Marshall Brain's Blog

[See Previous]

Disaster at sea: global warming hits UK birds

From the article:

Hundreds of thousands of Scottish seabirds have failed to breed this summer in a wildlife catastrophe which is being linked by scientists directly to global warming.

The massive unprecedented collapse of nesting attempts by several seabird species in Orkney and Shetland is likely to prove the first major impact of climate change on Britain.

The reason for the collapse is linked to a small fish that the birds would normally feed on while nesting:

A rise in sea temperature is believed to have led to the mysterious disappearance of a key part of the marine food chain - the sandeel, the small fish whose great teeming shoals have hitherto sustained larger fish, marine mammals and seabirds in their millions.

So, instead of breeding, the birds starved to death.

Why did the fish disappear?

It is believed that the microscopic plankton on which tiny sandeel larvae feed are moving northwards as the sea water warms, leaving the baby fish with nothing to feed on. This is being seen in the North Sea in particular, where the water temperature has risen by 2C in the past 20 years.

These movements of the plankton are affecting all the higher species that depend on them in one way or another.

The closing quote in the article mentions this:

"It shows that climate change is happening now, [with] devastating consequences here in Britain, and it shows that reducing the pollution causing changes to the earth's climate should now be the global number one political priority."

And that is true. Lots of people care about the environmental impacts of global climate change. But let's say you could care less about breeding seabirds. In that case, we know that most glaciers and ice sheets are now melting. Eventually, cities like NY, LA, DC, London, etc. will see the impact of rising ocean levels. So, whether you are an environmentalist worried about wildlife or a capitalist worried about trillions of dollars in real estate, you have an interest in stopping global warming.

What is so interesting about global climate change is our apparent inability to help ourselves. Even though we all know what is causing global warming (fossil fuels), and even though we all know how to stop it (stop burning fossil fuels), we are unable to do anything about the problem. We all need to go to work -- There is no alternative. To get to work we need to use cars or buses or trains, all of which burn fossil fuels either directly or indirectly. There is no alternative to that either, unless you ride a bicycle, which most people cannot do. Therefore, we all contribute to global warming every day. We have wired modern society so that, in order to survive, we must contribute to global warming.

It is a classic Tragedy of the Commons situation, where there is no short-term economic benefit to solving the problem, and quite a bit of short-term benefit to perpetuating it. So we spiral downward. One of three things will happen:

• The spiral continues out of control. Things get worse and worse and worse while we all wring our hands (which is where we are now).
• The crisis gets large enough to shock the modern world into action. We stop using coal, oil, etc.
• A new technology arises that either: a) removes carbon from the environment cheaply and in large quantities, and sequesters it -- preferably back underground in oil fields and coal mines, or b) fuels cars and power plants without adding carbon to the environment (for a funny take on one possible technology, see this article).

We can all watch and see what happens.