Forget Emissions, What About the Bugs?
The narrative of climate crisis is both exhausting and terrifying. It’s so difficult that it causes many to turn away from the changes that are happening around them, and plays out like a political cleavage in social discourse. The incredulous question always comes down to belief. You do/don’t believe in climate change? It’s an interesting turn of phrase, one that elevates science to the level of religion, a practice that can bear the burden of the public’s faith.
Among those that don’t believe in climate change, there is a sense that the version of the other side constitutes fake news, propaganda by a shadowy political cabal that wants to manipulate the free market to enforce a New World Order. Those that do believe in climate change often express the converse position - that it’s climate change denial which is driven by fake news, propaganda put out by hydrocarbon corporations that are have no intention of allowing the market for black gold to decrease.
“It just happens to be a question of new-money industrialists (the renewables), vs old money industrialists (fuel corporations)”
Both sides of this issue are convinced that the other side is 100% wrong, and that their side has the full story - the facts. But reality is painted in shades of grey, and it’s much more complicated than that. Both sides have a political agenda at stake, with a massive industrial complex funding think pieces, blog posts, and science on either side. It just happens to be a question of new-money industrialists (the renewables), vs old money industrialists (fuel corporations). Public opinion is the stage where these two factions duke it out, since the government can only afford to subsidize one of them at a time. Our goal here is to spend some time demystifying the debate. To do so, it’s necessary to take a look at both sides, and to spend some time thinking about what our overall goals are.
To start with, it’s worth pointing out that climate change, a shift in the local temperature setpoint, has happened repeatedly over the course of the earth’s history. Temperatures and conditions have oscillated dramatically: tropical plants in the arctic, ginkgo in the desert of Eastern Washington, ample water in the Sahara. In addition to titanic changes with little warning, the earth has just been much hotter for most of its history - up to 15 Celsius hotter. The excruciating about all of this, is that we can’t possibly know the significance of it, can’t possibly know the whole picture. Were there causes that could have been avoided that preceded this sort of change? Was it random, due to an unforeseen celestial change? Living on this planet comes hand-in-hand with living alongside species-ending calamities.
Three scales for understanding the context of global temperatures. The earth is estimated to be ~4 billion years old. 500 MYA is the first fossil evidence that organisms were beginning to explore land. 65 MYA dinosaurs were getting blasted by an extinction-causing asteroid. From the Wiki page on climate change.
Looking at that graph, I can understand that it might seem like if climate shifts are inherent to the planet, does that mean there’s nothing to worry about?
Well, no.
Why not?! You said this is just a thing that happens.
Well, for one thing, this sort of shift is stressful on the inhabitants of the planet, and entire ecosystems becoming dysfunctional could have serious repercussions. To be clear, no one (at least no one reasonable) is suggesting that all life on earth is on the verge of becoming extinct. What they are suggesting, is that humans, and the animals that they evolved alongside are threatened by a collapsing ecological web. There are no guarantees in this game, is what it comes down to. Most species are around for maybe a million years before inflexibility in the face of changing conditions wipes them out.
“if climate shifts are inherent to the planet, does that mean there’s nothing to worry about?
Well, no.
Why not?! You said this is just a thing that happens. ”
Many of these extinction events are considered to be due to an ecological inversion - an overabundance of consumers relative to producing organisms. This kind of collapse is subtle at first, but can reach a tipping point, after which collapse accelerates. One potential metric for this kind of collapse is insect populations - as insects begin to disappear, so do the plants that depend on them for pollination, and the animals that depend on them for food. This destabilization reverberates throughout the web, and could have disastrous consequences for humans - our food system is dependent on ready availability of pollinators.
One of the reasons for this is industrial agriculture, which took off in the 1950s with the advent of the Green Revolution. This was a one-size-fits most approach to increasing crop yields from staple grains such as wheat, rice, and maize. Genetic engineering of highly productive strains, in combination with the development of large-scale ammonia fertilizer production, led to the elimination of famine in most parts of the world. Tens of millions of people were saved from the brink of starvation, and has been heralded as one of the greatest accomplishments of international aid in human history. Despite the revolution’s enormous benefits, one of the side effects of the kind of monoculture prevalent in modern farming is the necessity for heavy application of herbicides and pesticides in order to drive yield-based-profits.
And now, it looks like we’re starting to pay the price for these global increases: the insects are dying, and the webs that depend on them, including our own food stocks, are threatened. Amateur entomologists see it, standardized academic studies see it. Bird population declines are associated with eating neonicotinoid-laden insects. The bees are also declining, and so are the plants they pollinate. One bright point is that it would appear that there is a rock bottom to be reached - a study in southern England hypothesized that areas modernized in the 1950s had already seen the worst of the insect declines - one explanation for the steep drop-off seen only in an area with extensive land-use changes over the course of the 50 year study. If a rock bottom can be reached, then it can be scrabbled back from.
What’s interesting about this sort of data is that, unlike carbon measurements that are difficult to parse, this data is apparent on the gut level. When I was a kid, we’d take road trips all over the place - through the Western US, through Europe, and the cars would always be disgusting. After a week of driving, the front would be caked in carcasses that some unfortunate kid at a rental place was going to have to scrape off before handing the car out again. In 2018 my partner and I traveled around for four months in our CRV - and had almost no bugs collected, despite passing through the great plains at the peak of summer.
The point here, is that there’s great danger in mis-allocating human responsibility for the current state of the planet. That kind of a mistake makes it possible to miss the mark, to focus all resources on solutions that are more bandaid, rather than the difficult choices necessary to prevent catastrophe.
Burning this is a terrible way to generate electricity, but signs point to the rates of emissions gradually slowing down. This is a problem we have known about for a long time, and emerging technologies are only now getting cheap enough to be able to replace hydrocarbon fuels without a massive cost to already-strained (or fundamentally underfunded) federal budgets. We can’t be sure about the data on CO2 and global warming except in retrospect - but it’s possible to look out and see the ways humans are negatively impacting a fragile planet. Industrial waste in the form of PFOA and PFOS contaminates almost all creatures on the planet. Insect populations around the world are collapsing. Plastics fill the oceans, showing up in fish, birds, and our own blood streams. Prescription medications pass into waterways, altering the hormonal setpoints of entire ecological systems. Humans have a problem with waste, and it’s starting to blow back in our faces.
There are many glorious things about the human species - art, music, poetry, architecture, compassion… but the way we deal with our waste is not one of them. There are no living systems (or physical ones, really) that don’t give off some kind of waste stream. Humans have, over the course of the last few decades been focused on a single one - carbon emissions. It has raised the question of human impact to a fever pitch. The goal now is to realize when a fight has been won, and move forward, onward, to the rest of it.
