Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:There's a Trump deregulation list that includes:
-Methane Emissions
-Clean Power Plan
-Endangered Species Act
-Waters of the U.S. Rule
-Emissions for Coal Power Plants
-Waste Prevention Rule
-Coal Ash Rule
-Chemical Release Prevention
-Scientific Transparency Rule
-Pesticide regulations
-Livestock regulations
-Oil gas and Fracking
-Power Plant Water Pollution
-Clean Air Act
among many, many others..
This is terrifying when the Fourth National Climate Assessment states:
Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities. The impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future..
Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities will continue to affect Earth’s climate for decades and even centuries. To RI's point, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states:
1,000,000 species are at risk of extinction (making this time period the 2nd-fastest extinction event on the planet by some metrics)
Holocene extinction event, indeed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction- Doc
I agree, terrifying.
I grew up mostly in a small city called Bellingham, about 60 miles south of the Canadian border on Puget Sound. There's a state park a few miles south of town called Larrabee State Park. It's on one of the most gorgeous drives in Washington -- Chuckanut Drive.
I spent lots of time in Larrabee Park a kid. in Washington, the land between mean high tide and mean low tide is public, so access to Puget Sound is pretty easy. Larrabee has a couple of beaches and a boat ramp. But the best part is the rocks. Most of the shore is really, really rocky -- easy stuff to climb and scramble around. And that's what I loved to do.
My favorite part, though, was the sea life. Especially the starfish. (Yeah, I know. Sea stars. But when I was a kid, we called them star fish.) When the tide was low at Larrabee, the rocks would be covered with these beautiful purple starfish. They were gorgeous, and it would look like there were thousands of them. If I close my eyes, I can transport myself back there and see those rocks and all those purple starfish.
I've lived about 75 miles south of Larrabee for going on 40 years now. Every time I drive north, I try to make time for a detour off the freeway to Chuckanut Drive. And if I'm not in a hurry, I'll swing into the park to climb around on the rocky shore. Good memories.
A few years ago, I stopped by the park for a little rock scrambling. And there were no starfish. Not. One. And I haven't seen one since.
You see, there's this thing called Starfish Wasting Disease. The starfish just kind of dissolve. Pieces of the arms break off and crawl around at random for a while, and then just melt. And it's killed off those starfish. Not just in Larrabee. Along the whole west coast from Mexico to Alaska, ochre starfish have been decimated by the wasting disease. And something like 20 other species of sea stars, including one in Washington that isn't a just a pretty thing to look at. Sunflower stars are the primary predators of sea urchins. And where the sunflower stars die off, the urchins take over. The urchins feed on kelp, and kelp forests are where the sea live thrives in these parts. Without any check on the urchins, it's the equivalent of burning down the Amazon rainforest under water here.
Already, the kelp forests in California from Monterey to the Oregon border have been replaced by "urchin barrens." The abalone in that region are dying off. The threatened Southern Sea Otters, which live in that region, live in the kelp forests.
Now, I'm not going to tell you that global warming killed the sea stars, because scientists are still trying to figure out why it happened. But the death of the kelp forests was helped along by unusual changes in ocean currents that kept the cold, nutrient filled water from welling up along the coast and left a layer of warm water along the top. But that's not really the point.
We've known for decades that life on earth exists in a very complex web and that disrupting part of an ecosystem can crash the whole thing. Evolution drives life to fill specialized niches. And a species that has lived in a narrow range of temperatures for thousands or millions of years has no reason to adapt to temperatures or pH levels outside of that range.
Every generation for hundreds of years has left its children with a more impoverished planet than it inherited. We don't see it because of a phenomena that's been labeled "shifting baselines." Each generation labels the world it grows into as normal. And so the long-term deterioration of life on earth goes largely ignored because we can't see enough in one lifetime to understand what's happening. And we have pushed the web so hard that its resiliency is strained. And we're determined to keep pushing until it falls to pieces.
If it does, I hope it takes us with it. Give some new species a crack at things in 100 million years or so. Maybe one that is smart enough to learn not to crap in its own nest.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951