Our Climate Is Still Changing

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | July 27, 2024

Time for our regularly irregular check on how the environment is doing and if we’ve fixed everything (or anything) yet…oh, dear.

The Florida Museum of Natural History reports what is likely the first species of plant or animal to become extinct in the continental U.S. due to climate change. Oops—we forgot we’re not allowed to use the term “climate change” when discussing anything in Florida. No, seriously, they made it a law that using the words “climate change” in any state document or legislation is now illegal.

Nevertheless, rising sea levels and the accompanying salt water intrusion in the Florida Keys have wiped out the Key Largo tree cactus. First discovered in the 1990s, there were 150 of these noble cacti around in 2021, but in just two years only six stragglers were alive. They were removed and taken to a lab setting in an attempt to save them, but none exist in the U.S. wild any longer. (There are still some in northern Cuba, the Bahamas, and some other Caribbean islands, but none here.)

Given the scant population to begin with, some have suggested it’s not really much of a loss in the bigger picture. Maybe, but they were pretty important for the little bugs that lived in and on them and the bats that fed on their flowers' nectar, not to mention that any extinction creates a cascade of negative events impacting a very long chain of fauna and flora.

Unfortunately, we lost some critters last year, too. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, we had to declare 21 animal species extinct. Those include a tiny Central American tree frog, some small fish, a blind beetle, two Hawai'ian bird species, and eight separate species of mussels.

Others exist on the razor’s edge of oblivion. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists the most at-risk including the red wolf, which now only exists in North Carolina, both the North Atlantic right whale and Rice’s whale, the California Mojave desert tortoise (which has lost 90 percent of their population in the last half century), and the Vancouver Island marmot with only 80 remaining mature individuals.

Humans are the common thread here, and not just due to the use of fossil fuels. The most common problem for land-based animals is loss of habitat due to human development and encroachment including industry, housing, and even the creation of solar energy farms. Plus the dramatic increase in the frequency and severity of wildfires. For ocean-based animals, the culprits are industrial fishing nets, warming sea temperatures, ship strikes, and industrial waste and fertilizers.

One would think those issues would be concerning enough, but there is an even bigger problem looming in our oceans and lakes. According to research conducted by scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, our oceans and inland lakes are losing oxygen at an alarming rate due to human activity such as chemically fertilizing farmland and industrial waste.

They report a 5.5 percent oxygen loss in inland lakes and an 18.6 percent loss in reservoirs since just 1980. Though it’s not been possible to test the oceans globally, one sample in the midwaters off the coast of central California found an alarming 40 percent loss of oxygen.

This particularly impacts the smallest critters like various forms of plankton, which then negatively impacts every species up the food chain.

We already know our ongoing use of fossil fuels and pumping more and more heat-trapping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere is playing havoc with temperatures here and globally. Last summer Phoenix went 31 consecutive days of temperatures of 110 or higher, and this summer Las Vegas had a record-breaking stretch of seven days with temperatures of at least 115, including an all-time high of 120 on July 7. Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, had nearly 600 heat-related deaths in 2023, and this year promises to be little better.

There are still those in decision-making positions who deny the reality of climate change, though it is clear to see all around us. Florida, whose leaders seem to believe banning the words will somehow make reality disappear, will instead be one of the first areas to become uninhabitable due to climate change caused by rising sea levels.

Regular flooding in south Florida—they just experienced another such incident which left a million or so fish flopping around once the waters receded—isn’t the only problem. Saltwater intrusion into their freshwater aquifers will ultimately eliminate their clean drinking water.

The science is undeniable that human activities like the burning of fossil fuels, loss of habitat due to forestry and farming, unchecked proliferation of plastics, expanding human encroachment into wildlands, and chemical fertilization of industrial agriculture are all human activities leading to environmental crises.

We are changing our climate, and semantic gymnastics won’t change that.