The Truth About Climate Change

Climate change is the defining issue of our time, and everywhere we are scrambling to either mitigate or adapt to its ill effects. However, it is just a footnote to a larger story. The true story is about Earth’s life support system, something we began to change thousands of years before we started putting billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere and altering climate. It is a story not only vastly more important but more interesting as well because it involves working with 30 million species.

We could begin the story anywhere on Earth, but let’s begin with the blind Yeti crab (so named because it is unbelievably hairy), working a mile and a half beneath the Pacific Ocean near hydrothermal vents not far from Easter Island. Along with sulfur copepods, scale worms, giant red-tipped tube worms, blind eels, and thousands of newly discovered species of resilient microorganisms, all these creatures live and work in one of Earth’s most inhospitable habitats. Other candidates for inhospitable places include arctic ice, hot springs, and the sands of the Atacama Desert, but here too, though primarily microbial, life is at work. Most of Earth is much more hospitable than these places, so it comes as no surprise that Earth is teeming with life almost everywhere, no matter what the conditions. Rainforests, grasslands, deserts, estuaries, oceans, farms, plantations, Morningside Park, and even the greens in front of Butler Library are full of species working day and night.

“Work” for biological organisms, including ourselves, refers to the business of transforming inorganic material, like water, carbon dioxide, and nitrates, into organic (carbon-based) material, like proteins, DNA, sugars, starch, and wood. When organisms grow and reproduce, they work, and in so doing they produce oxygen, cycle organic wastes, filter water, build up soils, produce food, fiber, and fuels, regulate floods and climate, and much more, all of which supports life on Earth. The biosphere is essentially a thousand-billion-ton carbon-based life support system run by millions of species that live everywhere on Earth.

Given the centrality of carbon in all of this work, it is not surprising that ecologists measure work by calculating Net Primary Productivity or how much inorganic carbon is transformed to organic carbon. In 2006, for example, NPP summed over all terrestrial ecosystems was estimated at 59.22 petagrams (billion metric tons) of carbon, or PgC, sequestered and turned into biomass.

In contrast, economists measure human productivity by calculating the gross domestic product. Economists use monetary currencies, like the U.S. dollar, the euro, or the yuan, rather then carbon. For example, when GDP is summed across all nations, global human productivity in 2006 was calculated to be 48.25 trillion in U.S. dollars.
Human work, however, is mostly biological work, involving growth and reproduction just like all species. As a workforce of 6.7 billion, we do a lot of work. Each year we move more nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous than all other species combined. We appropriate 54 percent of the world’s available freshwater runoff, we occupy the best real estate (covering 40 percent of Earth), and move 28 times more earth than geological processes do, an annual equivalent to 18,000 massive volcanic eruptions. Carbon, of course, is the best measure of our influence over Earth’s life support system. Along with fossil fuel consumption that moves seven PgC per year into the atmosphere, we also appropriate 28.8 percent of NPP carbon to do our work.

Clearly, we are the dominant species in Earth’s life-support workforce, so one might expect a fair chunk of our human economy to involve carbon, but it doesn’t. Voluntary carbon markets are valued somewhere between 10 and 30 billion U.S. dollars­—I’m no economist, but that seems pretty puny in a global economy of $48.25 trillion.

The solution is complex, but it is clear. Work with, reengage, and reenlist our brethren species in the business of running Earth’s life support system. Biodiversity conservation is at once both mitigation and adaptation not only to climate change, but to changes in Earth’s life support system. Don’t get me wrong. Building carbon mineralization towers, putting up windmills, or making better solar cells is important—so is moving away from the coasts, preparing for stronger storms, or moving plants and animals out of harm’s way as the climate changes. Such steps to mitigate or adapt to climate change, however, are distractions. The real challenge is reconnecting our work with the work of all other species in managing Earth’s life support system.

Besides, let’s face it, what could be more interesting, more exciting, and frankly more fun? If, when you awake, you consider that you join forces with lions, wildebeest, aardvarks, moose, whales, hawks, blue jays, juncos, beetles, bees, spiders, oaks, pines, ferns, fungi, and yes, the Yeti crabs deep beneath the Pacific, in running a magnificent global life support system, it changes one’s world view. For those of us in E3B and the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation who are students of biodiversity, we see the beasts, the birds, the fish, and all of life as our fellow workers—and in many ways, they teach us. If you’ve ever looked up as you’ve entered Schermerhorn, you might have recognized the building’s inscription: “But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee” (Job 12:7-9).

The author is a professor of ecology and the chair of the department of ecology, evolution, and environmental biology.