10 minutes

While American media once again spent precious time and energy pursuing the crap emitting from the mouth of our wannabe dictator as he continues to sow the seeds to end democracies not just in this country, but also the world, a scientist of international renown was ignored as he issued warnings that our only home in the universe continues on its trajectory to inhospitability.

 David Suzuki, speaking in an interview with ipolitics.ca made a statement that shook much of the world because of his status. Discussing the current state of the environment Suzuki uttered a very definitive statement:  Now, it is too late.   

Suzuki was asked:

It’s clear you haven’t lost your passion for a lot of the issues that you care about, but do you ever feel like you’re banging your head against the wall? If you look at public opinion data, climate change is often well down the list of priorities for most Canadians.

When you see that, where do you find the motivation to continue speaking to the values you believe are important?

And he answered very forcefully:

I believe an informed public will do the right thing. Public concern in the late 1980s was right at the top and we had the first international conference on the atmosphere in 1988, where there were 300 people, over 40 governments, environmentalists, scientists, private sector people, you name it.

At the end of that conference, they said global warming represented a threat to humanity, second only to global nuclear war. If the world had followed the conclusions from that conference, we would not have the problem we face today and we would have saved trillions of dollars and millions of lives.

Now, it is too late.

I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late. I say that because I go by science and Johan Rockström, the Swedish scientist who heads the Potsdam Institute, has defined nine planetary boundaries. These are constraints on how we live. As long as humans, like any other animal, live within those nine constraints, we can do it forever, and that includes the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the pH of the oceans, the amount of available fresh water, the nitrogen cycle, etc.

There are nine planetary boundaries and we’ve only dealt with one of them — the ozone layer — and we think we’ve saved ourselves from that threat. But we passed the seventh boundary this year, and we’re in the extreme danger zone. Rockström says we have five years to get out of the danger zone.

If we pass one boundary, we should be shitting our pants. We’ve passed seven!

And, if you look at those boundaries, like the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, we’ve had 28 COP meetings on climate change and we haven’t been able to cap emissions.

We’re on our way to more than a three-degree temperature rise by the end of this century, and scientists agree we shouldn’t rise above one and half degrees.

Please click on the link and read the whole interview. Suzuki himself has not given up despite what it sounds like. His statement is a clarion call that time is short and the consequences will be disastrous. Hopefully this call will cause a few leaders to put some effort into climate action, but based on media ignoring his message I doubt that it will cause even an iota of concern among world leaders.

Meanwhile the current administration is doing all it can to gut any environmental laws and rules. As NPR reported Thursday morning:

The Trump administration wants to overturn a key 2009 Environmental Protection Agency finding that underpins much of the federal government’s actions to rein in climate change.

The EPA has crafted a proposal that would undo the government’s “endangerment finding,” a determination that pollutants from burning fossil fuels, such as carbon dioxide and methane, can be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The finding has long served as the foundation for a host of policies and rules to address climate change. The EPA’s proposal to revoke the finding is currently under review by the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Already, environmentalists, climate advocates and others are bracing for what could be a fundamental shift away from trying to address the problem of a hotter climate. And the Trump administration is celebrating the proposal as a potential economic win.

Let’s add to all this a Gizmodo report on the staggering amount of plastics in our waterways and in our bodies and the bodies of all other creatures on earth:

Researchers from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and Utrecht University claim to be the first to provide a real estimate of ocean-polluting nanoplastics. Their research indicates that the North Atlantic Ocean alone hosts 27 million tons of floating plastic particles less than 1 micrometer (μm) in size.

“Plastic pollution of the marine realm is widespread, with most scientific attention given to macroplastics and microplastics. By contrast, ocean nanoplastics (<1 μm) remain largely unquantified, leaving gaps in our understanding of the mass budget of this plastic size class,” they explained in a study published earlier this month in the journal Nature. “Our findings suggest that nanoplastics comprise the dominant fraction of marine plastic pollution.”

Very scary and disturbing.

A discussion of the 9 planetary boundaries can be found here. 

The authors of this framework was a group of Earth System and environmental scientists in 2009 led by Johan Rockström from the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Will Steffen from the Australian National University. They collaborated with 26 leading academics, including Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, Goddard Institute for Space Studies climate scientist James Hansen, oceanographer Katherine Richardson, geographer Diana Liverman and the German Chancellor‘s chief climate adviser Hans Joachim Schellnhuber.

Most of the contributing scientists were involved in strategy-setting for the Earth System Science Partnership, the precursor to the international global change research network Future Earth. The group wanted to define a “safe operating space for humanity” for the wider scientific community, as a precondition for sustainable development.

Thresholds and tipping points

The 2009 study identified nine planetary boundaries and, drawing on current scientific understanding, the researchers proposed quantifications for seven of them. These are:

1. climate change (CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere < 350 ppm and/or a maximum change of +1 W/m² in radiative forcing);
2. ocean acidification (mean surface seawater saturation state with respect to aragonite ≥ 80% of pre-industrial levels);
3. stratospheric ozone depletion (less than 5% reduction in total atmospheric O₃ from a pre-industrial level of 290 Dobson Units);
4. biogeochemical flows in the nitrogen (N) cycle (limit industrial and agricultural fixation of N₂ to 35 Tg N/yr) and phosphorus (P) cycle (annual P inflow to oceans not to exceed 10 times the natural background weathering of P);
5. global freshwater use (< 4000 km³/yr of consumptive use of runoff resources);
6. land system change (< 15% of the ice-free land surface under cropland);
7. the erosion of biosphere integrity (an annual rate of loss of biological diversity of < 10 extinctions per million species).
8. chemical pollution (introduction of novel entities in the environment).

For one process in the planetary boundaries framework, the scientists have not specified a global boundary quantification:

9. atmospheric aerosol loading;

The quantification of individual planetary boundaries is based on the observed dynamics of the interacting Earth system processes included in the framework. The control variables were chosen because together they provide an effective way to track the human-caused shift away from Holocene conditions.