A Climate Saved is a Climate Earned
By: Emily Hirsh
Tags: Climate Change, Emissions, Civic Engagement, Global Warming, Oceans

A Climate Saved is a Climate Earned

Whether we’re leaving a dirty pot in the sink to “soak” because we don’t feel like washing it, pushing off a yearly trip to the dentist, or forgoing a routine sweeping of the floors for the next week, the truth is that we all have the tendency to view tomorrow a little differently from today. It seems full of possibilities and potential, and most importantly, doesn’t seem to require anything from us in the moment. As a college student, I’ve been guilty of leaving some assignments until the morning they’re due, or chapters unread before a test, and the feeling of waking up on the day you can’t push anything off anymore is quite an unpleasant one. Regardless of the action, it’s a fundamentally human tendency to, perhaps even unconsciously, ignore a gradually building problem or delegate actions that could improve it into the future, ultimately making the problem more insurmountable than when it began. Yet we often continue this pattern despite the negative effects in various aspects of our lives — but this problem isn’t limited to dirty dishes and missed appointments. It is precisely this human tendency to be less aware of the gradual, unpleasant, or complex that leads to some of the largest global issues of the day, such as climate change.

This topic has evolved to become one of the most contentious issues in the United States, with politicians tossing barbed rhetoric both ways across the aisle, and some people claiming not to believe in climate change at all. I have hope, however, that productive conversations about this topic can be held in the years to come; especially considering how crucial these years will be in the fight against global warming. As a member of the generation that could potentially be handed a damaged environment if no action is taken, I want to make every effort to protect our country — our world — and the people that will inhabit it. Modern science has deduced that a global temperature warming of above 2 degrees Celsius (compared to preindustrial temperatures) could produce irreversible effects on our environment that will be both economically severe and harmful to the natural world. I don’t want to see that in my lifetime, and I don’t want it to be a reality in the lifetimes of my children; I want to be a member of the generation that stops this momentum in its tracks.

I think that at the end of the day, that’s what most people want. However, the complexity of climate change and the politically charged nature of the actions needed to combat it have resulted in a clouded issue marked by years of conflict and inaction. It’s for this reason that I want to evaluate an aspect of climate change that’s perhaps less well-worn than traditional arguments over emission levels and ozone layers: the effect of climate change on our oceans. Increasing emissions as a result of passive domestic policies on fuel economies, energy sources, and corporations have the potential to allow the earth — and therefore the oceans — to warm, leading to a myriad of negative effects, including increased disastrous weather events, sea level rise, and natural ecosystem harm that could decimate both those reliant on the ocean for employment and those who rely on it as their main source of protein; the latter of which includes 1/3 of the population of the US, according to Dr. Dong-Ha Min, a past oceanography professor of mine whom I interviewed to gather more information on this topic.

To begin, I want to establish what I mean when I say “global warming”. It’s a term that’s tossed around quite a bit, and often used interchangeably for climate change; in actuality, global warming is a unique term altogether. The earth, as we all know, is heated by the sun — however, in a concept known as a “heat budget”, much of it is reflected back into space off of clouds, oceans, and other reflective surfaces. Global warming occurs when this natural process of reflecting heat can’t be completed because gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere allow heat in but not out, like a two-way mirror. When heat is reflected outward but is ‘caught’ by these gases, the atmosphere warms, leading to an overall warming of the earth — including its oceans. This video, by Bill Nye the Science Guy himself, provides a great explanation of this interaction:

Examples of harmful policies that accelerate this process can be seen in President Trump’s rollback of several EPA regulations beginning in 2019, in which his administration attempted to reverse or reduce 100 previously-held regulations and restrictions. These rollbacks included weakening standards for vehicular greenhouse gas emissions, removing Barack Obama’s “Clean Power Plan” in favor of delegating carbon emission limits to individual states, partially repealing a regulation limiting methane emissions on public lands, and — most notably — withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. All of these decisions have the potential to set us back years in combating global warming. To take an example of just one of these rollbacks, the weakening of vehicular emission standards stands to produce only “a fifth of the cumulative emissions abatement we would expect under the Obama-era standards,” the emission standards that were in place in 2019 (Pitt and Young).

Considering that these standards were already not enough to completely slow the pace of global warming, weakening them is both illogical and dangerous, and indicative of an administration that is not concerned with future consequences. Climate change is an issue that requires aggressive action prematurely — in other words, the worst is yet to come. But just because the worst-case scenario is delayed a few years doesn’t mean we have a few years until we have to do anything: we have to do something now. The more that we allow these trends to continue, the more that the atmosphere and our oceans can warm, creating larger issues for our future.

But what exactly does the warming of the ocean cause? As explained in the video with Bill Nye, many things — but I’ll summarize a few here. Warming oceans have the capacity to raise sea levels, as warmer temperatures cause land ice to melt and add to the sea level; additionally, warmer water is less dense than cold and expands, further contributing to sea level rise. Warming water can also weaken ocean currents, and increase the rate of intense hurricanes, as storms draw increased energy from warm waters and warmer temperatures can cause more potential rainfall to evaporate into the atmosphere (Biasutti). This is an escalating issue that has already been observed in my hometown of Houston, Texas.

In 2017, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston and left devastation in its wake — flooded homes, stranded families, piles of debris stacked taller than me on the sides of the roads. My street flooded with water that crept right up to our doorstep and hovered there for a few days.

A photo I took on August 28th, 2017, documenting how close the water came to coming inside of our home. My family was extremely lucky to avoid any flood damage.

My high school canceled school for three weeks in light of the destruction that Harvey caused, and I spent those weeks volunteering with my church and family to rip the drywall and floors out of homes that were completely inundated with storm surge waters, and deliver food and clothing to families that had lost everything. I was only seventeen, but I’d never seen anything like it before. Harvey was a Category 4 storm, but what really drove its devastation of my city was that it stalled over Houston for four consecutive days of relentless rainfall, rather than moving steadily inland as most storms do. This was due to a high air pressure system in the western US and a low pressure system in the east that effectively ‘boxed’ Harvey in; this, combined with the extra water vapor in the atmosphere due to warming temperatures, dramatically increased the amount of rainfall that Harvey was able to produce during its stint over Houston. The air pressure systems boxing in Harvey are thought to have been a result of a weakened jet stream due to warming temperatures, as well — thus, global warming was the cause behind two major factors in keeping Harvey centered above Houston for days. (Wagstaffe).