It is no wonder that young climate activists like Greta Thunberg and others have become so frustrated with the pace of involvement and change by various governments around the world to enact policies to counter our rapidly changing climate. Here in the US, we continue to watched the circus in Washington, D.C. as some Republicans are intent on burning down the government by refusing to increase the debt ceiling instead of working together to confront one of the biggest existential crisis of our lives.
Selective amnesia must be at play given that $7.8 billion of that debt was incurred under the Trump administration. They allowed these debts to be racked up under a Republican administration and they are now refusing to pay the bill. However, if we continue to refuse to address the serious climate issues facing this country and this planet it could all become a moot point.
Yesterday while I was laying low and taking it easy following my COVID booster shot, I read an article in Scientific American that provided yet another look at the impacts that climate change is having on all of us. During this past summer, we all saw in the news the myriads of reports about fires across the Western half of the United States. They were devastating. In Montana, the air quality was horrific for many, many days – not to mention all of the structures lost.
However, climate change is having a huge impact on a part of our country that most of us don’t think about to often because it is ‘out of sight and thus out of mind.’ The fire season in Alaska is getting longer and more devastating and, although this state is sparsely populated, the impacts go far beyond the loss of structures and the threat to human lives. According to this article, “The Arctic-boreal region as a whole is heating up 1.5 to four times faster than temperature zones. Alaska has warmed by four degrees F in the past 50 years, and evidence published in 2021 by David Swanson of the National Park Service Alaska Region suggests that warming has accelerated even more since 2014.”1
We have all heard about the melting Artic ice sheets and Greenland glaciers but there is another impact caused by this warming trend. The summers in Alaska are becoming warmer, the snow seasons are becoming shorter which means that the fire season has been increasing. The net result is that more acres of forest and land are being burned annually in Alaska.
The fact is that trees are being burned but the majority of the biomass that goes up in smoke is something called duff. Duff is a dense, peaty layer which is an accumulation of each summer’s dead surface moss and litter. Duff can range in thickness from three to 20 inches and can accumulate for centuries, becoming increasingly compacted and dense with time. Duff is an insulator of the permafrost and when it burns, that protection is reduced and the permafrost is subject to thawing.
It is estimated that thick duff layers across the higher latitudes store 30 to 40 percent of all the soil carbon on earth. “In 2015 severe wildfires in interior Alaska burned 5.1 million acres, releasing about nine million metric tons of carbon from standing vegetation – and 154 million tons from duff, according to Christopher Potter of NASA’s Earth Sciences Division. (That calculation includes carbon lost to decomposition and erosion for two subsequent years.) The total amount of CO2 is equal to that emitted by all of California’s cars and trucks in 2017.”1
Most of the fires in Alaska are caused by lightning but this trend of warmer and longer summers and shorter snow seasons, will also lead to increased amounts of lightning. And estimate is that lightning will increase 59% by 2050. That will lead to more wildfires which will lead to the destruction of more duff, thawing of more permafrost and the release of even more carbon into the atmosphere. If this is not an existential crisis, I don’t know what is.
The Republican party would have you believe that the biggest problems facing this country are unsubstantiated election fraud, illegal immigration, Critical Race Theory (which most of them couldn’t define if they had to), abortion and vaccine/mask mandates. And at the same time, they are refusing to pay the bills that were run up during the previous administration knowing full well that a default on the US debt would severely impact the US and world economies for years.
And yet, the real and probably the most pressing issue facing this nation and the world is the ongoing assault on our climate and the refusal to take bold actions to reverse this trend. As the saying goes, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” Rome is on fire and the Republicans are fiddling away!
There was an article yesterday I ran across that claimed it is likely worse than we know because we measure mostly the northern hemisphere where the instrumentation is- and the southern stands to be impacted more than the northern.
Mixed feelings on Gretta – she’s canon fodder for the likes of Trump and Republicans because she’s an emotional child (or was when Time selected her as person of the year). It gave them an easy target. And, the kids in my area – quite ready to skip school to protest – have their parents cars lined up for 1/2 a mile into my friends houses streets to pick their lazy kids up – some just blocks away from where they live. Time looked over all the scientists and satellites developed at JPL and other places and the people that are of age to make a difference that might be able to convince others that are skeptical. Gretta has / had a legit concern – but in my book counter productive to those that need to be swung to understand. They see a panicked kid that we now know sadly has a personality trait that makes her so. Even more strangely, her country benefits possibly from climate change – as that area was on schedule to be covered in thick ice not too far off geologically – the next small scale mini ice age was set to start now and climate change reversed it as far as we can tell. See link I put in here on this comment for JPL’s climate change stuff – it’s really cool. Hopefully, Trump didn’t can any programs that were underway – I haven’t looked into that.
Link not visible on the site, so: https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/research#/earth-sciences