years old, will be driven to extinction because they will only produce females.
Warmer Oceans
The world’s oceans are absorbing an estimated 90 percent of the excess heat generated by global warming.21 The effects of the increasing water temperatures go way beyond affecting leatherback turtles. As Rachel Carson noted, species are forced to migrate to colder waters, displacing those already there. Greater rates of evaporation put more water vapor into a warmer atmosphere that can hold more water, thus leading to more severe downpours and extreme rainfall events.
Temperatures are increasing in the Arctic and Antarctic at greater rates than in the middle latitudes. As a result, over the last fifty years, Arctic Ocean ice has vanished from an area twice the size of Alaska and the remaining ice is 50 percent thinner. The lowest maximum winter ice in thirty-seven years of satellite data occurred in February and March of 2016. The year 2016 tied with 2007 for the second lowest Arctic summer sea-ice level on record; the lowest occurred in 2012.22 Later in the same year the situation became even more striking: “On October 20, 2016, Arctic sea ice extent began to set new daily record lows for this time of year.” When Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extents are combined for September through November 2016, the quantity is dramatically lower than for those months in any previous year on record.23
During the summer months ice reflects 50 percent of the sun’s rays, helping to cool and regulate planetary temperature. By contrast, open water absorbs 90 percent of incoming sunlight, warming the water even more. Warmer air temperatures play a major role in ice melt, as does the self-reinforcing impact of ice disappearing. In a classic example of a positive feedback loop, warming Arctic waters lead to more ice melt, which exposes more dark sea, which absorbs more heat, which melts more ice, and so on. It should come as little surprise that the loss of sea ice appears to be accelerating.
More and more evidence indicates that decreasing Arctic Ocean sea ice is altering the jet stream and already affecting weather patterns around the world.24
The accelerated melting of the gigantic Greenland ice sheet is as dramatic as the disappearance of Arctic sea ice: over 50 percent of the surface was melting during the summer of 2015, contributing to the thirty-sixth consecutive year of global glacier loss.
In contrast to the melting of the massive Greenland ice sheet, the greatest danger for ice loss resulting from warming air and oceans in the Antarctic is the flow of the continental glaciers into the sea. As they reach the sea, “ice shelves” in contact with the water are formed, with the shelves still attached to the ice sheet on land. Melting from below and under tidal forces, these shelves produce the greatest amount of ice loss in Antarctica. As the ice shelves melt and icebergs calve off, more ice flows from the land into the sea. The loss of ice in this most active ice-loss region “shows signs of becoming ‘unstoppable.’ There’s enough water locked up in West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea region alone to raise the global average sea level by four feet, and it’s the fastest-melting spot on the continent.”25
As a result of thermal expansion and melting glaciers and ice sheets, sea levels rose about seven inches during the twentieth century, causing saltwater intrusion to damage low-lying coastal agricultural soils in Bangladesh, the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, and other areas of the world. The sea level is projected to rise another 1 to 4 feet by 2100.26
Plastics Are Forever
Plastic production, an essentially post–Second World War industry, increased from less than 2 tons in 1950, to over 340 million tons by 2014.27 After a single use, 95 percent of all plastic is lost to the production process, escaping into the wider environment: oceans, landfills, or incinerators. Because plastics are synthetic carbon-based polymers that didn’t exist on Earth until seventy years ago, few organisms have evolved to be able to metaboliz them.28 One-third of all plastic is not recaptured, going directly into the environment, often ending up in the ocean (the second-largest percentage goes to landfill). If things continue as they are, in thirty-five years the plastic in the oceans will weigh more than fish.29
Needless to say, vast quantities of plastic threaded throughout the watercourses of the world have drastic implications for life of all kinds. In yet another negative ramification for leatherback turtles, plastic bags floating through the oceans look almost exactly like large undulating jellyfish. When plastic bags are ingested, they will often choke the turtles, causing them to be asphyxiated or starve. A study from 2015 estimates that more than half of all turtles and 90 percent of seabirds have ingested plastic.30 In January 2016 necropsies on twenty-nine beached sperm whales stranded in the North Sea showed the animals had ingested massive quantities of plastic, including, in one case, a 40-foot-long fishing net. Robert Habeck, minister of the environment for Schleswig-Holstein, observed that the animals were made “to starve with full stomachs.”31 Just like those whales, humans who eat fish are almost certainly ingesting chemicals derived from plastic, along with a host of other contaminants.
Estimates vary, but upward of 500 billion plastic bags are manufactured every year, requiring 12 million barrels of oil.32 Paper bags are no friendlier to the environment: it takes four times as much energy and three times as much water to make paper bags, producing fifty times more water pollution and about 70 percent more pollution than the manufacture of plastic bags. Millions of trees are cut down that could otherwise be absorbing carbon dioxide; paper is difficult to recycle and takes up more space in landfill.33 The real answer is not to manufacture any bag designed for a single use (or for that matter, most other products). But because industry is so strongly opposed to that, efforts to ban single-use plastic containers have had limited success.
As plastic is now pervasive throughout the environment and will last so long without degrading, it has been proposed as one way to measure the impact of humans in the Anthropocene:
Plastics are now widely enough distributed to characterize such strata over large parts of the world, even in remote environments such as that of the deep sea floor and the polar regions. Especially in marine sediments, microplastics form superficially invisible, but potentially widespread markers, directly akin to microfossils in more conventional palaeontology…. Stratigraphically, plastics within sediments comprise a good practical indicator of Anthropocene strata…. Their correlation potential, though, now stretches out into space, as they have now been carried across the solar system by spacecraft, and placed in orbit around the Earth and on the surface of the Moon and Mars.34
In other words, not only has a single planet been poisoned—contamination of the whole solar system is occurring. A product with extremely useful and important properties has been produced but maladapted to its most appropriate and least damaging applications, used in short-term ways that cause immense pollution and long-term harm to the biosphere and beyond.
The Scourge of Air Pollution
Considered to be the largest environmental problem to threaten human health, the severe health implications of air pollution are only beginning to be fully quantified.
Energy production and use is the single largest contributor to air pollution. The smoke emitted by indoor sources for cooking, heating, and light (wood, charcoal, kerosene, etc.), which are used by 2.7 billion people, is estimated to be responsible for 3.5 million annual premature deaths.35
An estimated 166 million people—over half the U.S. population—live under conditions exposing them, simply by breathing, to high ozone and particulate air pollution.36 In 2011, air pollution from the U.S. energy industry caused $131 billion in damage, mostly in health impacts.37 According to a slightly earlier study by the National Academy of Sciences, all 137,000 coal miners in the United States could be given tax-free pensions of $50,000 a year for only 10 percent of the cost of
