The secret calamities of global climate warming change / 6-17-09

Unrelated introduction:
It is intellectually dishonest to discredit climate change on the basis that it used to be called global warming.
Carry on.

Everyone wants to fret about how climate change will warm the earth in places it should be cold, turn Canada into a rival wheat and corn producer to the U.S., kill off a bunch of cute critters, confuse Alaskan moose, melt some glaciers and turn Siberia into a balmy tourist trap. Some of that is neither here nor there; some of it is alarming.

Two other effects are far doomsdayier, I submit.

One is how a gradual warming of the seas will upset the underwater ecosystem. I'm not technically a biologist by trade, but I invite my billions of readers with advanced science-related degrees to confirm this suspicion of mine: even a tiny change in the balance of oceanic life will have an unforeseen major impact on land life. In the event of a sea change under the sea -- please forgive the lame joke -- the consequences are mysterious at this point, mostly because we haven't been doing the research necessary.

To give you an idea from sciencedaily.com:

"The disparity in focus on land-based compared to marine impacts was highlighted in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which included 28,500 significant biological changes in terrestrial systems but only 85 in marine systems."

And the study's co-author's money quote: "Climate change is affecting ocean temperatures, the supply of nutrients from the land, ocean chemistry, food chains, shifts in wind systems, ocean currents and extreme events such as cyclones. All of these in turn affect the distribution, abundance, breeding cycles and migrations of marine plants and animals, which millions of people rely on for food and income. Development of the Integrated Marine Observing System, announced in 2006, is an important step forward but securing data over the time scales relevant for climate assessment will not occur until near 2030.”

In other words, we're really just waiting for the other shoe to drop. We won't know what kind of effects rising ocean temps will have, and by the time those effects begin to, well, take effect, we won't be able to do much about them, will we now.

Just as grave is the coming toll on the poorest humans. A small rise in sea levels coupled with harsher conditions in barely arable land will displace 200 million people in the next forty years. And we're not talking about people who will calmly pack their worldly effects in a medium-sized U-Haul, leisurely travel cross-country and settle into a nice rental in the suburbs before they buy their next four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath home. No, this is Southeast Asia we're mainly talking about here, where abject poverty AND religious extremism AND political oppression reign already. Don't think too hard about where these dispirited nomads will be headed. There are no good answers.

So don't blow off climate change as an abstract bogeyman. The effects will be global, they will be real and the time to act is the day before yesterday.