[MCN] Earth Forgotten, Again: Rick Kerr, Choteau, MT

[Lance Olsen]

Earth Forgotten, Again

Rick Kerr 	    “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Re-educate”
P.O. Box 1276
Choteau, MT 59422

The first formal recognition of Earth Day was in 1970.  This recognition followed the 1960’s, a time period where humans still dumped raw sewage and chemical wastes in their water ways.  The Cuyahoga River in Ohio literally caught on fire.  And humans polluted their air with smoke stacks without scrubbers or filters, showering surrounding areas with arsenic, sulfur dioxide, and toxic heavy metal residues.

In his 1970 State of the Union speech, Republican President Richard Nixon exclaimed, “Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions.”  And thus Richard Nixon founded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  This was a time when support for environmental regulations transcended politics.

Since its inception, the EPA has transformed American life for the better.  Reducing concentrations of air pollutants by nearly 70%; mitigating the catastrophic effects of acid rain, leaded gasoline, and secondhand smoke; and implementing important regulations to protect our environment from off-shore and on-shore oil drilling, are only a few highlights of the work of our EPA.

Today, as we struggle with more formidable challenges brought upon us by a warming planet, our current Republican President has essentially degraded the EPA with appointments of poor leadership and nonsensical budget cuts.  He has also rolled back critical regulations by the EPA in its attempt to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions.        This is a direct slap in the face to our kids’, and their kids’, future right to a stable planet. 

Global warming is amplifying the intensity, duration, and frequency of extreme weather events across the planet, most notably with extreme heat and heat waves.  And we now have a new phenomenon to deal with …. climate refugees.

In a stable climate, the global ratio of record hot days to record cold days is about even.  New record high temperatures now regularly surpass new record low temperatures by a ratio of 2:1.    

The general expectation is that cold events should become less frequent and less severe as the climate warms on the global scale.

Due to increases in the intensity of cold air advection from polar to lower-latitude regions, it is possible for cold events to increase in frequency or intensity regionally for periods of time.
  
A link to Arctic warming with an amplified jet stream resulting in cold winters in middle latitudes, such as Montana, have been made.  The Arctic is warming much faster than Montana is and over the last two Februarys, Montana has had temperatures colder than in the Arctic and in the world.  

So as Earth Day #49 approaches, I hope we all will pause and seriously consider our choices in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  And, as importantly, consider who we should be supporting and electing to office.  We need people who will speak up, represent us, and protect our quest for a stable planet.

I will leave you with the wisdom from another time period: 

“We must all see ourselves as part of this Earth, not as an enemy from the outside who tries to impose his will on it …. being a living part of the Earth, we cannot harm any part of her without hurting ourselves.”

Lame Deer



 

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 “We live amid a global wave of anthropogenically driven biodiversity loss: species and population extirpations and, critically, declines in local species abundance. Particularly, human impacts on animal biodiversity are an under-recognized form of global environmental change. Among terrestrial vertebrates, 322 species have become extinct since 1500, and populations of the remaining species show 25% average decline in abundance. Invertebrate patterns are equally dire: 67% of monitored populations show 45% mean abundance decline. Such animal declines will cascade onto ecosystem functioning and human well-being.”

Rodolfo Dirzo, Hillary S. Young et al. Defaunation in the Anthropocene 
Science 25 JULY 2014 
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“Human society has yet to appreciate the implications of unprecedented species redistribution for life on Earth ….
 Even if greenhouse gas emissions stopped today, the responses required in human systems to adapt to 
the most serious effects of climate-driven species redistribution would be massive.”
 
Pecl et al. 2017. Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being
Science. 31 March 2017



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