El Residente
26 Guest Column by Linda M. Loverude
Climate Emergency
E
ven the finest-tipped pen can not accurately draw a line depicting Earth’s atmosphere on a football field sized photograph of our Blue Planet. Our atmosphere, which affords us protection and generates life in so many complex ways, is only 12 miles deep; only 12 miles from the touch of Earth’s surface to the first step into space. Every single second, without exception, humankind’s activities shoot 2.57 million pounds of CO2 into that 12 mile cushion. In 1988 Dr. James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist, testified to Congress that greenhouse gases had been causing Earth to warm since 1971. (In 1800, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the CO2 level was 200 parts per million and on Christmas Day 2019 the CO2 level was 410 parts per million.) Right now, there is more CO2 in our atmosphere than there has been since the Cambrian Era… and it is continuing to rise. So what? You may say. Carbon dioxide traps Earth’s heat and, if and when Earth reaches an average temperature increase of 2.0 degrees centigrade, the planet will be a very different place, with catastrophic climatic consequences.
The last time Planet Earth was that warm was three million years ago and the sea level was 80 feet higher than it is now. In the book The Uninhabitable Earth, a local example given was that in the jungles of Costa Rica, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal; within a few hours a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out, a very unpleasant scenario. As Bill McKibben, renowned climatologist from the organization 350.org states, the planet has already increased its average temperature 1.5 degrees centigrade. And as the planet warms there are chains of events that increase the problem – one is methane, another greenhouse gas, which is escaping from sequestration in the North as the tundra melts. Fires, destruction of natural habitats, deforestation of primordial forests, and plowing of land all exacerbate this whirlwind of chemistry heating our planet.
I’ve talked atmosphere, but now let’s think about the Good Earth itself. In the USA alone, in 2018, 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides were dumped on our soil and sprayed into the air. 388 million pounds of those were potentially fatal pesticides currently outlawed in the European Union, China, and Brazil. These numbers don’t even include
