Ecology - our bit

Brought to us by Eldon Haines and Ruth Duemler

1. Global Warming is Here Now
You know already that certain gases, carbon dioxide (CO2) in particular, reduce the rate that heat escapes the Earth.  These gases act like the glass in a greenhouse, letting the sun’s light in, but preventing the heat the sun creates from escaping – this is the well-known greenhouse effect.

Through research on ice cores in Antarctica and Greenland, the global temperatures and CO2 levels in the air have been tracked back 420,000 years through several ice ages and the intervening warm periods.  Throughout those 420,000 years, global temperatures and CO2 levels have been in lock step, rising together in the warm periods, falling together during the ice ages.

During the past 100 years CO2 has risen, slowly at first but ever more rapidly, to present levels higher than at any time in the past 420,000 years.  In the past twenty years global temperatures have risen, setting eleven new records in those twenty years, seven in the last ten years.  A few people argue that this is a natural phenomenon.  However, considering the timing of the rise in CO2 levels and temperature with increased burning of coal and petroleum for industry and transportation, it is most likely that we humans – especially us Westerners – are responsible for the unprecedented rises.  Climatologists are in consensus – humans are responsible for the abrupt rise in CO2 and world temperture.

2. Climate Disruption with Global Warming
Imagine a pan of water simmering on the stove.  You turn up the heat.  The water won’t get much hotter, but it will boil more vigorously.  A similar thing happens in the Earth’s atmosphere when it can’t eliminate heat as fast as solar energy comes in.  The climate becomes more turbulent to expel the excess heat.  Global warming leads to climate disruption.

Climate disruption means more violent weather.  Hurricanes become more severe.  Cold fronts bring arctic air to lower latitudes, disrupting ecosystems and agriculture.  Warm water and warm air moving to higher latitudes disrupt ocean environments and bring tropical diseases to temperate regions.  Glaciers are shrinking and some are disappearing.  Oregon is expected to get milder winters, more rainfall, less snow, and hotter, dryer summers.  Low snow pack damages irrigated agriculture and river ecosystems.  Hot, dry summers support more forest burns and subsequent replacement by oak savanna.  The Midwest "bread basket" could move north to Canada.

Europe could suffer worse with an abrupt loss of the heat from the Gulf Stream.  Scientists think that melting ice in Greenland and the Arctic Ocean (ice 40% thinner than 60 years ago) may stop the northward flow of the part of the Gulf Stream that keeps Europe temperate.  If that happens, Europe would become Siberian in a decade and the rest of the Earth’s climate could shift to a new pattern – maybe even a new ice age.

3. Sea Level Rise with Global Warming
The huge water mass of the sea takes a long time to heat up, but sea temperatures have risen in the last 100 years.  Water expands as it warms; so sea levels rise.  In the past 100 years sea level has risen between 3 and 10 inches, depending on where it was measured.  This rate is greater than any time in the last few thousand years based on geological and archaeological records.

Predicting future sea level rise is made more complicated by the uncertain futures of the Greenland and Antarctic ice packs.  Melting sea ice, as in the Arctic Ocean, doesn’t change sea level.  With little melting or movement of the large ice packs, sea level is expected to rise about another 20 inches by 2100 due to ocean warming.  This would flood about half of North America’s coastal wetlands and vastly increase the 100-year floodplain.  Protection of human habitat would cost 20 to 200 billion dollars, but those protective acts would cause still greater loss of wetlands.

However, temperatures, especially winter temperatures, have risen faster at higher altitudes and in polar regions.  Glaciers are disappearing.  Melt flowing from the Greenland ice sheet equals the flow of the Nile River.  Ice shelves are calving off Antarctica at record rates.  If the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (only partially submerged) moved into the sea, it would raise sea level between 13 and 20 feet.  Fortunately scientists don’t think that will happen this century, but it could, and unless global warming is reversed, eventually it will.

4. Moral Issues in Global Warming
With about 4% of the world’s population, we in the United States use about 24% of the world’s energy.  Each US inhabitant uses twice the energy of a Western European, 12 times that of a resident of China, 33 times more than a citizen of India, 147 times that of a Bangladeshi.  Most of it created by the burning of coal, oil, and gas.  While the US and other industrialized countries produce most of the CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, the effects of global warming are felt worldwide, more dramatically among the "fringe" cultures and species of the world whose homelands are degraded or destroyed.

Coral atolls in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are already showing increased erosion.  Another 20 inches of sea-level rise by 2100 will make most atolls uninhabitable.  The inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, Kiribati (Gilbert and Ellice), the Tokelaus, the Tuomotus, Maldives, etc. must move somewhere else.  Bangladesh will lose more than half it’s rice-growing lands.  If the large ice sheets of Greenland or Antarctica move into the sea, most of the world’s coastal cities and farms will be inundated.

Those who dwell around the Arctic Ocean cannot move farther north to maintain their hunting cultures when polar bears, seals, and walruses become extinct.  Increased downpours in some areas, droughts in others, will drive people already excluded by industrial culture out of their marginal environments.  Immigration into industrial nations, already considered a burden, will grow and cannot be stopped except by the harshest means.  Species unable to migrate because of fields, highways, clear cuts, and cities will perish as their accustomed climate is disrupted.

5. Global Warming: Coal
Montana and Wyoming together have more energy in coal reserves than Saudi Arabia has in oil reserves.  Most of the coal is used to make electricity via coal-fired steam turbines operating at 25% efficiency.  It takes about pound of coal to make a kilowatt-hour of electricity.  That pound of coal releases about 3-1/2 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere.  If you use over 800 kWh of coal-fired electricity in a month, you personally release over 2,800 pounds of CO2.  There is plenty of coal and it is relatively easy to dig.  But it is the dirtiest resource, too, in terms of acid rain, regional air pollution, and global warming.

So where do we put the "waste" from coal burning, the CO2?  Into the air of course.  In the US the problem with coal is not supply but pollution from "waste disposal."  No cost-effective means of capturing and burying the CO2 exists.  China, too, has huge coal deposits and is predicted to double its coal production in order to build its industrial capacity.

However, last November (2001) China signed onto the Marrakesh Accord – the follow-on to the Kyoto meeting on climate change.  Under this accord the industrial nations must, on average, decrease their greenhouse gas emissions to 7% below 1990 levels by the year 2012.  The US did not participate in the Marrakesh Accord.

6. Global Warming: Oil and Natural Gas
Oil’s energy resource is limited, a blessing for its global warming impact.  In 1956 geologist M.King Hubbert predicted that US oil production would peak in 1970.  It did.  The Hubbert analysis, applied to the world’s oil supply, predicts that production will peak around 2008.  In 1970 we shifted from domestic production to import as our demand for oil grew.  In 2008 there will be no place to turn to feed the ever increasing demand.

By 2040 world oil production will fall to about 1/3 of its 2008 peak.  If efficiency and renewable sources do not replace oil, prices will rise until only the richest can afford it.  Island nations, having small demands and expensive transport, and nations in economic crisis will be forced out of the market.  Oil’s global warming impact will wane.  But for now our demand for oil is still rising, especially for gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel.

Both oil and natural gas are used to produce electricity.  They produce more energy per pound than coal and release less CO2.  Natural gas, used in combined-cycle turbines, produces electricity most efficiently, further reducing the global warming load.  As oil and gas reserves diminish, coal will probably be touted as a ready alternative unless our leaders understand its danger to the climate, and join world efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

7. Global Warming: Alternatives for Electricity
The electric utilities, burning coal, oil, and natural gas, produce about 35% of our total CO2 emissions.  The past two decades have shown a consistent trend: electricity from fossil fuels has become ever more expensive, and electricity from sustainable resources have become ever less expensive.  As oil supplies wane and as we take collective action against the disruptive consequences of burning coal, this trend will accelerate; eventually sustainable energy resources will replace fossil fuels.

The largest "sustainable resource" is energy efficiency.  Efficiency simply means getting more of the service you want with less energy and less material.  Europe uses only half the energy per person that we in the US use, and maintains an excellent quality of life.  We could learn a lot from their example.

Green energy, electricity generated from wind and solar farms, continues to grow.  Laws requiring electric utilities to buy energy from very small producers has encouraged citizens to set up wind generators, small hydro turbines, and solar panels around their homes along with their two-way meters which run backward when the owners produce more electricity than they use.

Those with a long vision see renewable resources becoming the basis for the entire energy economy.  Wind, small hydro, biomass, and solar can supply all our energy needs for heat and electricity if we promote high efficiency.  Hydrogen, separated from water by hydrolysis, can be transported easily in pipelines, and when burned, the only waste is water vapor.  Fuel cells which efficiently produce electricity and heat directly from hydrogen may be used in homes, vehicles, and industry.

8. Global Warming: Cars, Trucks, Trains, and Planes
Our transportation system – cars, trucks, trains, and planes -- produces about 30% of our total CO2 emissions.  

Gasoline burned to propel your car releases about 20 pounds of CO2 for each gallon consumed.  If you get about 20 miles per gallon, your car produces about a pound of CO2 for each mile you drive.  If you drive eight to ten thousand miles in a year, you release your car’s weight in waste CO2 into the atmosphere each year.

Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) estimates that with two people in a car, 0.56 pounds are released, on average, for each passenger-mile.  Airliners perform about the same, about 0.58 pounds of CO2 per passenger-mile if occupancy is 65%.  On your cross-country flight you will personally add over 1,700 pounds of CO2 to the atmospheric burden – each way.

Trucks move about 70 tons of goods a mile for each gallon of diesel burned.  Your five pound bag of oranges shipped from Florida will place over two pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere.  Trains are more than four times as efficient; your oranges shipped by train would release about 1/2 of a pound of CO2.

9. Global Warming: Transportation Alternatives
More efficient automobiles, such as the new hybrids, may play a part in reducing greenhouse gases, but not if we continue to increase the number of cars on the road, and drive each car more.  Our cars also waste huge amounts of land.  For example, 60% of Los Angeles County is covered by streets, garages, driveways, gas stations, parking lots, (including UU parking lots.)  They create an alienated environment.  We can reduce the miles we each drive and the number of cars we drive collectively.

An easy "fix" for reducing CO2 emissions is to drive less.  Carpooling to work one day a week with another person reduces both of your work-related driving by 20%.  Carpooling to church with two others reduces your church-commute emissions to 1/3 and expands your circle of friends.  A list on the refrigerator reduces the number of shopping trips with more supplies bought each trip; arranging the route to eliminate backtracking also helps.  We can walk once a week where we might drive – good for more than the climate.  The same goes for the bicycle.  Riding the city bus cuts down our commuting emissions.

People with a wider view see urban planning as a powerful creator of efficient transport – and reduced Greenhouse emissions.  Clustered communities that include commerce and light industry have workplaces and most amenities within walking distance or a short bike ride away.  Communities clustered along mass transit lines – light rail or high-speed bus – eliminate the need for two (or three) cars in every garage.  People living, working, and playing together in a close community take better care of their environment and of one another.

Still to come in the spring: Green building, space heat, lighting.

Resources so far:
Union of Concerned Scientists:
"Steering a new course"
"The Nucleus" magazine