If your house were on fire, what would you save? Where would you even start? What if not just your house, but your whole planet was on fire?
That is the scenario we face today. Climate change has arrived. No longer clouds gathering in the distance, the firestorm is here now--melting titanic glaciers, drying mighty rivers and setting deserts ablaze.
With our new report, It's Getting Hot Out There: The Top 10 Places to Save for Endangered Species in a Warming World, the Endangered Species Coalition and our member groups attempt to answer the question: To save endangered species from climate change, where do we begin?
Threatened and endangered species, already in a precarious position, are the most vulnerable to additional pressures. For that reason, the vast and far-reaching impacts of global warming are a game changer for these plants and animals. In one stroke, climate change has introduced a new threat to edge a tremendous number of imperiled species ever closer to extinction.
So, if we are serious about our commitment to save our natural heritage for future generations, our response also must be a game-changer. We need a Marshall Plan for nature. The good news is that it is not too late to save endangered species from climate change, but we need to get to work now.
As the co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 (for her contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Dr. Jean Brennan, states, "What has been lost in the news over climate change and what this report highlights is that, at this very moment, we have a crucial window of opportunity to save species and ecosystems. Conservation measures, if taken now, can greatly increase a habitat's and species' ability to withstand climate change. But, we don't have a minute to spare."
While many of us are aware that polar bears and Arctic seas are in crisis mode, few of us have heard about the other species and ecosystems arriving at the emergency room door because of climate change.
Across our tropical waters, coral reefs are headed toward functional extinction--no longer providing food for fish, sea turtles or marine mammals--due to hotter temperatures and more acidic oceans.
Our Southwest deserts are home to endangered Sonoran pronghorn antelopes, desert tortoises, kangaroo rats, pupfish, springsnails, and other desert species that are adapted to very specialized niches and therefore particularly vulnerable to changes in climate and habitat.
America's Greater Everglades shelters threatened and endangered species, such as the Florida panther, manatee, American crocodile, Everglades snail kite, and fragrant prickly apple that are at risk of being submerged as sea levels rise to flood low-lying areas.
Other endangered species havens that must be saved are Hawaii--with the greatest number of threatened and endangered species of all the states, the Gulf Coast--home to more than 40 imperiled species on the front lines of sea level rise, the Snake River Basin--a unique habitat for salmon, bull trout, snails and clams, Greater Yellowstone--our nation's first national park, the California Bay Delta--important for salmon, sturgeon, steelhead, Swainson's hawk, and Smith's blue butterfly among other species and the Sierra Nevada ecosystem--the only habitat for the Sierra Nevada mountain yellow-legged frog, the Yosemite toad, and the Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep.
With so much of our natural heritage at stake, how can we sit back and let it go up in flames?
Obviously, we can't. We must act. And, this report outlines how.
Without question, we must aggressively reduce greenhouse gas pollution. Many of the ecosystems listed here--such as arctic sea ice and coral reefs--will not be saved without that step.
Additionally, we must exponentially increase existing conservation measures, such as eradicating invasive species, setting aside open space, creating wildlife corridors, and restoring wild lands. We must also head in new directions, such as preventing offshore oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and transforming how we manage California's water supply.
Whether drawing upon new or standard practices in our conservation toolkit, the urgency is higher than ever. Fortunately, one of the world's most effective wildlife laws, the U.S. Endangered Species Act, has powerful tools to protect species and their habitat from climate change. We must now invest significantly more in funding, political solutions and hands-on conservation in a massive effort to help ecosystems and species adapt.
By protecting these imperiled species, we will protect ourselves, ensure that our grandchildren have clean water, safeguard our coastal communities from the ravages of increasingly severe storms, and pass down America's unique natural heritage for future generations.
Follow Leda Huta on Twitter: www.twitter.com/savespecies
Your premise should be that people contemplating the totality of evidence, or lack thereof, know full well that the climate has always varied.
Though it may come as a surprise, looking at the big picture of climate change -- including trying to understand collective scientific opinion about what the heck is going on -- does not necessarily imply that one thinks the world used to have a static climate, nor does it imply that one wants to control the climate into stasis.
Spread the word, please, so that the debate can be ratcheted up a notch.
There will be nothing left to save if we pre-emptively kill it all.
If you are serious about saving endangered species, which will set you on the opposite side of the table from Sierra Club, NRDC, Wilderness Society, Nature Conservancy (etc.), then you need to stop them from putting a single industrial power plant in the desert, and instead ensure that we get a german-style feed in tariff so we can produce all the solar power we need right where it is needed - in the built environment. Germany installed several Gigawatts worth of rooftop solar in 2010 alone, so don't let them try and tell you it can't be done. it is being done, right now.
Not only will using the built environment for clean power production reduce GHGs exponentially more and faster, but it will save billions of gallons of scarce desert water, spare a massacre of fragile plants, animals and cryptobiotic soil crust, AND will cost us far less, will stabilize, decentralize and democratize the grid, and will finally dent the Big Energy monopolies we all stagger under the weight of.
Are you up for it?
I realize that when people think of renewable energy, they tend to think of intermittent supplies (e.g., solar, wind). As fiscal conservative tree-hugger of the lifelong variety, I often notice that we need to do a better job of educating the public about why massive solar plants in the desert are not much of a solution.
Part of that education means thinking about the "proximity footprint" of energy production, in addition to its emissions footprint, lest we who are socially and environmentally conscious become at once willing to count ourselves among those missing the forest for the trees.
If we are ever to get the efficiency at the electrical plug to improve -- a significant emissions saver -- having high-density power production nearer the consumers of that energy is a straightforward task. Furthermore, at least some of the renewable energy should be produced using technologies capable of producing a constant output of power, further reducing the need for persnickety batteries or other energy storage mechanisms.
Rooftop solar corresponds fairly closely to peak hours of use (which, in 6 hours/day, use more than 53% of total electricity) so we could cover a very significant portion of grid demand from rooftops owned by us if we had the German-style payment system. You might chuckle again when you hear that it is the CONSERVATIVES in Germany who are going crazy installing as much rooftop solar as possible (several GW in 2010!!) because it makes great economic sense, creates far more jobs, improves their property values and takes them one step closer to energy independence.
It is a shame that most of our conservatives (present company excepted) embrace Big Energy dependence and most of our democrats embrace killing wilderness to "be green, even though it costs more than doing the RIGHT thing for both political outlooks.
You make a great point about proximity, since any increased solar insolation in the desert is lost through transmission losses (and transmission emits HUGE amounts of GHGs, SF6 in particular).
The Bloom Box has a lot of potential, assuming we can start tapping into gas sources that are non-deadly (capturing methane, for example), and it will be very affordable and reliable for "baseload," then we can peak with PV. The grid could become like the internet - dynamic, intentionally redundant (for reliability), multi-directional and load-balancing (with some storage backup solutions embedded).
Keep spreading the word!
Can you expand on what you mean by that?
We have solar PV, solar hot water and a domestic wind turbine on our (very) energy efficient house here in very sunny and very windy Australia. Over the course of a year, we are a net exporter of electrical power. We don't even have a very good feed-in tariff structure, yet our system will be paid off in 10-15years. I'm happy with that.
In the meantime, I want the rest of my electrical energy generated by wind (if possible) or other renewables which are necessarily elsewhere. That necessitates a grid, it necessitates base-load, it necessitates industrial scale for some things. All of these things should be being done.
Choices have to be made; some are better than others. It's important to choose the better ones. Those choices are not in conflict with conservation or environmental protection, especially if one of the outcomes is a reduction in CO2 (the singular goal).
PS the pictures of the Polar Bears swimming were cool.