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In the cool, green Alaskan spring and summer, it's hard not to think about climate change. But we can't afford to. Climate change is everyone's problem, and it deserves global recognition. The lives of our children and grandchildren, and the future of life on Earth, are at stake.
Last year, every month was the hottest on record. These trends are compounding and affecting the entire planet. The cause of the problem is the production of carbon dioxide (CO2), a gas that traps heat in the atmosphere and warms the earth's surface. The use of fossil fuels, which produce CO2, must be banned and replaced with electricity (electric cars, electric heating, etc.) as an energy source.
The good news is that once you take into account the initial investment in the transmission system, the electrical energy produced by a grid-connected solar plant is essentially free.
President Joe Biden has laid out a comprehensive plan to address climate change, and recent measures being considered in Alaska include changing wildfire management strategies in the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge: rather than allowing fires to spread as a natural phenomenon in the refuge, smoke jumpers would be deployed to limit the spread of CO2 emissions.
Notably, the Gwich'in Athabascan people of Alaska and Canada already have their own methods for suppressing forest fires. Ed Alexander of Fort Yukon reports that in the spring, they light fires across large swaths of grassland to create firebreaks that “keep the fires at a manageable level when the summer heat and lightning strikes.”
Biden's plan would use artificial intelligence to detect and quickly extinguish fires across Canada and across the country, an effort he has called for on a global scale.
Rapid population growth is impacting climate change. The world population is expected to reach 8 billion in 2023. According to Wikipedia, on average, “each person produces approximately 2.3 pounds of CO2 per day.”
Burial practices can have a huge impact on mitigating climate change. When a 150 pound person is cremated, it releases about 100 pounds of CO2. When you put this in the context of the world's population, cremation should be avoided as much as possible.
Large-scale tree planting helps to contain CO2. As an example of scale, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used tree planting as a poverty alleviation strategy during the Great Depression in the 1930s. The project was so large that it created forests along the east coast of the United States.
These are just some of the possibilities for limiting CO2. Yes, business and livelihoods will be affected, but we are talking about the survival of life on Earth. Even a 10-year delay in reducing CO2 emissions will ensure massive and irreversible changes.
Scientists have a system for identifying episodes of life on Earth beginning with the Paleozoic Era (ancient life) 600 million years ago. This episode was followed by the Cretaceous Period, which ended when a huge asteroid struck Earth, spreading a veil of ash and causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. Life on Earth recovered, and we are now in the most recent era of humankind, tentatively named the Anthropocene.
There's been much speculation about whether this era will end. An article in The Economist, provocatively titled “Tomorrow and Tomorrow…”, points out that “it is possible to imagine the Anthropocene continuing, a world in which human activity on a current scale continues but in which human institutions curb its excesses. The carbon cycle rebalances, the climate cools, degraded ocean chemistry moderates, and ice sheets and rainforests recover.”
The Economist article concludes, “Alas, it's easy – perhaps too easy – to imagine instead a brutal, cruel and short Anthropocene. Maybe civilisation will grow again over time, maybe not.”
Of course, the “human tissue suppresses excess” scenario is literally the only viable path forward. Our bodies cannot function optimally when temperatures are between 104 and 122 degrees. Anything above a certain level of outside temperature can be deadly.
The scientific community overwhelmingly agrees that the next decade will be crucial for the future of life on Earth. Let us all think of our children and the young people of the world. We have just over a decade to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions or humanity will suffer devastating consequences.
Janet McCabe is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School and a member of Alaska Common Ground.
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