The Anthropocene In Two Pie Charts

All the mammals in the world today weigh more than five times as much as ten thousand years ago. 

1greenblogger | ecologue

1greenblogger | visualcapitalist

Cattle alone (416 megatons) weigh more than twice as much as all of the mammals on earth before humans domesticated animals, and releases 12,283 megatons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases during the collective animals’ life span.*

Most of the rest of the world’s livestock animals are, like cattle, ruminants; they and their compartmentalized stomachs belch and excrete methane, whose wiggly molecules are 80 times more powerful at bouncing heat back to earth rather than letting it escape into the atmosphere.

Our pets are small in number, but mighty in impact: cats and dogs contribute almost another megaton of greenhouse gases every year, in large part because they eat a fifth of the world’s meat and fish (and a third of the food from animal sources) in the US — more, per capita, than many humans. 

In short: the livestock we breed is a huge contributor to human impacts on earth.

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* Approximately 42 percent of a cow or steer is edible (pdf, p. 11); 416 megatons of cattle yields 173 megatons of meat; beef production is responsible for 71 kg of CO2-eq per kilogram.

Carbon Dioxide: Too Many New Records

We humans are pushing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere five times faster than we were in the 1960s. We’ve reached not only a new record of 427 parts per million but also a new record in the amount of increase in one year.

Scripps Institute of Oceanography

The current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is twice what it was prior to industrialization in the 19th century, and higher than it’s been in several million years — when sea levels were 78 feet higher than today. 

Also: a quarter of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted in the past 175 years has been absorbed by the oceans, which are becoming more and more acidic as a result. Bye-bye, coral reefs. 

The amount of CO2 the oceans can absorb has slowed since the start of industrialization — so more of our excess CO2 is going into the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, we’ve pushed atmospheric methane to a level approaching three times what it was before the Industrial Revolution, mostly because the amount of livestock we’re farming. Rice paddies, landfills, and fossil fuel extraction also contribute.

Methane heats the air a lot faster than carbon dioxide does. It degrades in about a decade into water and — yikes! carbon dioxide. 

CO2, unfortunately, is niiiiice and stable. It hangs around for hundreds of years. If we could somehow end all emissions by 2100, it would take thousands of years for CO2 to drop to its pre-industrial level.

Y’all, I’m nervous. Every day, I choose hope that we can manage as a human family to reduce consumption, transition to renewable fuels, and make peace. But despair over the world we are leaving the coming generations is never far from my mind. 

Media Fail to Explain Climate Crisis Role in Weather Events

From Public Citizen, via email. Key information: 7.2 percent of television coverage and 2.5 percent of news coverage in the top television stations and newspapers mentioned climate change in coverage of Hurricane Dorian.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Although Hurricane Dorian exemplifies what climate scientists have warned about, major U.S. media outlets are failing to connect the climate crisis to the strongest Atlantic storm ever to hit land, a Public Citizen analysis shows.

Scientists say that global warming makes hurricanes intensify faster, dump more rain and move more slowly. All these things have happened with Dorian; it has moved over water that is warmer than usual, intensified at an unprecedented rate, dumped 24 inches of rain on parts of the Bahamas and slowed to a crawl, moving at as little as 1 mile per hour.

But between Friday and Monday, climate or global warming was mentioned in just 7.2% of the 167 pieces on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and Fox. The top 49 newspapers by circulation didn’t do much better. Of them, 32 covered Dorian in their print editions, but only eight papers connected Dorian to climate. Of 363 articles about Dorian in those papers’ print editions, just nine (2.5%) mentioned climate change.

“It is mind-boggling that major media outlets can report about a storm of epic proportions that is exactly what climate scientists have warned about yet fail to mention two key words: ‘climate change,” said Allison Fisher, outreach director for Public Citizen’s Energy Program. “We can’t address the looming climate catastrophe if we aren’t talking about it.”

Meanwhile, Dorian is still lingering over the Bahamas, and damage reports are still coming in. The storm is growing and will head next to the East Coast of the U.S. As reporters cover this story, Public Citizen is urging them to include climate change.

Public Citizen’s analysis was a snapshot; it didn’t include online stories, and because of a limitation of the database, it didn’t include the Wall Street Journal. Because Public Citizen looked at top papers by circulation, many significant local dailies were not included, such as The Palm Beach Post and The Post and Courier in South Carolina. The same is true of papers that cover Capitol Hill, like The Hill, Politico and Roll Call. This analysis also does not include radio, local television or online news articles.

The results are in line with media coverage of Hurricanes Florence and Michael last year. A Public Citizen survey found that of the 24,968 total pieces mentioning Hurricanes Florence and Michael in 2018, climate change was mentioned in only 10% of online news pieces, 8% of television news transcripts and 5% of print news articles. This was, however, an improvement from 2017, when the rates were 6% for online media and television and 3% for newspapers.

Flying as an Environmentalist

The amount I’m flying this year is getting me down, because it’s hands-down the most carbon-intensive thing I do, and it negates all the carbon reductions I achieve by eating vegan, biking to work, and trying to reject consumer habits.

I’m flying this year to four conferences to give papers on ecocriticism — the study of how literature and other cultural artifacts like art, movies, and historical documents describe or depict how humans interact with the environment. My scholarly work deals with how the literature of early medieval England represents humans and the environments they occupy and imagine — from wilderness and forests through farms and their homes.

My engagement with medieval ecocriticisms is explicitly activist. I believe that thinking about the ways that humans of the past engaged with their environments can help us understand our present. I also believe that we’re in a time of climate crisis, and ecocritical humanities has to recognize that, and our scholarly endeavors have to advance understanding of the need to act, NOW. So that means I also need to act, myself — and all the flying is a real problem.

The last time I flew, I googled “carbon offsets” for flights, and rapidly went down a rabbit hole of conflicting information. One article claimed individuals don’t need to buy carbon offsets, because airlines are taking care of it. For example, they claimed Delta was providing carbon offsets for all travelers through certain airports, including the one I flew through. Turned out they were only doing that for flights taken on Earth Day.

I decided to create my own carbon sink by planting a tree for every flight I take this year. Here’s number one:

It’s a tiny, baby swamp white oak, maybe a foot tall. I planted it in a gully by Long Branch’s elementary school, with the help of a colleague and friend who has a contact there. In the photo, I’m building a cage made out of hardware cloth that will help protect the little tree from predators, mostly deer, and from accidentally being mowed. I’ll need to check on it periodically, and if we have a dry spell in the next four years I’ll have to water it.

My flights to Detroit, San Francisco, Albuquerque, and Charlottesville will add up to carbon emissions of about 3.4 tons.

A tree can sequester one ton of carbon in 40 years.

I plan to plant four trees this summer to offset the four flights I’m taking. And the labor of doing that is making me think harder about conference planning for next year, because I plan to continue planting trees to offset my own flights. But we’re in climate crisis now — we don’t have 40 years for the trees to grow.

Weather and the Street Grid

The National Weather Service has issued another heat advisory for several upcoming days in New York City. Right now, they are reporting that it’s 87 degrees, but feels like 93.

Lately I’ve been noticing quite regularly that my car and the bank that displays the temperature nearby are routinely recording temperatures higher than those being reported. It appears the weather services are using Central Park as their baseline.

But most of Manhattan is not park, and most of the parks are not Central Park, but much smaller public spaces, many of them with significant percentages devoted to paths, basketball courts, and other things that soak up heat. Next City estimates 15 percent of the borough is parkland, and 36 percent streets, which presumably includes sidewalks. Several years ago, Newsweek wrote about a study stuggesting 20 percent of Manhattan is yard space — but much of that is also paved. That leaves about 30 percent of the city’s surface covered by buildings.

In other words, a large majority of Manhattan is paved or covered in buildings.

Which means in a large majority of the city, the temperature is going to be higher than it is in Central Park. Earlier today, the weather stations were reporting a temperature of 91 with a heat index of 100. But at Apple Bank in my neighborhood, the sign said it was 100 degrees. What’s the heat index in that case?

And what are the implications and consequences of consistent underreporting of daytime and probably also nighttime temperatures in Manhattan and other heavily urbanized areas?

It turns out that large portions of Brooklyn and much of the Bronx, areas with waste transfer stations and industry that also house populations that are mostly people of color, are even more vulnerable to high heat than most of Manhattan.

I have no idea if the temperature reporting discrepancies are enough, given the relatively small land area of New York and other cities in comparison to surrounding areas, to affect our understanding of the severity of climate change.

But the effects on individuals would be significant. If the weather services is saying the heat index is 101, based on conditions in Central Park, but its actually several degrees higher in much of the city, then that alone is putting people in danger. Given that hundreds of people die of heat-related problems in New York City every year, and that people of color are disproportionatly effected, I think it’s time the weather services reported temperatures in the neighborhoods people actually live in, not idealized conditions in Central Park.

One Cheeseburger At A Time

Blitz's meat calculator will tell you how many pigs and chickens and cows you eat every year based on weekly meat consumption, and will tell you how many animals you can "save" if you switch some of your meals to vegetarian.

According to the calculator, if you're an average American you'll eat two pigs, two-thirds of a cow, and 289 chickens in the next ten years. If you reduce your meat consumption by even ten percent, that adds up to half a pig, a calf, and 29 chickens.

For the environment, what matters more than the lives of the animals is the resources used to produce them, including petroleum, water, and antibiotics.

The difference between a vegetarian diet and a meat-eating one, over ten years, is 18,000 pounds of carbon dioxide and 238,810 gallons of water. Think about California droughts and wildfires in that context.

Plus, one cow releases somewhere between 70 and 120 kg of methane a year, and methane is 25 times as powerful in causing climate change than CO2. Reducing your impact doesn't have to mean going vegan; swapping out one cheeseburger a week for pasta primavera or even a chicken sandwich will make a difference.