Reasons of global warming

It’s having two kinds of impacts. One is from the overall climate being warmer; but the other
is from the climate being destabilized.

Greater warmth is raising sea levels, which in turn is impacting both coastal cities and
coastal agriculture, and is also dooming some low-lying island nations such as Kiribati.

Those impacts come in slow and quick flavors. Slow sea level rise hurts coastal agriculture
through salt water penetration of the water table, along with covering land with salt water.
Cities are forced to build and maintain expensive sea walls, and to relocate inland in some
cases.

The quick flavor is storm surge, and if the storm occurs during a high tide or, worse yet, a
king tide, you can get an amazing level of inundation. Storm Sandy caused New York City a
billion dollars’ worth of damage and plunged lower Manhattan into darkness for a day.
When storm surge covers coastal farmlands with salt water, it can be tough to recover the
land for agricultural uses.

The same storm showed how you can’t say “claimate change caused X” nor can you say
“climate change didn’t cause X.” Storms as bad as Sandy could occur without man-made
global warming, but climate change turns 100 year storms into 5 year storms.

This is a subtlety that escapes climate change deniers, who are mostly authoritarian right
wingers who see conspiracies when they encounter ambiguities.

Global warming is also threatening a major source of both protein and tourist income in the
tropics: coral reefs. Warm spells exceeding the thermal limits of coral animals kill the reefs.
They can recover slowly if the temperature falls again, but as the seas keep warming these
corals could go extinct, taking the ecosystem down with them.

The likelihood of this is increased by the fact that the oceans are absorbing enough of the
CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere to change the acidity of the ocean, which in turn is
starting to impact the ability of both corals and shellfish to reproduce.

Living organisms can evolve to adapt to changing conditions if they change slowly enough,
but our CO2 output (along with some other greenhouse gases) is changing the environment
too quickly for evolutionary mechanisms to cope with it, as far as organisms above the level
of bacteria and the like are concerned.

The second major effect of global warming is that we’re putting out much more CO2 than
normal geological processes to absorb, so the level keeps changing. That is destabilizing the
climate, making weather less predictable and more likely to be extreme, with longer
droughts, and storms with more rain and wind.
There are many other impacts. Tropical diseases are now appearing in the lower states of
the US, both east and west. Hotter heat waves are killing more people every year, especially
the poor who can’t afford AC. Agricultural pests are invading croplands and forests that
hadn’t been warm enough for them in the past.

And ironically, as the world overall swelters, the northeast of the USA has been experiencing
severe cold snaps in the winter due to the northern jetstream being destabilized.

It’s possible that as the Greenland ice cap’s melting accelerates it will interrupt the flow of
the Gulf Stream that keeps Europe warmer than it would be otherwise, giving it colder
winters for a time at least.

Here in California, NOAA predicts that the next drought will be like the last one that lasted 6
years—only it has an 80% chance of lasting for decades, which will threaten water supplies
across the Southwest, making the viability of desert cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas
questionable.

Tropical rainforests will be supplanted with grasslands and savannah in many places, while
growing lusher in a few other places, with an overall reduction in biomass.

All these direct effects of global warming are being exacerbated by other human activities—
aggressive deforestation, peatlands burning, humongous amounts of air pollution,
especially in places like India and China, dead plumes extending out from ocean mouths up
to 150 miles out into the ocean from the larger rivers due to agricultural
pesticide/fertilizer/factory runoff into streams, smothering coral reefs with silt from illegal
logging and mining in the tropics, bomb fishing, cyanide fishing, trawling, the Chinese-
funded extermination of sharks, which keep parrot fish from eating all the coral, titanic
amounts of plastic waste that impacts ocean ecosystems, diseases from fish farms in the
ocean that kill off food fish populations in the open waters nearby…we’re a very busy
species…

Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry has spent roughly a billion dollars since 2000 to convince
at least half the country that there ‘s no problem and it’s all a so-shul-ist hoax—as you can
see by Quora’s squadron of persistent deniers parroting fossil fuel industry fake science on
nearly every comment thread about climate here.

And the current Trump administration is aggressively suppressing all the science developed
about climate change by the federal government. Because the Republican philosophy is if
you don’t like the news, shoot the messenger.