When seemingly unrelated news stories from around the country and the globe about the state of the natural world converge on each other, it is important to sit up and take notice. Island Earth is trying to tell us something.
One story is global, one is regional and one is local, but their interconnected meaning is inescapable.
Let’s begin with the big picture. The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently reported that combined global land and ocean surface temperature for June 2010 were the warmest on record. June 2010 was the fourth consecutive warmest month on record, following March, April and May, which were also the warmest on record, part of the 304th consecutive month with a global temperature above the monthly 20th century average. The last month with below-average temperature was February 1985-25 years ago. The ten warmest years for average global temperatures in the last 130 years have all occurred in the last 15 years. What are these numbers telling us?
Weather is what happens on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. Weather is what analysts call a noisy system-there’s lots of variation (or noise) in the system, so our experience of highly changeable weather obscures our ability to see patterns. Climate is what happens over decades. And when you take the long view, the patterns are inescapable. Regardless of whether you believe global climate change is caused by the clearly documented year-by-year carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere during the past 60 years, it is indisputable that we are living in a warmer and rapidly warming world.
Now let’s go to a very local picture. The fisheries agency responsible for coordinating the management of lobsters along the Atlantic coast is called the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASFMC). ASMFC’s technical committee has just recommended closing the entire southern New England lobster fishery for five years. Most of the potentially affected area is in Long Island Sound, where lobster fishermen in Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York used to catch over 30 million pounds of lobster per year. Last year’s catch was less than half the recent average. Overfishing is not the problem, scientists say, it is rising ocean temperatures.
Lobsters prefer bottom habitats where the temperatures are less than 66 degrees F. Unfortunately Long Island Sound’s summer temperatures – top to bottom in the Sound’s relatively shallow water column – have already reached an average of 68 degrees and now routinely exceed 79 degrees F. Lobsters are a coldwater species, which become stressed at such warm temperatures. They don’t die-although shell disease, and other secondary infections become much more common-instead they move to deeper, colder waters, where Long Island lobstermen report they now catch most of the lobsters they land.
The problem is that when female lobsters release their eggs in deeper waters offshore, rather than the intolerably warm inshore waters, the ocean currents that distribute the floating hatched lobsters for the first 20-30 days of their lives sweep them away from shore-away from their preferred nursery grounds into new regions where the larvae are not adapted. Fisheries scientists call this a recruitment failure. If ASMFC follows through on this drastic recommendation to close the southern New England lobster fishery, it will be the first instance where rapidly warming ocean temperatures have disrupted a major commercial fishery in our region.(ok)
Speaking of disruptions to major commercial fisheries, the attention of the country has been riveted for the past three months on the oil drilling disaster, 90 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico,affecting an entire region. It has been exceptionally difficult for most of us to understand how this tragedy could have spun so wildly out of control-and why one strategy after another to stop the unrelenting flow of oil has failed. Is everyone involved supremely incompetent?
One of the most unusual assessments of the situation comes from an energy industry insider, Matthew Simmons of Houston Texas and Rockport Maine (Simmons is a trustee of the Island Institute). Simmons is no fan of BP, which he believes has consistently mischaracterized (actually a polite way of describing Simmons’ more blunt language) every aspect of the crisis from the extent in the early days to the spill’s cascading ecological effects on the ocean and its long-term effects on public health. But he says none of the major deepwater oil exploration and drilling companies could have fixed the blowout once it started because the pressures from the well exceed all the tolerances that the oil industry’s technology is designed to handle. Relief wells, he believes, will fail because the well bore and casing have been irreparably damaged, which is what happened at the Ixtoc well in Campeche Bay, Mexico in 1979, which spewed millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 10 months before the gusher spent itself.
Time will tell if we have to come to terms with Simmons’ darkest fears. But in the meantime, it is important to recognize that these three stories are all part of one much larger story. We are witnessing the historic beginning of the end of the age of fossil fuels. Or more accurately to paraphrase Winston Churchill, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
We used to say we have to reduce our dependence on foreign oil; now it is clear we need to reduce our dependence on oil, period. This will take a lifetime at least, but we should begin. We must, must, must push as hard and fast as we can to develop alternative sources of energy. The only way to send a signal to the energy markets and energy entrepreneurs of the world is for the largest fossil-fuel consuming country in the world to put a price on carbon. Unfortunately, the U.S. Senate has recently punted on considering any kind of cap and trade legislation this year, so the prospects for actually facing up to what our warmer, drier and stormier climate is signalling to us appears to be especially bleak at this time.
The oil depletion allowances and the other subsidies that the United States has heaped on the oil industry from its earliest days send exactly the wrong message to the market about the future- “Drill, baby, drill.” From the bumper stickers that have appeared in recent months on Vinalhaven, we can begin to imagine a very different energy future for offshore Maine: “Spin, baby, spin.”
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.