Examining the consequences of climate change
Here are the complexities of climate change.
In 2020, there was record low amount of sea ice in the Arctic.
In 2021, a breach of polar cold from the Arctic into the United States nearly brought Texas to its knees.
The lessons: Pay attention to the science and prepare for it, even if it seems contradictory.
“Heed warnings before a crisis strikes,” said Western Connecticut State University student James Cantafio at a lecture on climate change at the university. “It will happen.”
The lecture series “Climate and Humans Civilization” is sponsored by the university’s Jane Goodall Center. It’s been an annual event at Western since 2016.
It was canceled in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, there are two lectures, presented online
The first, held last week, was on global warming and the Arctic.
The second — “The Urgency of the Ethics of Greening” — features talks by Anna Malavisi, assistant professor of philosophy and Western junior Gabrielle Johnson. It will be at 7 p.m. Tuesday. To participate, go to: https://wcsu.webex.com/wcsu/j.php? MTID=me1b2eb1e73ee153d5 30ccb315ec5eb5d
Mitch Wagener, the professor of biology at Western who organizes the series, said concentrating on the Arctic allows people to see the consequences of climate change writ large. “It’s happening there twice as much as the rest of the world,” he said.
It also involves pronounced feedback loops.
As warming melts the Arctic ice, there’s less ice to reflect sunlight and heat back into the atmosphere. Instead the exposed land and ocean water absorb the heat. That makes things warmer. More ice melts.
Likewise, warming temperatures are thawing the permafrost — the deeply frozen ground of the Arctic. For centuries, that permafrost has captured carbon dioxide and methane from decaying plants. As it thaws, it releases that carbon dioxide and methane. Those greenhouse gases are a primary cause of global warming. As temperatures rise, more permafrost gets thawed.
This warming could bring profound changes to the Arctic landscape and biodiversity.
Wagener said that a century from now, parts of the tundra could be replaced by boreal forest. That would mean more trees capturing some of the CO2 in the atmosphere.
“That’s the long term,” Wagener said. “The shortterm will be more warming.”
Cantafio, a meteorology student at Western, spoke of how climate change may be causing irregularities in the huge, swirling air mass above the North Pole known as the Polar Vortex.
“We don’t know if it will be happening more frequently,” Cantafio said. “There’s a hypothesis that it might. But there is no consensus.”
But that’s what happened in February, as a huge mass of cold air poured into the United States as far south as Texas.
The severe cold essentially froze the Texas power grid — the state was four minutes and 37 seconds from having its grid shut down. In the end, the cold snap affected 4.5 million people who went days without electricity or potable water. It caused $195 billion in damages.
Cantafio said the Texas utilities had been warming for several years that a disaster like this could happen..
“But there were no incentives to change,” he said. “So they didn’t do it.”
These changes will in some ways form a basis for Malavisi’s talk on Tuesday about the ethics of environmentalism.
“I’ll be talking about our place on the earth,” she said.
Malavisi said she wants people to rethink their place in the world’s ecology. Rather than seeing human endeavor as dominating the environment, it would be better, she said, to see ourselves as inside the complexity, rather than outside.
“We need to think about ecosystems as a whole” she said. “We love the trees, the water, the oceans. We need to see that we are part of the environment.”
Likewise, Western junior Gabrielle Johnson will talk in the second half of the lecture on Tuesday about capitalism and how its emphasis on materialism and constant growth may not create a sustainable, environmentally ethical economy for the 21st century.
“I’m leaning toward a steady-state economy,” Johnson said, of a model that de-emphasizes constant growth and instead supports less consumer spending and a conservation of natural resources.
Wagener said at last week’s lecture that there are things people can do as individuals to reduce their carbon footprints — some things as basic as eating less meat or thinking about family planning and having fewer children.
But he also said people need to think and act collectively.
“Vote,” he said. “Speak up. Stay active.”