Global Change: From Antarctica to Alvord

Honors Day Address, April 6, 2006

Alvord Theater, Northland College

by Tom Fitz

The year 2005 was interesting for what it revealed about our relationship to the environment. One very revealing event occurred when a group of European scientists working near the south pole drilled to the bottom of the Antarctic ice sheet and extracted a 3.2-kilometer-long ice core. The layers of ice and trapped air bubbles in that core provide a detailed record of how climate and atmospheric chemistry have changed over the past 650,000 years. What we see is that carbon dioxide is currently 27 percent higher than at any time in that period – 650,000 years – a time that spans numerous glacial and interglacial periods, including the remarkably warm Sangamon Interglacial period of 129,000 years ago. And then we learned that 2005 was the warmest year since records have been kept by people. These two findings are not coincidental, but it's actually not the temperature that matters, or even that the temperature is changing, because climate has always been changing. In fact, it has been a lot warmer for long periods of time in the past than it is today. What matters is the rate at which temperature changes. So it's not that 2005 was the warmest year on record that is alarming, what is alarming is that it’s the latest piece of data in a clear trend of rapidly rising temperatures. The temperature increase since the mid-1970’s has been especially rapid, and in the last decade the warming has been 30 times faster than it was at the end of the last glaciation 10,000 years ago.

If we go further back in time – not thousands of years, but hundreds of millions of years, and we look at the climate record preserved in limestone, it is clear that there has always been a direct link between carbon dioxide and climate. (Now, limestone doesn’t provide as precise a record as ice does, but it does give us reasonable approximations of past climate.) Basically, when carbon is stored with in the Earth, it's cold at the surface, when the carbon comes out of the Earth and into the atmosphere, for whatever reason, then climate warms up. And it can warm up very rapidly. It is also clear that rapid climate change has devastating effects on the biosphere. When the physical systems change faster than the rate at which biological systems can respond, there is trouble. Species go extinct. Sometimes climate change causes massive extinction events, such as the one 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian Period when approximately 95 percent of all species went extinct. We need to pay close attention to what happened at the end of the Permian, because it looks like many of the same changes are happening today.

We don’t completely understand what happened at the end of the Permian, but we do know that this time things are different because the change is being caused by the actions of one species – specifically us – and, more specifically, our burning of fossil fuels to satisfy our nearly insatiable appetite for energy. We know this is true because the ratios of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere tell us that the excess carbon has been stored in the Earth, it is not carbon from the current biosphere. The excess carbon is coming out of rock. It's from fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas. The scientific debate is over. We know that the burning of fossil fuels is increasing the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and we know that the climate is warming rapidly. The only logical conclusion is that our use of fossil fuels is causing rapid climate change. We also know that rapid climate change is catastrophic.

One of the many things that happens when climate warms is that glaciers melt and the water flows into the sea, causing sea level to rise. A recent study of oceans and melting glaciers shows that in the last 100 years sea level has risen about 8 inches, but the rate of rise has been rapidly accelerating since about 1990, and in the next 100 years it is expected to rise about 13 feet. At the same time that sea level is rising, the number of people living along the coast is steadily increasing. Which leads us to another event that took place in 2005 – Hurricane Katrina. The devastation wrought by Katrina is especially revealing because the catastrophe was caused by a combination of human alteration on the coastal region in the gulf, the natural and human-induced subsidence of the land, and our reliance on engineered flood-control structures that ultimately proved inadequate. What these events highlight is our influence on the environment, our dependence on technology, and the vulnerability of both natural and human-made systems.

But climate change and sea level rise are only two of many problems that we face right now. Experts from many fields agree that we have entered a critical time in our relationship to Earth's systems – a time that has been referred to as "The Bottleneck". What we do in the next 50 years will determine whether there will be even more wide-spread suffering, continued extinctions, and disruption of the natural balances between the biosphere and the physical Earth. Are we going to make it through the bottleneck gracefully? Or tragically? We have to make a U-turn in the way we use resources and in our relationship to the environment. If not us, then who? If not now, then when? We are the guides of The Great U-turn.

How did we get here? How did it come to this? For one thing, we didn't have an adequate understanding of the interactions and feedbacks in the natural systems, and some of the trends are only now becoming apparent, such as how rapidly carbon dioxide is increasing. We had to recognize the scope of the problem before we could tackle it. Then there is societal inertia. It's not easy to get a whole society headed in a different direction. And part of that has to do with a personal disconnect from the natural world and people not seeing themselves as part of natural systems. This disconnect leads us to ignore natural limits, such as the limit of how rapidly carbon dioxide can be absorbed by plants and the oceans. It leads us to spend more and more money to build higher and higher walls to keep out rising oceans.

So, now that the scope of the problems has been recognized, what's it going to take to get through the bottleneck? To make a U-turn? It's obviously a huge task that requires great changes in the way we do things.

And there are signs of change. Hope is blowing in the wind, literally and figuratively. Wind turbines have become more efficient and reliable, as their price is coming down. Energy from the wind power is now economically competitive with electricity generated with conventional fossil fuels. And there is easily enough energy in the wind to supply the United States with all its electricity. Car companies are having difficulty keeping up with the demand for hybrid cars. Renewable energy technology was a 7-billion dollar industry in 2005, and General Electric corporation is investing 4 billion in wind generators this year. GE expects the industry to increase 25 percent per year for several years at least.

But technology is only one small part of the answer. We also need to have a fundamental change in our perspective, and this is done through education. These are complex problems that require interdisciplinary approaches. They require the kind of thinking and perspectives provided in an environmental liberal arts education. Education that is liberating, that allows us to be ready to discard old ideas and welcome change. Ultimately, the answer to these problems is in understanding our relationship to the Earth, and to each other. And those of us who are fortunate enough to have such an education have an obligation to act, and help other people make these changes and understand why it is important. If you care about yourself and the people around you, then you also have to care about the billions of Chinese citizens who are struggling to get by and whose only energy source is filthy coal that releases vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

There is only one atmosphere on Earth, and we all live in it together.

What is it going to take to make the U-turn? It's not going to be one big change, it's going to be lots of little changes by lots of people. It's going to take the kind of passion and dedication to excellence that the people in this room have demonstrated in their scholarship. For example, over spring break two groups of students will be going to New Orleans to help with relief efforts. Another group of students along with Professors Paul Norris and Jason Terry will be going to the Blue Ridge Center for Environmental Stewardship in Virginia to help with environmental service projects. Senior Addison Manning is doing his capstone project planting fruit trees in schoolyards to help grade-school students connect with the food they eat. And Caleb Ashling’s capstone is a study of the concentration of heavy metals in birds in the Arctic. Professor Gus Smith and his students are doing research in the Apostle Islands to document the effects of the increasing deer population on understory shrubs, and people all across campus have joined sustainability study circles to come up with ways that we can decrease the environmental footprint of the College. These are just some of the examples happening right here, but it's happening in many places in our society.

So we see the change around us, and that is our source of hope. The hope is in people like you who want to change the way we relate to the Earth and to want to help other people do the same. You are not just witnessing the great U-turn, you are already the leaders of the great U-turn.

It's going to take the kind of passion I saw in the students in Geology and Society class when we did the calculations comparing the cost of going to war in Iraq with the cost of upgrading our electrical power grid with wind turbines to replace our old coal-fired power plants. The look on your faces said: "YES! We can do this! We can make this U-turn! Let's turn this ship around NOW!"

It has been our use of resources that has gotten us into this bottleneck in the first place, and it's going to be our clever use of resources that is going to get us out. Not so much technology or natural resources, as human resources. How are we going to relate to the Earth and how are we going to treat each other?

President John F. Kennedy said: "Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education, because the human MIND is our fundamental resource".

I look around this room and I see that President Kennedy was right.

Keep up the good work.

Bibliography

Alley, Richard, 2004, Abrupt Climate Change; Scientific American, (November, 2004).

Archer, Cristina, and Jacobson, Mark, 2005, Evaluation of Global Wind Power; Journal of Geophysical Research; v. 110, D1211O (June, 2005).

Bjornerud, Marcia, 2005, Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth; Westview Press.

Brook, Edward J., 2005, Tiny Bubbles Tell All; Science, v. 310, no. 5752, p. 1285-1287

(November, 2005).

Deutsch, Claudia H., 2006, Investors Are Tilting Toward Windmills; G.E. Sees Much to Like In Alternative Energy; The New York Times; (February 15, 2006).

Doney, Scott C., 2006, The Dangers of Ocean Acidification; Scientific American (March, 2006).

Overpeck, Jonathan T., and others, 2006, Paleoclimatic Evidence for Future Ice-Sheet Instability and Rapid Sea-Level Rise; Science, v. 311, no. 5768, p. 1747-1750 (March, 2006).

Romm, Joseph J., and Frank, Andrew, 2006, Hybrid Vehicles Gain Traction; Scientific American (April, 2006).

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