Earth Day Perspective: Ocean Rising
Credit NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli
On this 51st Earth Day observance, there will be lots of attention to a multitude of issues, including the forty world leaders joining President Biden in a virtual summit. Earth Day is a good moment for perspective with this view of our “spaceship” full of life, hurtling through the vacuum of the universe. Land, water, ice, and clouds – changing in front of our eyes, with the rising sea being a special agent of change.
Of course, Earth has always been dynamic and evolving throughout its 4.5 billion year history. Life evolved magically some 4.2 billion years ago, shortly after the ocean formed 4.4 billion years ago. Our species is now understood to date back a mere million years or so. Some like to think of the entire planet as a living organism, a concept postulated by one of my favorite authors, iconoclast Dr. James Lovelock.
At today’s global virtual Summit it is expected that major announcements will be made about the urgent need to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are now known to be causing our planet to warm to levels unknown in at least three million years. The expectation is a bold commitment for the United States to reduce GHG emissions by half by 2030. That would be extraordinary and worthy of attention particularly in a forum with world leaders from China and nearly all major industrial nations.
That’s a notable sign of progress. It follows a growing segment of the business and financial community that recognizes the growing threat and urgency resulting from a warming world.
But for perspective, that would just slow the rate of warming. The world would still be warming. Warming means more days of high heat, wildfires, more droughts, heavier rainfall due to more moisture evaporating from the oceans, strange and severe storms due to the excess heat energy in the sea and the melting of the polar ice cap which is altering world weather patterns.
And then there is that issue of ice, water, land…
Seventy two percent of our planet is ocean, in terms of surface area, a number that is getting fractionally greater as melting ice turns into water. Looking at the biosphere, the living part of the planet from the tree canopy down to the microbes in the soils and the ocean, miles deep, the oceans are estimated to be a staggering 98% of the three dimensional volume.
In a warming world the ice sheets and glaciers will surely melt. At present the rate of global average sea level rise is about five millimeters a year, roughly a quarter of an inch. The rate is now triple what it was last century. And it’s accelerating. On the current path it could rise a meter higher in the next fifty years. (For Americans, a meter is close to three feet.)
In my new book Moving to Higher Ground: Rising Sea Level and the Path Forward, I observe that there is some poignancy as the sea that we take for granted is now rising up, putting some of the land that we value so dearly, underwater, literally and financially. Perhaps that perspective will help us to move forward on this urgent journey to keep this planet habitable for our species.
Earth Day should cause us to think of the 4 E’s: Environment, Ecology, Economies, and social Equity as one unified view, enabled and exemplified by that amazing image of Earth from space, first seen just a half century ago.
The challenge is great, but there really is no alternative. As I wrote in the final sentence of my book:
“So, let us begin, to ‘rise with the tides’…. for ourselves, for our moment on Earth, but more importantly, as testament of our concern for future generations.”