Message to Americans and Everyone Else, Too:
Parents, Grandparents, Great-Grandparents and Humanity
I beg you to read on, for I am "Dr. Waug," (James P. Louviere), spokesperson for the "WAUG" Kids, the not-yet-conceived kids that will be born between now and 2100. I am not "chicken little," but there are irrefutable things happening that will tend to create a madhouse world in thirty or more years, and I want you to know about it (there's a great bibliography included) and nobody but me seems to be trying to put a "face" on the young people of tomorrow who will inherit the Earth and not very civil societies we are going to leave as a legacy for them to deal with.
The Arctic ice cover is changing dramatically. Result? The reflective white, floating ice is no longer universal there, and the dark blue ocean beneath is now absorbing more solar heat than before, and holding it.
Like an ice cold Cola on a hot day released its dissolved CO2 into the air (you can see the bubbles, and they rise and burst, and the Cola tastes "flat," no fizz left in it). CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the most plentiful one in the atmosphere, and when oceans are cool or cold, they can dissolve it and hold it. They can also dissolve methane and hold it, and keep the methane clathrates (not a familiar concoction yet, but a widespread and temperature-sensitive one nonetheless) under them or neighboring them, like in Siberia, Alaska, northern Canada, etc.) in solid form.
This trapping of heat in the water, and subsequent release of dissolved CO2 and CH4 (methane - a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2) make for a warmer atmosphere, more Arctic melting, and the loop goes on.
Siberian and Alaskan permafrost with their ages old bogs are softening. The trapped and frozen methane clathrates are breaking down. Bubbles of methane are rising in the lakes of the far north as the methane clathrates frozen on their beds are decomposing. I didn't learn about clathrates in my organic chemistry classes, but that was half a century ago. Today, they have been discovered and some studies have been made. Look up the subject by doing a Google search, and you may be amazed at what you'll find. This produces yet another loop or "forcing" which is self-sustaining and self augmenting.
Plants Suck: We've all learned in school that plants, especially trees, suck in CO2 as their roots draw in H20, and, when the sun is shining, the process of photosynthesis in the green leaves produces sugars and O2 (oxygen gas, which we need for life.) Massive attacks by human beings are bringing down trees in unprecedented quantities. If they burn, they grab back some of the oxygen in the air and recombine it with the wood's carbon, returning CO2 to the atmosphere. Parking lots, airports, golf courses, plowed fields, deforested mountains, hills and plains are not full of trees, so there's less capture of CO2 by trees, and more released CO2 if the wood burns.
Do you need to be a rocket scientist to see another "forcing" process?
Many new faces in town! There are lots more people than there were until just three or four centuries ago. In fact, in just the past 100 years, the human population has grown rapidly to about 8.5 billion people. Most of the humans don't have natural gas (methane) stoves, solar panels, electric toasters or microwave ovens. In places like Pakistan, many women spend most of their waking hours walking around looking for wood, dung or peat to take home for cooking and or heating. This is true also in the countries of Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. That makes a lot of CO2 day in and day out, plus smoke and soot. Their scavenging has and continues to result in the denuding of green lands, where few trees have survived. More CO2, less trees - get the picture? Another "forcing."
There’s a lot of solid, free information. A search of Climate Change or Global Warming on Google will give you a lot more information. The NOAA, NASA, AAAS, Science, Nature, Scientific American, Science News, and network news will provide more insights into the causes and results of climate changes.
Here I am going to make a plea to your sense of morality, ethics, human compassion, or simply your good sense, but first: Look at how some of our ancestors must have felt around 1850 in North America!
A. Those enslaved must have longed for the day when their descendants could be free.
B. Those with “incurable” diseases of their time must have hoped for cures which would free their descendants from diseases like tuberculosis, syphilis, typhoid, yellow fever, leprosy and pneumonia must have prayed for a miracle that would relieve the world of these horrid killers. A world where their grandchildren or great grandchildren might never have these plagues, or would be able to fully recover from them.
C. Those Victims of Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing who were called “Indians” in 1850, who had subsisted on buffalo (bison) meat for ages must have despaired at the disappearance of their herds. The ravages of invasion, wars of extermination, forced marches from comfortable places into desolate places, diseases introduced by Europeans, and the encroachments of white people claiming their lands must have prayed and hoped that the cruelty and barbarism of the "civilized" people would someday stop, and they could find justice in the future.
A. has been accomplished through the application of moral, political and military force.
B. has been accomplished by the application of science.
C. has never been resolved equitably and seems like it can never be repaired, but certainly the “Indians” of 1850 desperately wished something better would work out.
One thing has to be obvious: The people of each generation hope that the fate of following generations will be kinder, and the people being born in fifty or more years would be better off.
Generations are praised for their legacy, or blamed for their failures. Will the “What About Us? Generations” look back at us with disgust as the GNDG? That stands for the Great Do Nothing Generation!
This is truly Do or Die time!
James Hansen of NASA, James J. McCarthy of AAAS, Bill Moomaw of Tufts, and hundreds and thousands of scientists and anthropologists warn us that nothing in history has yet to come even close to the dangers faced by humans and nearly all living things due to climate change.
How do we know? The truth is in the numbers. The insurance industries report that weather related losses have increased dramatically in the last twenty years. Fierce firestorms, floods, droughts, tornadoes and hurricanes are increasing in frequency and intensity. Cities depending on artificial lakes and rivers delivering water from snow in the mountains will receive less and less water as snowfalls decline. Reservoirs in many populous areas are drying up.
Despite the threat of fires and earthquakes, people still crowd certain warm areas along coastlines, lakes and rivers. Despite the rapid drawdown of waters in aquifers sustaining Idaho’s agriculture and Arizona’s retirement villages and Las Vegas’s nightlife, people are slow to change their perceptions and practices. Fresh water will no doubt be the most valuable resource in the future, and one of the least available.
Yet along the Gulf Coast and all over Florida, people are rebuilding shattered and flooded homes after multiple hits by Katrina and Rita and a host of other hurricanes, and government policy supports that despite warning that more bad weather will be coming, and deficits that have sent cities, states and the central government into a quagmire of debt.
Across the Atlantic, areas of Europe are beginning to suffer heat waves and droughts. In Africa, lakes are drying up, snow on mountains is disappearing, and tropical diseases, once limited to hotter lowlands, are showing up at higher and higher altitudes on mountains as the air warms up.
These clear signs of trouble are still being ignored by some, dismissed as aberrations or “natural cycles” by others, and trivialized by diplomats from countries heavily dependent on the status quo, which means crude oil flow, and the subsequent climate damage CO2 emissions cause.
Coal interests leagued with auto companies and oil companies still indoctrinate school teachers and children in American schools in the old, carbon-fuel dependent culture that is driving much of climate change.
Diplomats from Russia don’t want scientific arguments to slow the warming of Siberia and the opening up of shipping lanes across the Arctic Ocean. They don’t want caps on the amount of fossil fuel they can sell to Europeans and the former satellites countries that were part of the Soviet Union.
Saudi Arabian diplomats consistently work to dilute passages of resolutions regarding climate change to impede application of emission reductions.
References: Carbon War, book by Jeremy Leggett.
See carbonbibliography.blogspot.com
With all this, ask yourself, What will children in thirty, forty, fifty or more years from now think of us?
Look at the legacy we’ll leave for them!
A world full of
· ancient animosities,
· ethnic cleansing,
· genocide,
· terrorism,
· drug wars, and
· injustices and invasions imposed by the haves upon the have-nots.
A world with enormous health problems
· diseases and overpopulation
· plagues like H1N1
· Ebola
· H1N1
· HIV
· widespread malaria
· dengue fever
· and a number of diseases caused by as-yet-unknown viruses and bacteria,
A World peopled with
· The Hungry
· The Thirsty
· The submerged – as rising sea levels forcing hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people to migrate toward better locales
· Better off people facing invasions from hordes of poor, displaced, desperately needy people.
· With farms, forests and waters invaded by warm-weather insects and tropical lifeforms with no local natural enemies.
What a legacy! Is this what you want to pass along to your great grandchildren?
I call the as-yet-not-conceived generations the “WAUG Kids" or What About Us? Generations of Kids who will inherit an Earth and a group of competing civilizations far harder to deal with than even our troubled world.
What can help? Good science teaching and the teaching of undiluted, frank and fearless global warming lessons, and hands-on science lessons that require students to think take responsibility for results, record, measure, graph and analyze data, and test their assumptions and verify their conclusions would help people understand what science does and how it knows what it knows.
Finally, grown ups have to teach young people by example to be loving, forgiving, tolerant, prudent, and skeptical about ill-founded or baseless doctrines (even if that applies to what I’ve said above about global warming, which it does not!)
They must also reexamine hundreds or thousands of assumptions our generation takes for granted, like the use of colored ink in paper that goes to the incinerator, the use of high density corn syrup in many pseudo-foods, the overuse of salt in nearly everything in the store; double or triple wrapping of food, for example a box of cookies may have a cellophane wrapper outside the beautifully colored cardboard box, and inside there might be a bag containing some kind of clear plastic tray that holds 18 little cookies.
Compare that with what “nature” provides:
A Banana, with a tough, tamper-proof skin, which is color coded to tell you when the fruit is not yet ripe, ripe, or overripe, and decomposes into the soil when you toss it away. Inside there’s no tray or other eternal plastic to toss aside. No added salt, sugar, HDCS, MSG, or artificial coloring, and lots of fiber, water, vitamins and minerals, put carbohydrates that don’t require cooking. Is that a good design, or what?
So let’s reexamine our beliefs and assumptions. Let’s get serious about our responsibilities regarding our children, their eventual progeny, and what we consider our “rights.”
The welfare of humanity over the next hundred years required action now!
"Dr Waug,"
James P Louviere July 20, 2009
