On Saturday, the BBC reported that the Spanish Oceanographic Institute published a study finding that the ocean depth in the Mediterranean Sea has been increasing since the 1970s, and has been steadily accelerating. This acceleration has been attributed to global warming, or climate change. So, what's the big deal with this climate change?
The phenomenon has gone from "global warming" to "climate change," and it shouldn't even be called climate change. That's a misnomer. It would be better to label this climate destabilization.
You see, the Earth naturally emits about 150 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere each year, and it reabsorbs just as much, in an equilibrium that is stable in the short term. Since the industrial revolution, humans have been burning fossil fuels and releasing about six billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.
This continual burning has consistently overloaded nature's carbon sinks, resulting in a yearly net increase of atmospheric CO2. Since 1870, concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by more than 30 percent. This intensifies in the so-called "greenhouse effect"; greenhouse gases, chief among them CO2, trap solar energy in the atmosphere, causing the temperature to increase.
In fact, the greenhouse effect of industrialization has increased atmospheric temperatures over the past few decades. The magnitude of this increase is about 0.5 degrees Celsius, or about 0.75 degrees Fahrenheit.
Why is a measly 0.75 degrees such a big deal? Remember, this isn't simply climate change; this is climate destabilization. Earth's climate is a gigantic, complicated, interconnected system that maintains a precarious balance, and pushing it just a little bit out of balance results in a series of feedback loops that serve to accelerate the process, pushing it even further out of balance. On the global scale, mean temperatures take multiple centuries to change by fractions of a degree.
In the Earth's past, warming of this magnitude has occurred over centuries and millennia; now, it's happening over decades. The problem is this: adaptation takes time, and as the warming speeds up, adaptation to the new environment will become increasingly rushed.
The Spanish Oceanographic Institute pointed out increasing sea levels and is adding its voice to an ever-growing chorus of scientific institutions warning that climate change is reality.
In addition to national science organizations from almost every developed country, almost every reputable climate science organization also stands behind the reports of climate change, including NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society and many others.
The basic ideas behind climate destabilization are easy to understand, and the overall consensus of the scientific community is that it's happening and happening faster and faster.
Isn't it time that we as a society start getting ready to mitigate and weather the changes?
Write to Neal at necoleman@bsu.edu
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