Daily Quick Read - July 5, 2019

Climate Change Impacts Indian Reservations

                                       Image by Derek Janis

Climate change will impact poor communities sooner and with greater severity than more affluent one.  In the US, we can already see the debilitating impact of the climate crisis on Indian reservations in the northern Great Plains.

Over recent decades, the escalating climate crisis has steadily turned up the chaos meter, battering reservations. Creeping behind the more theatrical plagues of tornadoes and ice storms is an even greater threat: a dizzying dance of deluge, followed by drought, followed by flood, as regional weather systems swing ever more wildly. And as these extremes intensify, the tribes of the Plains — American citizens, like the Hurricane Maria-battered people of Puerto Rico — are being left to face the rising chaos alone.

If Climate Change Is A Crisis – Where is the Urgency?

The Democratic Party is the political party who members seem to believe that Climate Change is really big deal.  Still the leaders of the party don't seem to care enough about the issue to actually talk about it.

The most dangerous form of climate denial is no longer Senator Jim Inhofe throwing a snowball on the Senate floor to prove that global warming isn’t real, or Trump calling climate change a Chinese hoax. It’s liberal and centrist politicians who should know better appealing to “bipartisan consensus,” immediately shifting the blame to other countries when the U.S. has among the highest per-capita emissions in the world, or asking, “How will we pay for it?”

Deforestation in Brazil = Increased Seaweed in the Ocean

Washing up on a beach near you – massive tangles of sargassum seaweed that will foul the beaches and the air as they rot and decay.  In part this new annual event may owe some of it increase in volume to increased use of agricultural fertilizer in deforested areas of the Brazilian rain forest.

It weighs 20m tonnes, stretches from west Africa to the Gulf of Mexico, and washes up on beaches creating a malodorous stench. Now scientists say a vast swathe of brown seaweed could be becoming an annual occurrence.

The prospect, the team say, could be strengthened by the finding that increasing levels of nutrients are being flushed into ocean via the Amazon in the spring and summer each year, as a result of human activities including deforestation and fertiliser use. The team report that total fertiliser usage in Brazil increased by 67% between 2011 and 2018.

Planting 1.2 Trillion Trees Could Save the Planet

This is something we could all do and support.  The total cost to plant sufficient numbers of trees to sequester sufficient carbon would be in the range of $300 billion (US) worldwide.  That’s the good news, the less good news, it will take 50-100 years to do the job.  The science says it could work, but there are skeptics  – and they have some valid arguments.

“This new quantitative evaluation shows [forest] restoration isn’t just one of our climate change solutions, it is overwhelmingly the top one,” said Prof Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, who led the research. “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.

”However, some scientists said the estimated amount of carbon that mass tree planting could suck from the air was too high. Prof Simon Lewis, at University College London, said the carbon already in the land before tree planting was not accounted for and that it takes hundreds of years to achieve maximum storage. He pointed to a scenario from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 1.5C report of 57bn tonnes of carbon sequestered by new forests this century.