If we want a sustainable future, are we better off letting the market (i.e., profits) control the decision making, or relying on some kind of a regulatory plan?

There is often the touting in politics of letting the invisible hand of the market decide how things are to be done, as though the market will always decide to do the right thing in it’s best interest. Which is nonsensical at best and deliberately misleading at worst. I know soda is bad for me. The Dr. Pepper I just drank had 250 calories in it and I loved it. Salad is good for me, and I don’t eat it. The market is comprised of people, people make bad decisions for their short term interest all the time.

Politically it’s provable that deregulating economic markets and energy markets would not help the economy. George Bush called it Voodoo economics, then as Reagan’s Vice- President denied that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8hnM6xNjeU But Bush was correct all along.

Fast forward to modern day and we have politicians debating the existence of facts because they get massive amounts of lobbying money, otherwise known as bribes, from fossil fuels, special interests, and generally not for the environment in their policies.

So keeping this in mind, and noting that the Richard Branson and Elon Musk kinds of billionaires are the exception rather than the rule, what reason could anyone believe that the markets will do the thing that isn’t immediately profitable, for future potential profits and sustainability, unless there was signifigant penalties and incentives to make them do this? I end this diatribe, with a relevant quote from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, “Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous “trickle-down” theory of US economic policy. If the rich get richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow “trickle down” to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to pre-industrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.”

He wrote this during the time of George W. Bush as president. He’s been dead for eleven years and he’s still right in my opinion. Electing a new congress that will hammer through pro environment policies should be a top priority. Half the Great barrier reef is dying.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/great-barrier-reef-half-of-natural-wonder-is-dead-or-dying-and-it-is-on-the-brink-of-extinction-a6992411.html We can either attempt to reverse course on this mess or crash headlong into it. And the decision in this country rests with the electorate. Maybe expect that the worst will come to pass, because the  trees are not going to come alive and drown the fires in India and China like they did in Isengard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8WyXv7hQvE

Why is much of the tropics considered as a biodiversity hotspot?

Well the term hotspot is any place with at least 1500 types of vascular plants that are uniquely occurring in that area. https://www.learner.org/courses/envsci/unit/text.php?unit=9&secNum=4 Tropical plants can’t thrive in places that aren’t tropical. Palm trees can’t grow in Detroit. Tropical rain forests have the distinction of having thousands of different plants and tens of thousands of different animals that don’t occur in other parts of the world. That and the diversity in plant life would satisfy the definition of a biodiversity hotspot. http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/150650/ All the animals in the tropics have adapted to live in the tropics, they can’t transplant to Fargo, North Dakota and survive there. Many of them, such as the poison dart frog need to keep their skin moist through the humidity of the rain forest and will die without it. Evolution has permanently affixed these animals and plants to living in this one biosphere.

Sea level rise will obviously have a direct impact on certain coastal areas.  Do you think that the burdens of dealing with this problem should be the responsibility of all countries, or just the countries with the impacted coastal areas?

Examined from a practical standpoint do I think the world is going to aid every nation where a coast line will be affected by sea level rise? Is Saudi Arabia going to aid Israel if massive flooding happens there? Probably not in this particular universe. Is the U.N. going to show up and help in Bangladesh if they get flooded out? That’s sort of what they exist to do.

In our collective unconcious we can only really see past our massive differences through the empathy of tragedy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious Flooding is easy to relate to for most countries because most of them have rivers that flood.  It’s why the movie “Independence Day” has one of the best speeches in any movie ever about the fourth of July no longer being an american holiday, because we can all empathize with fighting aliens, even though we’ve never actually done that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t1IK_9apWs

But if the question is will any country put the well being of people they’ve never met before over the needs of their people, even if they really don’t want to meet those same needs. You ever met a politician who ran on a platform of, “Let’s help those people over there with that thing”? I didn’t think so. This is probably gonna be a country by country solution.

In what ways will climate change impact the amount of food we produce, the types of food we produce, and the places where we produce our food?

Had to get a new computer because my old one died. But in terms of how we’re going to eat in the future. Again I’m reminded of my ethics professor Ron Johnson and his conversations on sustainability. http://www.sustainabletable.org/246/sustainable-agriculture-the-basics

And then I remind myself that my friend Jesse told me we’d probably start eating bugs for protein at some point in the future. I’ve read too many dystopian novels and watched too many movies where that’s the shorthand for everything being awful to adapt to that future. So hopefully we don’t wind up in a Mad Max or The Road Scenario.

1. You have seen that in many areas of the world, water is already one of the most important constraints on the quality of life, and by the middle of this century, almost everyone agrees that there will be 2 billion more people on the planet. At the same time, climate change will reduce the amount of precipitation in some areas, while others will receive more precipitation.  Given these facts, how will we meet the water needs of  9 billion people by the middle of the century?

If in the year 2050 we have 9 billion people on this planet and we still rely on fossil fuels as our primary form of energy, we will be on a unsustainable trajectory. I have no scientific means of guessing what the world will be like. More likely than not we’ll be fighting over the scarce resource of water and employing very drastic measures to ensure sustainability. Thankfully some very smart people are already working on this. http://www.shell.com/media/speeches-and-articles/2012/meeting-the-needs-of-9-billion-people.html

Ronald Johnson is a professor here at Penn State. He teaches business ethics. He really has a passion for sustainability. In his class was actually the first time I heard that term. He had lots of videos in his class covering sustainability,like solar panels in grassy fields where the grass was cut by goats. If we switch every fossil fuel to a renewable one, we can probably increase how long our planet can last.

Of course I have sincere doubts about our planet ever supporting 9 billion people. Likely a major plague or war will deplete a significant portion of the planet’s population. If that happens, our resources would probably last longer.

What are some of the ways that ocean acidification will likely affect humans?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/us-effort-on-ocean-acidification-needs-focus-on-human-impacts/

In order to fully drive home the negative impacts of a more acidic ocean people would need to have relatable concerns about what will happen. It’s easier to care if people who’s livelihoods depend on the ocean and fishing. Commercial fishing is a multi billion dollar industry and the most dangerous job anyone can do.

If people knew that a more acidic ocean would mean less fish, a higher price per pound of wild caught seafood and a decrease in the quality of it available maybe more people would act on the environmental factors that increase ocean acidification. It’s hard to make most people care about the depleted amounts of plankton, probably because they’re microscopic organisms.

Giant jellyfish are a serious problem, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/8373420/Giant-jellyfish-invade-Japan.html

Aside from being really scary and venomous they eat the plankton which is the same food that fish eat. And they’re biologically immortal. unfortunately the only predator that could solve this problem in the sea of Japan would be gigantic sea turtles. And I do not think those exist or else they would’ve taken care of this problem.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/02/18/scientists-are-floored-by-whats-happening-in-the-arctic-right-now/

According to the article in The Washington Post, the arctic is getting hotter. The ice is starting to melt, the water is drying up , generally now would be the time to be alarmed. Except we’ve been alarmed for a long time now. We can’t really be shocked into action about this. The increasing levels of CO2 are normal at this point. We’ve been seeing them rise for years.

From this point it seems like no amount of trees planted or hybrid cars bought can reverse the trend. I guess it makes some sense in a larger poetic way. we burn the things that used to be the dominant life forms on this planet for fuel, and they help to further secure our own inevitable demise.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/study-finds-plant-growth-surges-as-co2-levels-rise-16094

Interesting enough plants will grow better in areas of increased CO2 concentration. But those places also need to actually plant the plants for that to have any impact. ANd hopefully it won’t get so ridiculous that the increased plant growth over saturates the earth in oxygen, making it more flammable and then burning the entire planet down.

Clip related.

The general circulation model doesn’t account for the heating caused by greenhouse gasses. It assumes that other factors will cause the planet to heat up over a longer period of time and are easier to trace.

Aside from new shipping lanes opening up through the arctic circle numerous species will become less stable as the arctic warms more. Polar bears can already be observed to have less fat than is typical from a few years ago.http://www.greenfacts.org/en/arctic-climate-change/l-3/5-arctic-animals.htm The surface area that makes up Greenland will decrease and as it worsens the sea level will rise more. As the sea rises,eventually some small remote islands are going to wind up underwater.

Feedback mechanisms seem to exist as the equal and opposite reaction to this planet’s absorption of solar radiation. The ocean being blue and absorbing more light energy as heat than the white polar ice makes sense given what I learned in physics class where I was asked a question about what color should the sail on a solar powered sailing ship in space be to go faster. http://climate.nasa.gov/nasa_role/science/ I answered black because how should I know how to make a theoretical spaceship? Turns out the answer was white because it would reflect the light more and make this space ship go faster.

Some people think that the sun’s activity level has changed and that’s what’s leading to global warming. While it’s true that sunspot cycles do contribute, they don’t happen nearly often enough, (only eleven years at a time) to be the biggest or most likely explanation for the planet getting warmer. When the increase in temperature corresponds to when humans first started burning fossil fuels and the fact that as our sun gets older, it will get less active and eventually die. https://www.aip.org/history/climate/solar.htm

The overarching question of this weeks reading is what amount of time do we need to look at before weather becomes climate. Thankfully this video exists and I watched it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcHfU8w5AL4  It’s a lot to take in but I would figure that at least 100 years of weather and the change therein would be where I would start my measuring. A century behind now would put any measurement toward the start of the industrial revolution and the increased urbanization of the United States.

I feel like I can’t find or think of any really positive things that global warming will do for me.http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/01/pictures/130115-climate-change-superstorm-atmosphere-science/ Any socioeconomic growth I can think of possibly obtaining would count for very little if the world is slowly being made uninhabitable. But a nice beach house in what used to not be beach front property would be a lot like having the nicest cabin on the Titanic. My hometown already had a massive redorc breaking flood my senior year of high school. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/nyregion/ny-region-in-triage-mode-as-flooding-persists.html?_r=0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLn0ZRzd4bk   So global warming has already made it cheaper to live in my hometown if I wanted to. That’s arguably a positive.

As I looked into global CO2 levels for the purposes of writing this blog I very quickly saw through both the module and outside scientific publications that we as a species are nearing a record level for carbon dioxide concentration. 400 Parts per million. The last time the planet had that level of concentration of CO2 modern humans weren’t around.

Some scientists argue about when exactly it was that it was this high, but the range can be estimated to be between 2.5 and 5.3 million years ago. At this point in time the earth was on average 11 degrees warmer (on a fahrenheit scale that’s about 12 degrees celsius.) oceans were about 100 feet higher, and gigantic sea sharks were in that ocean. Suffice it to say nothing about this time in the Earth’s history sounds like a great place to be.

Measuring CO2 levels is important because apparently it’s the longest living greenhouse gas. So if we really want to take a good measurement of the temperature of the earth in 2050, that’s what one would use.

Apparently to make a guess at what the temperature of the earth was hundreds of thousands of years ago scientists would have to use oxygen isotopes from ice cores. This clicked in my brain because it reminded me of the novella “At the Mountains of Madness” which is about finding spooky alien skeletons in ice cores. I guess I’v elearned a lot already in the first week of this class.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-last-time-co2-was-this-high-humans-didnt-exist-15938

http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/whens-the-last-time-our-co2-levels-were-this-high

My Name is Heath Ferris. I’m a senior graduating in May with a major in Management Information Systems through the Smeal College of Business. (MIS) I am taking the course because I enjoy rocks and geology.