more than a fourth of the carbon emitted: Rob Monroe, “How Much CO2 Can the Oceans Take Up?” Scripps Institution of Oceanography, July 13, 2013, https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2013/07/03/how-much-co2-can-the-oceans-take-up.
90 percent of global warming’s excess heat: Peter J. Gleckler et al., “Industrial-Era Global Ocean Heat Uptake Doubles in Recent Decades,” Nature Climate Change 6 (January 2016): pp. 394–98, https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2915.
absorbing three times as much: Ibid.
90 percent of the energy needs: Australian Government Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, “Managing the Reef.”
Great Barrier Reef: Robinson Meyer, “Since 2016, Half of All Coral in the Great Barrier Reef Has Died,” The Atlantic, April 2018.
from 2014 to 2017: Michon Scott and Rebecca Lindsey, “Unprecedented Three Years of Global Coral Bleaching, 2014–2017,” Climate.gov, August 1, 2018, www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/unprecedented-3-years-global-coral-bleaching-2014%E2%80%932017.
“twilight zone”: C. C. Baldwin et al., “Below the Mesophotic,” Scientific Reports 8, no. 4920 (March 2018), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-23067-1.
threaten 90 percent of all reefs: Lauretta Burke et al., “Reefs at Risk Revisited,” World Resources Institute (Washington, D.C., 2011), p. 6, https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/pdf/reefs_at_risk_revisited.pdf.
as much as a quarter of all marine life: Ocean Portal Team, “Corals and Coral Reefs,” Smithsonian, April 2018, https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/corals-and-coral-reefs.
food and income for half a billion: “Coral Ecosystems,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, www.noaa.gov/resource-collections/coral-ecosystems.
worth at least $400 million: Michael W. Beck et al., “The Global Flood Protection Savings Provided by Coral Reefs,” Nature Communications 9, no. 2186 (June 2018), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04568-z.
oysters and mussels will struggle: Kate Madin, “Ocean Acidification: A Risky Shell Game,” Oceanus Magazine, December 4, 2009, www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/ocean-acidification--a-risky-shell-game.
fishes’ sense of smell: Cosima Porteus et al., “Near-Future CO2 Levels Impair the Olfactory System of Marine Fish,” Nature Climate Change 8 (July 23, 2018).
32 percent in just ten years: Graham Edgar and Trevor J. Ward, “Australian Commercial Fish Populations Drop by a Third over Ten Years,” The Conversation, June 6, 2018, https://theconversation.com/australian-commercial-fish-populations-drop-by-a-third-over-ten-years-97689.
by a factor perhaps as large as a thousand: Jurriaan M. De Vos et al., “Estimating the Normal Background Rate of Species Extinction,” Conservation Biology, August 26, 2014.
an era marked by ocean acidification: A. H. Altieri and K. B. Gedan, “Climate Change and Dead Zones,” Global Change Biology (November 10, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.12754.
with no oxygen at all: “SOS: Is Climate Change Suffocating Our Seas?” National Science Foundation, www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/deadzones/climatechange.jsp.
a dead zone the size of Florida: Bastien Y. Queste et al., “Physical Controls on Oxygen Distribution and Denitrification Potential in the North West Arabian Sea,” Geophysical Research Letters 45, no. 9 (May 2018). See also “Growing ‘Dead Zone’ Confirmed by Underwater Robots” (press release), University of East Anglia, April 27, 2018, www.uea.ac.uk/about/-/growing-dead-zone-confirmed-by-underwater-robots-in-the-gulf-of-oman.
Dramatic declines in ocean oxygen: Peter Brannen, “A Foreboding Similarity in Today’s Oceans and a 94-Million-Year-Old Catastrophe,” The Atlantic, January 12, 2018. See also Dana Nuccitelli, “Burning Coal May Have Caused Earth’s Worst Mass Extinction,” The Guardian, March 12, 2018.
trip can take a thousand years: National Ocean Service, “Currents: The Global Conveyor Belt,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_currents/05conveyor2.html.
depressed the velocity of the Gulf Stream: Stefan Rahmstorf et al., “Exceptional Twentieth-Century Slowdown in Atlantic Ocean Overturning Circulation,” Nature Climate Change 5 (May 2015), https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2554.
“an unprecedented event”: Ibid.
two major papers: L. Caesar et al., “Observed Fingerprint of a Weakening Atlantic Ocean Overturning Circulation,” Nature 556 (April 2018): pp. 191–96, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0006-5; David J. R. Thornalley et al., “Anomalously weak Labrador Sea convection and Atlantic overturning during the past 150 years,” Nature 556 (April 2018), pp. 227–30, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0007-4.
“tipping point”: Joseph Romm, “Dangerous Climate Tipping Point Is ‘About a Century Ahead of Schedule’ Warns Scientist,” Think Progress, April 12, 2018.
Unbreathable Air
cognitive ability declines: Joseph Romm, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 113.
almost a quarter of those surveyed in Texas: Ibid., p. 114.
deaths from dust pollution: Ploy Achakulwisut et al., “Drought Sensitivity in Fine Dust in the U.S. Southwest,” Environmental Research Letters 13 (May 2018), https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf20.
a 70 percent increase: G. G. Pfister et al., “Projections of Future Summertime Ozone over the U.S.,” Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 119, no. 9 (May 2014): pp. 5559–82, https://doi.org/10.1002/2013JD020932.
2 billion people globally: Romm, Climate Change, p. 105.
10,000 people die: DARA, Climate Vulnerability Monitor: A Guide to the Cold Calculus of a Hot Planet, 2nd ed. (Madrid, 2012), p. 17, https://daraint.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/CVM2-Low.pdf. James Hansen himself has made this comparison in a number of venues, including in an interview with me published in New York as “Climate Scientist James Hansen: ‘The Planet Could Become Ungovernable,’ ” July 12, 2017.
researchers call the effect “huge”: Xin Zhang et al., “The Impact of Exposure to Air Pollution on Cognitive Performance,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 155, no. 37 (September 2018): pp. 9193–97, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1809474115. Coauthor Xi Chen made the “huge” comment to a number of news outlets, including The Guardian: Damian Carrington and Lily Kuo, “Air Pollution Causes ‘Huge’ Reduction in Intelligence, Study Reveals,” August 27, 2018.
Simple temperature rise: Joshua Goodman et al., “Heat and Learning” (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. 24639, May 2018), https://doi.org/10.3386/w24639.
increased mental illness in children: Anna Oudin et al., “Association Between Neighbourhood Air Pollution Concentrations and Dispensed Medication for Psychiatric Disorders in a Large Longitudinal Cohort of Swedish Children and Adolescents,” BMJ Open 6, no. 6 (June 2016), https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2015-010004.
likelihood of dementia in adults: Hong Chen et al., “Living near Major Roads and the Incidence of Dementia, Parkinson’s Disease, and Multiple Sclerosis: A Population-Based Cohort Study,” The Lancet 389, no. 10070 (February 2017), pp. 718–26, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(16)32399-6.
reduce earnings and labor force participation: Adam Isen et al., “Every Breath You Take—Every Dollar You’ll Make: The Long-Term Consequences of the Clean Air Act of 1970” (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. 19858, September 2015), https://doi.org/10.3386/w19858.
E-ZPass: Janet Currie and W. Reed Walker, “Traffic Congestion and Infant Health: Evidence from E-ZPass” (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. 15413, April 2012), https://doi.org/10.3386/w15413.
melting Arctic ice remodeled Asian weather patterns: Yufei Zou et al., “Arctic Sea Ice, Eurasia Snow, and Extreme Winter Haze in China,” Science Advances 3, no. 3 (March 2017), https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1602751.
peak Air Quality Index of 993: Steve LeVine, “Pollution S
core: Beijing 993, New York 19,” Quartz, January 14, 2013, https://qz.com/43298/pollution-score-beijing-993-new-york-19.
new and unstudied kind of smog: Lijian Han et al., “Multicontaminant Air Pollution in Chinese Cities,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 96 (February 2018): pp. 233–42E, http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.17.195560; Fred Pearce, “How a ‘Toxic Cocktail’ Is Posing a Troubling Health Risk in China’s Cities,” Yale Environment 360, April 17, 2018, https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-a-toxic-cocktail-is-posing-a-troubling-health-risk-in-chinese-cities.
1.37 million deaths: Jun Liu et al., “Estimating Adult Mortality Attributable to PM2.5 Exposure in China with Assimilated PM2.5 Concentrations Based on a Ground Monitoring Network,” Science of the Total Environment 568 (October 2016): pp. 1253–62, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.05.165.
the air around San Francisco: Michelle Robertson, “It’s Not Just Fog Turning the Sky Gray: SF Air Quality Is Three Times Worse than Beijing,” SF Gate, August 23, 2018.
In Seattle: In August 2018, the mayor’s office tweeted, “Today’s air quality has been declared UNHEALTHY FOR ALL GROUPS. Stay inside, limit outdoor work, and try not to drive.”
Air Quality Index reached 999: Rachel Feltman, “Air Pollution in Delhi Is Literally off the Charts,” Popular Science, November 8, 2016.
more than two packs of cigarettes: Richard A. Muller and Elizabeth A. Muller, “Air Pollution and Cigarette Equivalence,” Berkeley Earth, http://berkeleyearth.org/air-pollution-and-cigarette-equivalence.
patient surge of 20 percent: Durgesh Nandan Jha, “Pollution Causing Arthritis to Flare Up, 20% Rise in Patients at Hospitals,” The Times of India, November 11, 2017.
cars crashed in pileups: “Blinding Smog Causes 24-Vehicle Pile-up on Expressway near Delhi,” NDTV, November 8, 2017.
United canceled flights: Catherine Ngai, Jamie Freed, and Henning Gloystein, “United Resumes Newark-Delhi Flights After Halt Due to Poor Air Quality,” Reuters, November 12, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-airlines-india-pollution/united-resumes-newark-delhi-flights-after-halt-due-to-poor-air-quality-idUSKBN1DC142?il=0.
even short-term exposure: Benjamin D. Horne et al., “Short-Term Elevation of Fine Particulate Matter Air Pollution and Acute Lower Respiratory Infection,” American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 198, no. 6, (September 2018), https://doi.org/10.1164/rccm.201709-1883OC.
nine million premature deaths: Pamela Das and Richard Horton, “Pollution, Health, and the Planet: Time for Decisive Action,” The Lancet 391, no. 10119 (October 2017): pp. 407–8, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32588-6.
prevalence of stroke: Kuam Ken Lee et al., “Air Pollution and Stroke,” Journal of Stroke 20, no. 1 (January 2018): pp. 2–11, https://doi.org/10.5853/jos.2017.02894.
heart disease: R. D. Brook et al., “Particulate Matter Air Pollution and Cardiovascular Disease: An Update to the Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association,” Circulation 121, no. 21 (June 2010): pp. 2331–78, https://doi.org/10.1161/CIR.0b013e3181dbece1.
cancer of all kinds: Kate Kelland and Stephanie Nebehay, “Air Pollution a Leading Cause of Cancer—U.N. Agency,” Reuters, October 17, 2013, www.reuters.com/article/us-cancer-pollution/air-pollution-a-leading-cause-of-cancer-u-n-agency-idUSBRE99G0BB20131017.
acute and chronic respiratory diseases: Michael Guarnieri and John R. Balmes, “Outdoor Air Pollution and Asthma,” The Lancet 383, no. 9928 (May 2014), https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(14)60617-6.
adverse pregnancy outcomes: Jessica Glenza, “Millions of Premature Births Could Be Linked to Air Pollution, Study Finds,” The Guardian, February 16, 2017.
worse memory, attention, and vocabulary: Nicole Wetsman, “Air Pollution Might Be the New Lead,” Popular Science, April 5, 2018.
ADHD: Oddvar Myhre et al., “Early Life Exposure to Air Pollution Particulate Matter (PM) as Risk Factor for Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Need for Novel Strategies for Mechanisms and Causalities,” Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology 354 (September 2018): pp. 196–214, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.taap.2018.03.015.
autism spectrum disorders: Raanan Raz et al., “Autism Spectrum Disorder and Particulate Matter Air Pollution Before, During, and After Pregnancy: A Nested Case-Control Analysis Within the Nurses’ Health Study II Cohort,” Environmental Health Perspectives 123, no. 3 (March 2015): pp. 264–70, https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1408133.
damage the development of neurons: Sam Brockmeyer and Amedeo D’Angiulli, “How Air Pollution Alters Brain Development: The Role of Neuroinflammation,” Translational Neuroscience 7 (March 2016): pp. 24–30, https://doi.org/10.1515/tnsci-2016-0005.
deform your DNA: Frederica Perera et al., “Shorter Telomere Length in Cord Blood Associated with Prenatal Air Pollution Exposure: Benefits of Intervention,” Environment International 113 (April 2018): pp. 335–40, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2018.01.005.
98 percent of cities: World Health Organization, “WHO Global Urban Ambient Air Pollution Database,” 2016, www.who.int/phe/health_topics/outdoorair/databases/cities/en.
95 percent of the world’s population: Health Effects Institute, “State of Global Air 2018: A Special Report on Global Exposure to Air Pollution and Its Disease Burden” (Boston, 2018), p. 3, www.stateofglobalair.org/sites/default/files/soga-2018-report.pdf.
more than a million Chinese each year: Aaron J. Cohen et al., “Estimates and 25-Year Trends of the Global Burden of Disease Attributable to Ambient Air Pollution: An Analysis of Data from the Global Burden of Diseases Study 2015,” The Lancet 389, no. 10082 (May 2017): pp. 1907–18, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30505-6.
one out of six deaths: Das and Horton, “Pollution, Health, and the Planet,” https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32588-6.
“Great Pacific garbage patch”: Smithsonian calls it more of a “trash soup.”
700,000 of them can be released: Imogen E. Napper and Richard C. Thompson, “Release of Synthetic Microplastic Fibres from Domestic Washing Machines: Effects of Fabric Type and Washing Conditions,” Marine Pollution Bulletin 112, no. 1–2 (November 2016): pp. 39–45, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2016.09.025.
a quarter of fish sold: Kat Kerlin, “Plastic for Dinner: A Quarter of Fish Sold at Markets Contain Human-Made Debris,” UC Davis, September 24, 2015, www.ucdavis.edu/news/plastic-dinner-quarter-fish-sold-markets-contain-human-made-debris.
11,000 bits each year: Lisbeth Van Cauwenberghe and Colin R. Janssen, “Microplastics in Bivalves Cultured for Human Consumption,” Environmental Pollution 193 (October 2014): pp. 65–70, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2014.06.010.
total number of marine species: Clive Cookson, “The Problem with Plastic: Can Our Oceans Survive?” Financial Times, January 23, 2018.
73 percent of fish surveyed: Alina M. Wieczorek et al., “Frequency of Microplastics in Mesopelagic Fishes from the Northwest Atlantic,” Frontiers in Marine Science (February 2018), https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2018.00039.
every 100 grams of mussels: Jiana Lee et al., “Microplastics in Mussels Sampled from Coastal Waters and Supermarkets in the United Kingdom,” Environmental Pollution 241 (October 2018): pp. 35–44, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2018.05.038.
Some fish have learned to eat plastic: Matthew S. Savoca et al., “Odours from Marine Plastic Debris Induce Food Search Behaviours in a Forage Fish,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences 284, no. 1860 (August 2017), https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.1000.
bits that scientists are now calling “nanoplastics”: Amanda L. Dawson et al., “Turning Microplastics into Nanoplastics Through Digestive Fragmentation by Antarctic Krill,” Nature Communications 9, no. 1001 (March 2018), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03465-9.
3.4 million microplastic particles: Courtney Humphries, “Freshwater’s Macro Microplastic Problem,” Nova, May 11, 2017, www.pbs.org/wgbh/
nova/article/freshwater-microplastics.
225 pieces of plastic: Cookson, “The Problem with Plastic.”
sixteen of seventeen tested brands: Ali Karami et al., “The Presence of Microplastics in Commercial Salts from Different Countries,” Scientific Reports 7, no. 46173 (April 2017), https://doi.org/10.1038/srep46173.
one million times more toxic: 5 Gyres: Science to Solutions, “Take Action: Microbeads,” www.5gyres.org/microbeads.
We can breathe in microplastics: Johnny Gasperi et al., “Microplastics in Air: Are We Breathing It In?” Current Opinion in Environmental Science and Health 1 (February 2018): pp. 1–5, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coesh.2017.10.002.
94 percent of all tested American cities: Dan Morrison and Christopher Tyree, “Invisibles: The Plastic Inside Us,” Orb (2017), https://orbmedia.org/stories/Invisibles_plastics.
expected to triple by 2050: World Economic Forum, The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the Future of Plastics (Cologny, Switz.: January 2016), p. 10.
they release methane and ethylene: Sarah-Jeanne Royer et al., “Production of Methane and Ethylene from Plastic in the Environment,” PLOS One 13, no. 8 (August 2018), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200574.
Aerosol products actually suppress: B. H. Samset et al., “Climate Impacts from a Removal of Anthropogenic Aerosol Emissions,” Geophysical Research Letters 45, no. 2 (January 2018): pp. 1020–29, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076079.
only heated up two-thirds as much: Samset, “Climate Impacts from a Removal,” https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076079. Samset himself says, “Global warming to date is one degree Celsius (or thereabouts). Our paper showed that industrial/human induced aerosol emissions mask about half a degree of additional warming.” And because of how unevenly warming is distributed across the planet, he adds, “we note that in two models, Arctic warming due to aerosol reductions reaches 4°C in some locations.”
“Catch-22”: P. J. Crutzen, “Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?” Climatic Change 77 (2006): pp. 211–19, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-006-9101-y.
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