Climate ‘weirdness’ throws ecosystems ‘out of kilter’
Dave Davies interviews Science journalist Michael Lemonick
14 August 2012 Science journalist Michael Lemonick doesn’t want to be a doomsday prophet, but he does want to be realistic about the threat of climate change. “Since I started writing about climate change all the way back in 1987, we’ve known what the cause is, we’ve known what the likely outcome is, and we’ve had time to act — and essentially we haven’t acted,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Dave Davies. Lemonick is the co-author of a new book, Global Weirdness: Severe Storms, Deadly Heat Waves, Relentless Drought, Rising Seas, and the Weather of the Future. The book, published by the nonprofit research organization Climate Central, details the effects of climate change and greenhouse gases in ocean acidity, existing ecosystems, disruptions to food supply and rising sea levels. Lemonick says sea level has risen by about eight inches overall worldwide since around 1900, and the waters are expected to rise an estimated three feet by 2100. “Sometimes we forget that the damage in New Orleans in 2005 from Hurricane Katrina came not from wind or rain, but from the storm surge [that caused flooding] ahead of that storm,” Lemonick says. If sea levels rise as expected, “all of those storm surges are going to be starting from a level three feet higher, which means that they have much greater potential to drive inland, to wash over barrier islands, and to really inundate the coast. … Many, many millions of people and trillions of dollars of infrastructure are in serious danger, if those projections are correct.” On how scientists calculate temperatures from hundreds of thousands of years ago “One very important way we know about the temperature in the past is that if you go to Greenland or to Antarctica and drill deep into the ice, what you find is air bubbles trapped as snow fell thousands of years ago [and] hundreds of thousands of years ago. Air was trapped in among the snowflakes, and when it was compressed into ice — those air bubbles … are actually time capsules that show you exactly what the atmosphere was like at any time up to 800,000 years ago. … “What we can look at directly is the amount of carbon dioxide that was in the air, and that has gone up and down. You can also deduce what the temperature was by the chemical characteristics of the snow itself: The ice that was once snow, depending on what the temperature was, the different chemical composition of the ice will say [whether] it was warmer or colder.” On carbon dioxide making the oceans more acidic “While it’s true that the primary effect of carbon dioxide buildup is to warm the Earth and to change the climate, some of that carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans, and when water absorbs carbon dioxide, it becomes more acidic. … That has some implications for sea life, especially organisms that form shells: In an acidic environment it’s harder to form a shell, and because a lot of these organisms are at the very base of the ocean food chain, there could be some real disruptions to that part of our food supply. ” […]
