Why is Climate Change not a Hot Topic? Covid is a Mere Bagatelle!
By: Tessa Schlesinger
Tags: Climate Change, Government, World Issues, Global Warming, Global Pandemics

Why is Climate Change not a Hot Topic? Covid is a Mere Bagatelle!

Climate change is heating up on multiple levels. Coming all at once, they could spell the end of our civilisation. Isn’t it time, we looked at the many different aspects of global warming? Tessa Schlesinger Dec 14, 2020·15 min read

The price of not stopping climate change is the end of civilsation. Pixabay Enrique Meseguer

How do I find thee? Let me count the ways. There’s the greenhouse effect that causes the permafrost to melt and release methane into the air. There’s the mass extinction of 100 species a day that is destroying our eco-system. There’s the increase in the speed of winds in hurricanes and the increasing warmth of the oceans that is driving polar ice to melt. Then there’s the rise in volcanic eruptions that some papers have revealed to be linked to global warming. There are the droughts that mean less food and the floods that mean drowning and death and more homeless. The hellish fires that are increasing in numbers, temperature, speed of spread, are destroying all in their path. There’s the death of life in our oceans, and the death of the ocean itself as increasing heat destroys the seas which provide most of our oxygen.

Did you know that most of our oxygen comes from the sea — not from the trees?

Counting the Ways that Climate Change Affects Us.

The pandemic hit most people out of the blue. Those people who read were expecting it. It’s the same with climate change. Although most people have heard the term by now, for most it’s something nebulous. The seas are rising, they know, but that’s not important to them. What does it matter if the sea will be a foot or two higher in half a century? They can move.

And what does it matter if the earth is warming up? After all, if you’ve lived through enough snow storms, it’s nice to have a little warmth. And so it goes. Climate change doesn’t appear to be a cataclysmic ongoing event for most. It is. Here’s why.

Air: Our Lungs Don’t do Well on Methane and Other Toxic Gases.

Our human lungs breathe in 78% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen and the rest comprises argon, carbon dioxide, neon, helium, and hydrogen. Remember gas warfare? It killed people because human beings can only breathe in one particular combination of gasses. We are fortunate that our earth is surrounded by that particular formula, and one of the reasons astronauts and deep sea divers have to carry air supplies is because we will simply die if we don’t have that particular combination of gasses.

We can’t breathe methane, and methane is being increasingly released as a result of the ice caps and the permafrost melting. It’s been stored for many millennia in those areas. Nobody knows how much there is, but when scientists are concerned, I think it’s a concern.

Likewise, when the composition of our air changes — more carbon dioxide, more carbon monoxide, more chlorine, more anything — we being to have trouble breathing. Air pollution is what happens when toxic gases begin to change the balance of our air to the degree that people begin to die. There are many different gasses on earth, fifty one of them being deadly to our health.

These ancient greenhouse gases, produced from microbes chewing through ancient carbon stored in the soil, range from 2,000 to 43,000 years old. Walter Anthony and her colleagues captured methane bubbling out of 72 locations in 11 thermokarst lakes in Alaska and Siberia to measure the amount of gas released from the permafrost below the lakes, as well as used radiocarbon dating on captured samples to determine their age. Source.

Air pollution kills an estimated seven million people worldwide every year. WHO data shows that 9 out of 10 people breathe air that exceeds WHO guideline limits containing high levels of pollutants, with low- and middle-income countries suffering from the highest exposures. From smog hanging over cities to smoke inside the home, air pollution poses a major threat to health and climate. Source.

Hurricanes — The Winds that Blow Our Cities to Smithereens.

There’s been talk for some time now that a category six should be introduced for hurricanes as a result of increasing wind speeds. When wind speeds hit 190 or 215 miles per hour, not much stands in their way. The financial damage is always somewhere in the region of billions, but that is not the most severe damage. The most severe damage is in lives lost and lives damaged and lives in chaos as a result of all the destruction.

Hurricanes destroy homes, businesses, industries, and habitats. These things have taken anything from millenia to centuries to develop. They are destroyed in one fowl swoop, and they cannot just be rebuilt in a day or a year. The on going loses caused by an increasing number of hurricanes cannot be sustained.

Major hurricanes are by far the world’s costliest natural weather disasters, in some cases causing well over $100 billion in damage. There’s now evidence that the unnatural effects of human-caused global warming are already making hurricanes stronger and more destructive. The latest research shows the trend is likely to continue as long as the climate continues to warm. Source.

Pandemics and Plagues — The Result of Man Disrupting Nature’s Boundaries

The fact that so many seem to think that Covid isn’t serious or doesn’t exist or is a hoax or is ‘just the flu,’ is indicative of just how many people on our planet are unaware of the number of viruses that can slay mankind. And we’re not talking Zombie or Vampire strains here. We’re talking zoonoctic viruses. A zoonotic virus is one that lives in one species but can (and does) cross to another species. Only the species is crosses to has no immunity to that virus because, up until now, those two species did not come into contact with each other. Bats, for example, carry many viruses, and bats, most definitely, have never been pets of mankind. Nor have they been a food source.

With the rapid expansion of humanity into wild areas, the natural barriers, where species have their own space, are being destroyed. I currently live in a small town — the population is under 160,000 — and this town is growing rapidly because it is well run and away from the violence that beseiges most South African cities. With the expansion into the outlying rural areas, the space of various species is being invaded. These days, when I go outside in the morning, I can see the bat s**t on the walls. We have invaded the living quarters of the bat population, and they have repaid the compliment. They are now coming into our areas, and they carry crazy, horrendous, awful diseases. And we do not have immunity to a single one of them.

That story is being played out with many species — minks and chickens and pigs and porcupines and any of the hundreds of thousands of species that share our world with us. We are intruding on their patch, and they have not exactly laid out the welcome wagon. It would behove us to learn more about our natural world and not go where our bodies have no immunity.

Scientists warned for years that pandemics are coming. They are currently warning that the next one is three to five years away, and that the next one might not be as ‘mild’ as Covid-19 is. Is anyone listening? Nope. They are writing about how to earn $10,000 a month and how to get 17,000 followers. They are writing about those things because that’s what too many people want to read.

So long as there are people who want to have more than other people and be famous and winners and top of the pops, so long we will continue with the mad expansion, and with this mad expansion comes certain death — possibly the death of our species.

Bats have become newly infamous as reservoirs of deadly viruses. In addition to hosting an ancestral version of MERS, which has caused repeated outbreaks in people, bats also harbor very close relatives of the virus that caused the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak and today’s novel coronavirus pandemic. They are the suspected reservoir of the Ebola virus and natural hosts for Hendra, Nipah and Marburg viruses — all of which can be deadly in people. But bats appear to be special, if only in the number of high-profile viruses that they carry and appear to tolerate. With few exceptions — including rabies and the more obscure Tacaribe virus — when bats get infected with viruses they don’t appear to get sick. Source.

It’s easy to blame a bat, but is our wanton destruction of nature and the traditional habitats of species responsible for the pandemic gripping the world right now? Experts concur that the loss of biodiversity, mainly because of humans, is directly connected to the spread of deadly diseases like COVID-19. The only way to prevent these new diseases from ravaging us is to preserve intact our ecosystems and biodiversity, they caution. Source.

Floods and Sea Rising

I never ever heard of 60" of rainfall before Houston flooded as a result of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Some 57 tornadoes were reported within the hurricane and water rose between 6' and 10' above ground, There was $125 billion in damage.

Throughout the world, the increase in floods caused by torrential rainfall has resulted in broken lives and broken business. It has reached a point where it’s difficult not to find a place where weather isn’t acting out Flooding has become the new normality — it is the most frequent natural disaster.

Between 1998 and 2017, floods impacted on the lives of two billion people. That’s more than 25% of the world’s population, and the situation is getting worse by the hour. The correlation between climate change and increased flooding is a proven one.

In addition, some cities, like Singapore, are sinking, and as they sink, they begin to flood more. They are sinking because there are now water shortages, and so city governments are taking water from aquifers. As thesse aquifers empty out, there is nothing to keep the earth above them from collapsing, and so the cities begin to sink. When Cape Town ran out of water some years ago, the city fathers were thinking of removing water from the aquifer beneath the city. This is a short term solution with very bad consequences resulting in the medium to long term.

Searise, for a variety of reasons, is happening far more quickly than anticipated. It’s no longer a fact that coastal cities will be under water by the end of the century, i.e. 80 years away. Instead, in our lifetimes, the result of sea rise will see much of waterfront property become uninhabitable. Personally, I’ve advised all friends and family to sell up coastal properties and move to higher ground.

The World Resources Institute, a global research group, found that 147 million people will be hit by floods from rivers and coasts annually by the end of the decade, compared with 72 million people just 10 years ago. Damages to urban property will soar from $174bn to $712bn per year. By 2050, “the numbers will be catastrophic,” according to the report. A total of 221 million people will be at risk, with the toll in cities costing $1.7tn yearly. Source.

Dire, Dire, the Earth’s on Fire!

The world is burning, but too many people are still focused on getting rich, famous and fabulous. Hundreds of thousands of online success marketers (if not millions) are hanging out hooks to ensnare them. And the only time it seems that these people will wake up and start seriously focusing on what must be done to prevent further damage to our environment is when the fire reaches their doorstep.

In 2019, fires swept havoc across the earth. In Australia, there were 5,900 fire burning 16.8 million hectares (42 million acres). There were 224,000 fires in the Amazon, burning 12 million hectares (120,000 km2). There were 4,700 fires in the Arctic, and those fires destroyed 8.3 million hectares (83,000 km2). In Europe, there were 1630 wild fires, and they destroyed 271,000 hectares (670,000 acres). California had 7,860 fires, and those fires ate 105,140 hectares (259,800 acres) for breakfast. There were more than 9,000 fires in sub-Saharan Africa and they destroyed more than a million hectares. Asia boasted 5,100 wild fires, and they were responsible for the destruction of 329,000 hectares (814,160 acres).

Homes and businesses were destroyed. People died. Several species might have gone extinct. And who knows what other damage was caused. That said, the prognosis is that there will be an increasing number of fires, and sooner or later, we will all face either flood or fire or some other fatality as a result of mankind’s destructive race for more and more money.

Volcanic Eruptions on the Increase Due to Climate Change

Consider that ice glaciers weigh a lot, and when there’s a lot of ice, it keeps things underneath in place. That includes lots of hot, hot lava. Scientists have found that the number of volcanic eruptions drops when it is cooler, thereby confirming that when the earth heats up, volcanoes erupt more frequently.

That said, about 75% of the world’s active volcanoes are located within the Ring of Fire, and these are under water. The eruption that took place on White Island where many tourists died while they were exploring the volcanic island is part of the Ring of Fire. The Ring of Fire is always active, possibly because it sits on “the meeting points of many tectonic plates, including the Eurasian, North American, Juan de Fuca, Cocos, Caribbean, Nazca, Antarctic, Indian, Australian, Philippine, and other smaller plates, which all encircle the large Pacific Plate.”

Ring of Fire Public Domain Fair Use

This does not mean that we are safe from increased volcanic activity. According to a recent NASA report, nobody has any idea of how many volcanoes lie underneath the ice, but there’s more than one. The point is that some earth scientists (geologists) have put forward that the ice on top of volcanoes plays some part in keeping them from going airborne — pyroclastic clouds, if you get my meaning. We also know that in the past, when there has been a lot of volcanie activity, there have been small ice ages because there was so much ash in the sky that the sun couldn’t break through.

While the exact number of volcanoes in Antarctica is unknown, a recent study found 138 volcanoes in West Antarctica alone. Many of the active volcanoes are located in Marie Byrd Land. However, there’s no evidence of a dramatic volcanic eruption in Antarctica in the recent geologic past. Seroussi says details about the volcanism of many parts of Antarctica (particularly in East Antarctica) remain uncertain, both because they’re covered by ice and because their remoteness makes surveying them difficult. Source.

Droughts and Fresh Water Shortage

There have always been droughs and fires and storms and floods. The difference in our current situation is the frequency. In Geology 101, my professor, Don Barrie, explained that some floods might take place once in 500 years, or a drought might take place once in 200 years, or a hurricane of particular severity might occur every 250 years. When something occurs more frequently than it has in the past, then it is deduced that there are other influences. Geologists can determine this because they examine the layers of the earth, and they see when there were floods, fires, droughts, and more.

Right now, one of the biggest factors pointing to man-made climate change is that the timing is wrong, and that the frequency of various weather events doesn’t chime to the same rhythm as they did previously.

Droughts are horrific. Many people have starved to death throughout history because crops didn’t grow, animals died of starvation, and eventually there was nothing to eat for human beings. Starvation is not pretty. To be blunt, droughts need to be taken a lot more seriously than they are.

Droughts in Africa have resulted in 45 million people with food shortages, some of them in such a state of starvation that they are skin and bones. Countries and areas without sufficient water to grow crops or provide drinking water for people include the Middle-East and North Africa, and India. Most other countries have a degree of water stress, and that means droughts. Climate change is driving those droughts, and manufacturing and mining are driving climate change.

Where there is water stress, there is drought. Fair use.

The Destruction of the Eco-System.

I learned about the eco-system in junior school. It’s not a difficult concept. Everything on earth depends on everything else. If we remove the honey bees, then the plants aren’t pollinated. If the plants aren’t pollinated, the plants don’t reproduce, and if the plants don’t reproduce, they stop growing, and we (and other species) don’t eat. Whenever we remove a species, it affects other species, and then those species begin to die as well. Right now, there are many guestimates of how many species are going extinct per day. Depending on the source, it’s anything from 25 species per day to 150 species per day.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which involved more than a thousand experts, estimated an extinction rate that was later calculated at up to 8,700 species a year, or 24 a day. More recently, scientists at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity concluded that: “Every day, up to 150 species are lost.” That could be as much as 10 percent a decade. Source.

The scientists say that the ongoing sixth mass extinction may be the most serious environmental threat to the persistence of civilisation, because it is irreversible. They say that it is caused by an ever-increasing population and consumption rates. Further, species are links in ecosystems and, as they disappear, the species they interact with are likely to disappear as well. When a species dies out, the Earth’s ability to maintain ecosystem services is eroded to a degree. Humanity needs a relatively stable climate, flows of fresh water, agricultural pest and disease-vector control and pollination for crops, all services that will be impacted as the sixth mass extinction accelerates. Source.

Priorities are Not Merely Necessary — They are Vital

We remember that Nero partied while Rome burnt. Of course, there is now some dispute about that, but we know what it implies. When every single body of us ought to be forgetting about business profits and focused enitrely on adjusting the economic and consumer systems that brought us to this place, it’s not happening. We seem to think it’s still okay to focus on our private passions, accumulate status and riches, and the government will look after us. That’s not going to happen.

Until we collectively make collective decisions for our planet, this problem cannot be solved. The only way we can do this collectively is to pressurize government to act on our behalf. We need to elect candidates that put the survival and health of our environment ahead of commercial interests.

So how am I going to end this piece? I can’t jauntily say to you “See you in the next life” because I don’t believe there is one. I can only feel a great sadness when I realize that I will probably have no great grandchildren, and that mankind will go the same way as the dinosaurs. As we now know, there’s nothing and nobody that’s too big to fail. Even the earth can fail.

Tessa Schlesinger first became aware of climate change in 1970 when she read Rachel Carson’s book ‘Silent Spring.’ She has taken an active interest in progressive politics since 1966 when her late father signed her up for junior membership of the Progressive Party in South Africa (Nobel prize winner Helen Suzman’s party). Please click here to read her slant on world issues.