Documentary film - exposé
Late Take Off
Details
The carbon cycle
Important to today’s life
When a plant on land or in the ocean grows, it absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere and gives off oxygen through photosynthesis. It also produces carbohydrates as part of that.
When an animal eats a plant, animals take those carbohydrates and convert them into carbon dioxide and energy.
When living things exhale, we're giving off CO2 gas. That is that carbon moving from the atmosphere to the plant, from the plant to the food to the human and back to the atmosphere.
The ocean is where most of the carbon in the carbon cycle exists. 85% of the carbon is in the ocean. And that's where it needs to go.
Positive feedback: The ugly part of the carbon cycle
Positive feedback is when something happens and then something reacts and amplifies the situation because of that.
Wildfires are increasing around the world emitting more CO2
Permafrost is melting, which admits methane gas, which is also causes climate change
Disruption of stable food, water and other resources
And there's many other factors that are basically feeding back on each other
Negative feedback: The good about plastic
If humans stopped emitting plastic today, 100% no more plastic hitting the ocean. It would take a few hundred years or so for all that plastic to dissolve and it would be gone.
Earth history
5 geologic eras
For all the four major eras, there was a tipping point event that caused the bringing on of the next era:
half of all light disappears or
there's a fundamental change in the chemistry of the earth, or
there's a dramatic evolution of life on earth.
Archean eon
4 to 2.5 billion years ago.
Stromatolites, formed by colonies of photosynthesizing bacteria known as cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) lived in the shallow waters. In the Archean Eon, Earth's atmosphere was composed of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide, which would be unbreathable by living organisms today.
Then change in chemistry… (oxygen appeared)Proteroyoic eon
From 2.5 billion to 500-600 million years ago.
That was unique because that actually was when oxygen first appeared. When the earth was first formed, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. It was produced as a byproduct from the first photosynthesis synthetic algae and plants. That took the CO2 that was in the atmosphere and converted that to oxygen. And that actually was toxic to them. So they were the first species to kill themselves off of their own toxic waste.
At some point 2 of those organisms got together and said, Hey, wait a minute, let's work together. We're going to work together and become a multicellular organism. And that made them so much more competitive to the others that innovation flourished.
Then dramatic evolution of life… (multi cell organisms)Paleozoic era
500 to 250 million years ago
Began 541 million years ago with the Cambrian explosion, an extraordinary diversification of marine animals. The Cambrian explosion was caused by the evolution of the nervous system. By the end of the Paleozoic era evolution had caused complex land and marine animals to exist.That was when mammals walked the earth before the dinosaurs did. Most people don't know a mammal has ruled the earth before the dinosaurs. You had herbivores, carnivores, small, big animals.
It ended about 252 million years ago with the Permian–Triassic extinction event, the greatest extinction event in Earth history. That wiped out nearly 96% of all marine life and 70% of land animals. Only a few species survived including some reptiles. The leading hypothesis is that the end-Permian extinction was caused by massive volcanic eruptions that spewed more than 4 million cubic kilometers of lava over what is now known as the Siberian Traps, in Siberia, Russia.
Then half of light disappeared due to volcanos…Mesozoic era
From 250 to 65 million years ago.
That's when the dinosaurs lived. During the Mesozoic, the Earth was very different than it is now. The climate was warmer, the seasons were very mild, the sea level was higher, and there was no polar ice.
And the transition point between the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic is a mass extinction (Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event) when the asteroid hit the Yucatan and killed all like half of all life on earth.
Then half of light disappeard (asteroid hit)…Cenozoic era
From 65 million years ago to today
This era is the era of new life. The rise of mankind. Humans start to evolve 2 million years ago, with the modern human 200k years ago.
Last million years has seen 10 ice ages. The range of CO2 went from 278 parts per million to about 350. This difference creates a difference in the ice age.
Then - 3 conditions at the same time…
Because for the first time in the history of the earth, we're actually causing all three conditions simultaneously.
Effects of climate change
Ocean
Surf conditions change
Every surfer now knows what causes waves. It's a wind blowing on the ocean somewhere. There's a storm and those waves march across the ocean to where you are.
Climate change causes storms to change and regular patterns of storms to change. So that means what we expect is normal wave patterns will no longer exist. So if you've ever had a really good winter on the North shore or in Northern California or wherever, and if you've ever had a really bad winter on the North shore or Northern California or wherever, you understand that having bad winters back to back to back is not very good for your surfing. . It'll be less predictable.
Ocean acidifies
The ocean is where most of the carbon in the carbon cycle exists. 85% of the carbon is in the ocean. When more CO2 is admitted to the atmosphere, it gets absorbed by the ocean inorganically. That causes the ocean pH to go down. That's acidification. The oceans are acidifying 10 times faster than they ever have.
Plankton dies
And what happens is, is that the organisms that make up the base of life in the ocean are plankton and about half the plankton have a calcium based chemistry and that dissolves in acid. So as the ocean acidifies plankton dissolve.
Coral reefs die
Coral reefs are the same thing. It's calcium carbonate, dissolves in acid. So the coral polyps will not be able to make their skeletons and literally dissolve away, plus the base of the food chain will dissolve away. That's horrible.
Conveyer belt stops
We're also changing ocean circulation. This is called the ocean stratification. Life on the oceans and the earth depend on a circulating ocean. The Gulf stream for example, takes warm water from Florida and Southern Atlantic up to the North Atlantic where Europe is and heats Europe. England is the same latitude as Alaska yet it's warm like California because of the Gulf stream. And then what happens is the Gulf stream gets around Iceland and it sinks and then the same conveyor belt goes down the deep ocean all the way down to the Southern ocean in Antarctica where it comes back up again. That's the ocean conveyor belt.
Climate change disrupts the conveyor belt and this is very clear in the geological record that's happened many times in the past.
When that happens, life on earth changes dramatically.
The deep ocean is full of nutrients and it's literally the mixing of the deep ocean to the surface that allows plants to grow because they're being given the nutrients, the nitrates, the phosphates, iron to actually grow. So when circulation stops, plants in the ocean disappear and we're already seeing a 40% decline in plankton in certain areas of the ocean from the lack of mixing. And that's already impacting penguins and whales and other creatures that depend on eating plankton.
Land
Extreme weather
Affects human society in general. So extreme weather, droughts and fires lead to the disruption of stable food, water and resources. That's going to be global. And that's why the U S military is so concerned about climate change that causes disruption of food supply.
Increased number of fires
That's what climate change is. It doesn't rain where it used to rain.
California went through a huge drought. And the drought is still ongoing, even though we did have a wet year this past winter. But the drought situation is not got away. And we had four or five years, we were hardly rained at all. And then we had these crazy fires.
In 2017 we had the tubs fire, the most destructive fire in California history. It caused 1.2 billion in economic damages and basically wiped out half of Santa Rosa town.
Also in 2017 we had the Thomas fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara. That was the largest wildfire in California. With a total cost of 2.2 billion of economic losses. When that mountain range burned, it killed all the vegetation and then the rain came for the first time in forever and then it was a mud slide. It killed 21 people and it happened at 3:00 AM
2018 the next year we had the Woolsey fire in Malibu. And what happened used to be relatively rare before climate change. Because fires are so much more prevalent from the drought and other factors now the fires go through what's called a plume replacement cycle where the fire gets really hot, really fast, smoke rises, that smoke, hits the colder upper atmosphere and then cools off and then sinks. It sinks back down on top of the fire and that creates a downdraft that then amplifies a fire tremendously.
Also in 2018, the campfire. That was the biggest one by far. That was where the town of Paradise was wiped out. A $16 billion of damage. That basically caused the first climate change bankruptcy for civic gas and electric company PG&E.
Preemptive power outage
One of the biggest impacts that we're feeling literally right now is a disruption of our stable economy because they shut off the power as a preemptive move to prevent being responsible for starting fires. Because they literally can't afford, have any more liability from starting a fire.
The Santa Ana’s is an East wind in the fall after everything's dry from a hot summer. And it basically creates conditions with lots of wind and hot weather to cause fires. The power companies are looking at these Santa Ana winds and they're saying there's a high likelihood that these are gonna move trees into power lines and cause a fall forest fire. All it takes is that one spark. And then because of the drought and the climate change, the conditions are for that fire to go from a spark to a massive Inferno.
Before climate change, those sparks would often just cause a small fire. Not a raging Inferno. So we're in this circumstance where the electric companies can't afford the possible liability of causing another one of these fires.
The economic losses from the four days of power being shut off was $2 billion. But compared to the 16 billion from the fire that was caused the year before.
And that's what climate change does. It takes the resilience away from the system. There's no longer any ability for the system to really cope with all the different stresses.
Like the aging power lines: They definitely need maintenance. We can't afford to underground them all, which is what would need to happen. Every home doesn't have solar and a battery backup system, which is another way to solve that problem. We literally can't afford to solve that problem in one of the richest States in the world.
Permafrost
There's permafrost all across Alaska, Canada and Siberia. And the permafrost is a problem because it's melting rapidly. The Arctic warms six times faster than the rest of the earth from climate change.
So the permafrost is melting and what happens is there's a lot of grass stored in that belt, in that frozen soil. When that melts, it gives off methane. Methane is 25 times more potent than CO2 per molecule at trapping heat. So that method is going to rapidly warm up the earth and there's so much methane potential stored there.
Literally, um, it's a thousand times the historical total of humans emissions, right? That's again, the feedback mechanism that if we don't prevent that from melting, now it's gotta be too late.
That's how Wars get started.
Cause now you have warring communities fighting over food.
The End Game
Purple sulfur bacteria
When the upper ocean sinks to the deep ocean, it brings oxygen down. And oxygen is essentially what prevents the establishment of purple sulfur bacteria. So most life on earth is carbon based life, but there's a small amount of life that's based on sulfur, which is actually much harder to build life around.
There's some bacteria, purple sulfur bacteria at that bottom of the ocean that flourish when there's no oxygen around. It also happens in the black sea. There's a jellyfish Lake in Palau and other places where there's no oxygen.
And those places are extremely toxic because the byproduct of purple sulfur bacteria is not CO2. It's hydrogen sulfide gas. Hydrogen sulfide gas is a potent neurotoxin that literally will kill you in small concentrations if you breathe it.
And when the ocean circulation stops, the purple sulfur bacteria fill up the ocean and now the gas floats over, kills everything in the ocean and everything on land. That is a mass extinction. That's the kill mechanism for mass extinctions from climate change.
It will take some time
I mean that's not gonna happen for thousands of years. Point is, is that we're getting to the point where it's going to be too late to reverse that no matter how hard we tried. But it's such a complex, intricate system that none of us understand. And there are ways that it can go wrong that none of us can forecast.
The Solution
Permanence
Permanence is something that you measure in the carbon offset world and look at. It means that the people who live in that project have to be able to manage it even after there's no more money left from the carbon finance side. And that has done through sustainable development.
The United nations has this new new concept called the sustainable development goals. There's 17 of them that measure environmental issues like carbon or biodiversity on land and water. And they also measure the stable development, poverty, health care, gender equality, electricity, income. Those sorts of things are actually critical to making a truly effective carbon sequestration project.
Projects
SeaTrees on Biak Island, Papa New Guinea.
SeeTrees is one of the first projects out there to actually take into account the permanence, wrap it up into a package so that a surfer can look at their carbon footprint, wipe it out and essentially mitigate their climate impact. The mangrove tree does a better job than all other trees. It's one of the most physically active or effective, biological ecosystems to sequester carbon dioxide. It sequesters five times more CO2 than aerial tropical forest per year. The project is being run by the Eden reforestation company. They struggle for recognition and for funding. SeeTrees is a way to tell their story and provide funding to those projects.Kelp Forest Regeneration, California
California has lost 90% of its kelp in basically the last 15 years from changes to the ecosystem. The basket stars in Northern California that eat up tons of urchins every day have all disappeared through some sort of disease. So the sea urchins are eating the kelp. The Bay Foundation based in Los Angeles. They have pioneered the technique of going to an urchin barren where there should be kelp and smashing the urchins with hammers to basically bring the cow back. A kelp ecosystem is a thriving ecosystem that has resilience from things going out of balance. When you start taking away pieces of that ecosystem, like the sea otters are taken away and then the baskets are taken away, then you lose resilience and ecosystem collapses. Restoring kelp is very expensive compared to planting trees. You have divers have to dive down and it's not as easy as finding a tree.