Note: This program first aired August 22, 2015.
If you
haven’t noticed lately, its been kind of hot here in Maine. Hot like it hasn’t
been all summer, or even in a year or two. While the rest of the world has been
heating up, the Northeast has generally been running a bit cooler than most
everyone else. We knew that for sure last winter, but the same has held true
for the past couple of summers as well. Exactly why we’ve been cooler while
everyone else has gotten hotter, as predicted by climate models, is not
entirely understood. The wandering of the polar vortex that has graced our past
two winters results from latitudinal changes in atmospheric pressure gradients,
which change the jet stream, allowing it to run more north and south than the
typical east and west. The summer coolness may just be coincidence, or may not.
Rapid melting of Arctic sea ice and the Greenland Ice sheet have put large
quantities of cold fresh water into the north Atlantic and changed aspects of the
circulation of the Gulf Stream. Less warm water is going north, and less cold
water is coming south. The resulting cold area in the north Atlantic may be
having something to do with our coolness relative to the rest of the world. Or
not. It just isn’t clear.
While we’ve
been living in our cooler than average bubble here in Maine (present heat wave
notwithstanding), temperatures on the rest of Earth have been rising. In fact
the first half of this year has been the warmest on record, wiping out the “warmest
year on record” status held by last year. And we know why this is, we’ve talked
about it ad nauseam here on the show before. Increased levels of atmospheric
green house gasses are trapping more and more heat in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The primary green house gas is of course, carbon dioxide—one of the key
nutrients necessary for photosynthesis and one of the products of energy
liberating chemical reactions, like deconstructing glucose for metabolic energy
or burning oil, coal or gas to yield mechanical energy. Anything we do that
diminishes photosynthesis or increases energy liberation increases carbon
dioxide production.
As has been
clear from the past two winters here in the northeast, the impacts of climate
change are not distributed uniformly across the surface of the Earth. We were
buried under feet of snow, and when it wasn’t snowing it was well below zero,
while my uncle in Alaska dealt with rain and temps in the 50’s all winter. One
of the regions being hardest hit is the Arctic, a region of the world that has
been an ice covered ocean for at least 700,000 years, if not more. Each summer
the sea ice melts a bit, and each winter more ice forms. Lately though, due to
all this carbon dioxide mediated warming, more and more ice has been melting in
the summers, and less is refreezing in the winter. The ice is getting thinner,
and the overall coverage is diminishing. This is problematic for many of the
organisms that make the Arctic their home, as well as for the havoc that it
wrecks on global weather patterns (Snowmageddon anyone?). There are some people
out there though, who think this lack of Arctic ice is pretty good news. The
petroleum company Royal Dutch Shell has been working for many years to secure
all of the equipment and permissions required to begin exploratory well
drilling in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska. Because this is US territorial
water, it required the permission of the federal government, which it just
received.
One of the
things we talk about when looking at climate change is the feedback loop.
Feedback is when one thing impacts another, which can then impact the original
event which can then impact the secondary event, and on and on. What we have
set up here in the Arctic now is a feedback loop. We burn fossil fuels and pump
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which warms it, which melts the Arctic sea
ice, which opens access to the Arctic Ocean for offshore drilling, which gets
us more fossil fuel. Perfect. I feel like that character in the movie
Zoolander, who, at his wits end screams out “I feel like I’m taking crazy
pills!” Aren’t we worried about the impacts of climate change? Then why are we green lighting a scheme to
get even more climate change causing oil? Not to mention the potentially
horrific impacts of an oil spill in the Arctic. Someone didn’t connect the dots
here. As we stew in our 100% humidity here in Maine, for a few weeks we join
the rest of the world in feeling the heat. I suspect that when President Obama
visits the Arctic later this month, he will be feeling the heat as well.
References:
Its official—the first half of this year is the warmest on
record (world wide) http://www.weather.com/news/climate/news/earth-record-warmest-january-june-2015
Cold water in the north Atlantic: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/03/whats-going-on-in-the-north-atlantic/
Images of temperature anomalies (variations from average)
from NOAA: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201506
Wow, words can hardly express my delight in finding this
parody site: http://arcticready.com/
#failbetter
On Shell’s permit http://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-s--throws-shell-a-lifeline-with-arctic-drilling-permit-152427071.html#
Arctic sea ice current conditions: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Why did Shell get a permit? Democracy Now interview: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/8/18/obama_gives_shell_final_approval_to
Will Ferrell in Zoolander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llgY3VBwTAo
