During the Covid-19 Lockdown in California, I joined a Climate Change Book Club. This experience has been both exciting and more than a bit surreal as I read about one impending global crisis, while living the shocking reality of an entirely different global crisis. The club is made up of some of my peers and friends in marine science careers as well as two friends in other biology doctoral programs. This group brings super interesting perspectives to the problem of climate change because we all have different backgrounds (even those of us in marine science focus on different topics, and it’s been super interesting to try and take the additional time offered by not having ANY commute (or a whole slew of other time consuming activities) to dedicate to a topic I care rather desperately about. We are reading Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Captialism vs. the Climate. The book is about how Climate Change and Capitalism are fundamentally at odds with one another, and how despite the fact that we’ve known about anthropogenic (man-made) climate change for decades (Plantico and Karl, 1990), the interests of free trade and the economy have always come ahead of the needs of our fragile environment. I went on a (socially distant) walk with a close friend during the first week of being a part of my climate change book club and we were talking about the implications of climate change to our generation – catastrophic changes to our climate that cannot be predicted exactly but what we do know is that we can expect increased intensity of storm events like hurricanes, enormous rain storms and flooding, as well as hotter and drier droughts. My friend looked at me and said she didn’t know how I did it – working with climate change as a biologist, how to not get depressed in the face of all of these uncertainties, in addition to the knowledge that there is an alarming number of people denying that these changes are occurring in the first place. To be honest, I don’t know how or why we are able to keep our heads up, but every other scientist I know working in the field of marine or atmospheric science has something they hold on to in the face of climate change – be it coming up with resilient solutions for communities using natural barriers, or researching the aspects of a creature’s biology which allow survival in changing environmental conditions. So why start a book on climate change in the midst of a global pandemic? Well to be honest, I had been meaning to get around to books about the climate and more “serious” books than the escapism fiction books I normally read, but realistically it took my friend reaching out to me and asking if I was interested in joining the book club before I could actually commit to the task that is reading about how badly we’ve messed up our wonderful planet. I’ve struggled throughout my academic career to look at extinctions caused by humanity as a whole because it’s such an emotional topic for me but at this point climate change is coming, and I’d rather be informed about all the steps we took to get here so at the very least I can be a little more prepared. This topic is inherently uncomfortable. It’s close to home because it quite literally is going to affect our home and the world at large in ways we can’t know until it happens. And that’s scary. Now what’s fascinating about reading this book has been the reaffirming of the beliefs that I’ve held for quite some time about the uncertainty we face due to climate change. Now as a young overly progressive ridiculously loud environmentalist, I’ve been told for YEARS that I’m overreacting or that “it’ll work itself out”. Klein’s book has highlighted a lot of the changes that we can expect to see in the face of climate change, especially given that we’ve been operating business as usual in terms of our emissions for the past 30 years in spite of scientific evidence clearly stating that increased emissions WILL impact our climate in ways that will become additive and unpredictable. And although this knowledge isn’t comforting, it is refreshing to hear about climate change in direct terms rather than the wishy-washy watered-down nonsense that has been such a large part of the political discourse since I was old enough to listen to what politicians were saying. Bummer, dude. Yeah. I’ve been hesitant to talk about the current Covid lockdown/social distancing/whatever exactly is happening because it’s equally uncomfortable for me to talk about. But one day on a walk down to the beach near me, I set up a towel on the grass about 100 feet from the closest person and laid down to read the introduction of This Changes Everything. It was a Thursday afternoon, and you wouldn’t know that it wasn’t the middle of summer for how many people were at the beach. In fact, you’d have no idea that there was a disease ravaging the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in our country because there were very few people wearing masks or practicing social distancing at the beach park. I don’t claim to know the circumstances of every group of people hanging out in the park, but it felt out of sync with the events transpiring from Covid. While I was sitting at the beach, reading the beginning of this book I was met with this quote about climate change in the introductory chapter: “Faced with a crisis that threatens our survival as a species, our entire culture is continuing to do the very thing that caused the crisis, only with an extra dose of elbow grease behind it.” As I read this chapter, a large family moved a whole picnic’s worth of stuff onto a table nearby and started blasting music. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t think twice about a family having a picnic in such a wonderful location but I live in a place where people are adamantly ignore the CDC recommendation of wearing masks in public places, and seeing everyone behaving like it’s just an extended break and there aren’t people on ventilators in our hospital just up Pacific Coast Highway feels icky. And putting some learning about the impending climate crisis was just a little too much for this young scientist. There is a silver lining somewhere here, I just know it. A recent paper in Nature found that the shut-downs caused by the pandemic have decreased daily global carbon dioxide emissions during the lockdowns by 17% by early April as compared with the average 2019 values (Quere et al., 2020). While cool, without significant changes to how we as a planet, as a country, as a society decide to return to “normal”, the drop in emissions may be just a small blip in the increasing trend of climate emissions over the past few decades. Works Cited:Quere, C., Jackson, R., Jones, M., Smith, A., Abernethy, S., Andrew, R., De-Gol, A., Willis, D., Shan, Y., Canadell, J., Friedlingstein, P., Creutzig, F., and G. Peters (2020). Temporary reduction in daily global CO2 emissions during the COVID-19 forced confinement. Nature Climate Change. Plantico, ,M. and T. Karl (1990). Is recent climate change across the United States related to rising levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gases? Journal of Geophysical Research. 95(D10): 16,617 – 16,637.
1 Comment
Henry
8/1/2020 08:50:03 am
Do you recommend the book? Worthwhile even though it was published 6 years ago? (Which feels like millennia right now)
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AuthorBree Gibbs, here. I'm a recent Master's Grad just trying to share what it's like to be a trash scientist (for those who aren't in the know, I'm a marine biologist). Categories
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