. The threat to climate stability is now increased because the oceans can only absorb so much CO2. That huge absorption up to this point has helped keep CO2 levels in the atmosphere above the absorbing oceans below 400 ppm. But already that mark has been reached, once considered a major tipping point for the past twenty years of arguments about global warming. What is expected by atmospheric scientists now is that saturated ocean sea surfaces wont be able to absorb the CO2 as they have been and more CO2 will continue to rise in the atmosphere. That means there could be a jump in CO2 levels in the next ten years, along with rapidly increasing amounts of methane from melting permafrost, which will make temperature swings, rains, drought, fires, tornadoes more intense. Many economists are now writing about the increasing threat that violent weather will have on gutting government budgets. In my work at Earthfiles and my news reports for COAST radio, Dreamland Online radio and other media, my goal has always been to bring the pressure of fact. Some of those facts now around the world and reported more frequently than ever before include many different Earth creature die-offs such as birds as I reported about on September 26th COAST with the Science Director of the National Audubon Society in Washington, D. C. He explained several examples of bird food supplies that have diminished or disappeared with changing ocean temperatures and drought and loss of land habitats. Today, many scientists are describing this modern era of the 21st Century as a 6th mass extinction of Earth life that follows the 5th mass extinction 65 million years ago when scientists think a large asteroid slammed into the Gulf of Mexico, killed off all the dinosaurs and most plants while the oceans flooded up to 40% of the continents. Here is an excerpt from The New York Times Editorial Board on Sunday, September 28, 2014: “A tracking initiative called the Global Carbon Project recently reported that greenhouse gas emissions jumped 2.3 percent in 2013, mainly because of big increases in China and India. This means it is becoming increasingly difficult to limit global warming to an upper boundary of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. Beyond that point, scientists say, a world already suffering from disappearing glaciers, rising seas and persistent droughts could face even more alarming consequences. Avoiding such a fate is going to require a revolution in the way the world produces and consumes energy, which clearly has to involve national governments, no matter how much commitment there is on the streets and in the boardrooms.” nytimes/2014/09/22/science/earth/scientists-report-global-rise-in-greenhouse-gas-emissions.html?_r=0
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 19:07:55 +0000