What do we know about the climate change?
11/29/20 Ames area only has this little crack on the ground for our poor people to do elevated hikes. When the weather is nice, everybody comes. After “hiking”, it feels like “ah, this is a nice parade” 🙂 I had to do some off-trail walk to pick up the hiking feeling. Miss Mt Rainer, Grand Canyon, Adirondacks, Rocky mountains … even blue ridge is alright 🙂
After tenure, I definitely felt more free to explore the problems I care. Although I am not yet doing research in “climate change” and “global warming”. I felt the responsibility to talk about it. It is sad to see those terms become buzzwords and hard to connect to people. So today, let me make them concrete.
Let’s start with corals. Corals are animals. They are self-sufficient in that there are plants that live inside coral and make food for coral through photosynthesis. In recent years, corals are dying in a historically fast speed. Scientists estimated that if corals continue dying in this speed, we will no longer have corals on earth after 30 years. Corals to marine life is like buildings to people. Fishes have their fixed home in corals. They go out in the morning for food and come back at night to corals. If all the corals died, what about fishes? then what about us? Coral itself have been contributing to medicine including cancer-curing medicine.
How is global warming related to coral dying? Scientists observed that the ocean water is coming “hotter” in recent years. Corals are very sensitive to the water temperature, even 1C or 2C can cause them “bleach”. What is a “coral bleach”? When the water temperature rises, the photosynthesis in the coral is impaired. The corals “think” that the plants inside are malfunctioning and try to eject them. As a result, corals go starving, turn to white and then die.
Now let’s talk about the north pole and south pole. In the north pole, in summer, the amount of ice is reduced vastly. Seals use ice to build a “defense” for their babies. When there is less ice, their babies are exposed and easily caught by the polar bears. Polar bears live on ice. When the ice is all melt, where the polar bears can go? Walrus used to live on ice near where they get their food. Now, the ice is disappearing in summer. Many walruses are piled each other on a small beach. Some were stepped by their peers to death. Some tried to climb up over cliffs and fall down to death. These are documented in our cameras. In the south pole, the ice traps a lot of algaes. It is a food source for krill (looks like a shrimp but not a shrimp). This krill is then a food source for penguins and whales. If we no longer have ice, what will happen for this food chain?
This above is just a part of the effect of global warming. To avoid buzzwords, we don’t have to use the term “global warming”, but the facts are: we detected the rising of the ocean temperature deviated from the historical trend. The warming killed corals and melt the ice near south and north poles in summer. We observed that many animals rely on ice for food and shelters. The major cause is believed to be CO2 (I have done some research and found that data centers also contributed to quite the carbon footprint).