Good News, Bad News

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | May 18, 2024

There is good news and not such good news on the climate front. 2023 was the planet’s hottest since official records started being kept in 1850, and it’s not getting any cooler; locations in both Texas and Arizona have already recorded temperatures over 100 degrees this year, a bit earlier than normal. And our tornado season is off to an unusually destructive and deadly start. But let’s look at both sides.

It’s good news that a sei whale, the third largest member of the whale family and highly endangered, has been spotted off the coast of Argentina for the first time in more than 100 years. After nearly being hunted to extinction, if they are returning to familiar territory again, that’s a good thing.

It’s not such good news that Venezuela has become the first country in history to lose its glaciers. The northeastern-most chunk of the Andes includes parts of Venezuela, and they used to have six glaciers. The last surviving has been downgraded to an ice field, unmoving and occupying barely more than five acres.

It’s pretty good news the scientists diligently working on fusion energy have conducted another successful trial. There was a time when fusion was thought to be a foolish fantasy, but the theory has now been proven in reality—if only they can now start figuring out how to make it work practically.

It’s patently bad news, however, the so-called “portal to Hell” in Siberia keeps getting bigger and bigger. Basically a very large sinkhole caused by melting permafrost, it is expanding by a whopping 35 million cubic feet per year according to New Atlas. As it melts, bacteria and viruses which have been trapped for hundreds of thousands of years can spring to life as one 45,000-year-old “zombie virus” did. We’ve no clue what’s in that permafrost and whether or not it will be dangerous or even deadly to us.

It’s probably good news, and at the very least interesting news, that scientists using a remote controlled submersible examining a seamount (undersea mountain) off the coast of Chile have discovered, so far, at least 100 new species of various creatures large and small.

But, sadly, the other side of that coin is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared 21 species extinct in 2023 including eight iconic honeycreepers (birds) from Hawai'i, two bats from Guam, and a fish in Texas. (Animal species can be declared extinct when there is no evidence of their existence in their natural habitat or surroundings and there is no question the last survivor has died.)

It’s good news the world’s largest carbon capture plant, lovingly named Mammoth, developed by a Swiss company, is now operating in Iceland. It claims to be capable of “capturing” 36,000 metric tons of carbon directly from the air—the equivalent of removing 8,600 cars from the road—which it can then insert deep underground or turn into solid carbon.

We’ll need many more carbon capture plants because the bad news, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is that we are producing more CO2 and other greenhouse gasses than ever, a 20 percent increase in such emissions in the last 40 years.

But the good news is some countries have taken this climate change business seriously and are actually doing something about it. According to Euronews.com, the 27 European Union (EU) nations actually decreased their use of fossil fuels for electricity by 17 percent in the first half of 2023. (Some EU countries are still too dependent on coal, an issue of which they are aware.)

There is, alas, bad news at both the top and bottom of our planet. According to NASA, which keeps track of such things, the Greenland ice sheet continues slipping away, losing about 150 billion tons of ice annually while Antarctica is even worse, losing as much as 270 billion tons of ice annually. These two ice sheets account for about two-thirds of all the freshwater on Earth, and the melting has been responsible for about a third of sea-level rise since 1993.

Slow progress is being made, but taking two steps forward and nearly two steps back isn’t going to take us where we need to go. We need industrial strength progress and actual implementation rather than theories and possibilities. State legislatures and Congress could suddenly have epiphanies and start doing the right things, like mandating the use of renewables to power any new construction, maximizing the value of green spaces including on rooftops, planting rather than removing trees, retrofitting existing buildings with solar panels, etc. We need bolder leadership willing to stand up to the industries that continue impeding real gains.

As long as the bad news continues to balance with the good, we aren’t likely to get ahead, and stay ahead, of the climate change curve.