PUBLISHED IN THE MARCH 26, 2024, ISSUE OF THE HOT SPRINGS VILLAGE VOICE. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION.
Climate change - a hot topic for Earth
By MARY ELIADES
Voice correspondent
Hot Springs Village Audubon recently welcomed Dr. Peter Trabant as guest speaker on the topic “Our planet’s climate system - a history of discovery.”
Trabant has been much in demand as a speaker because of his background in geophysics, climate change, oceanography (and just about every other scientific discipline), as well as his skill as a photographer.
He began his presentation by telling attendees, “I’m in the Village as a climate refugee,” and said he moved to Hot Springs Village in 2011 after floods in Houston and droughts in the Texas Hill Country.
Trabant shared a bit of his background: He grew up in Europe, attending French and British schools, before enlisting in the U.S. Navy, where he chased Soviet submarines during the Cuban blockade and served as an interpreter to the U.S. 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean.
He later earned a bachelor’s degree in geology at the University of Miami, and a doctorate in oceanography from Texas A & M University, while authoring technical papers and textbooks on geophysics and “our understanding of Earth’s past climates in the search for hydrocarbons.”
Trabant worked as a consultant to the petroleum industry as an exploration geophysicist for offshore oil and gas, and said, “My ‘job’ within the offshore oil and gas industry was to prevent a repeat of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, and my motto was ‘Call me before you have to call Red (Adair).’”
Trabant said he became interested in climate studies while fishing as a boy in Italy – he noticed that the fishing was always good around underwater ledges, which occurred throughout the Mediterranean at the same depth.
Trabant said the history of climate science began as early as 1902 with an article in The Selma (Ala.) Morning Times about Swedish professor Svend Arrhenius. Arrhenius theorized that “the combustion of coal by civilized man is gradually warming the atmosphere so that in the course of a few cycles of 10,000 years the earth will be baked in a temperature close to the boiling point.” The theory was based on the accumulation of carbonic acid [carbon dioxide] in the atmosphere, “which acts as a glass in concentrating and refracting the heat of the sun.” Trabant pointed out this was the first description of the greenhouse effect.
Another significant contribution to early climate science was made by Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovitch, who proposed that past climate fluctuations, particularly ice ages, resulted from variations in the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth as a result of changes in the Earth’s orbit. His calculations match what geologists have observed through dating of sediment layers and indicate that the Earth goes through an ice age roughly every 100,000 years.
Many years later, Enrico Fermi’s work with isotopes and Cesare Emiliani’s decoding of ocean temperatures using oxygen isotopes verified Mankovitch’s work, resulting in data indicating that we should be “slipping into the next ice age.”
In 1988, Jim Hanson, NASA’s top climatologist, told Congress, “Earth, we have a problem! We are rapidly warming the planet.”
“Several times in Earth’s long history,” Hanson continued, “rapid global warming of several degrees occurred…In each case more than half of plant and animal species went extinct…If we drive our fellow species to extinction, we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world that we inherited from our elders.”
The last ice age in North America (the “Wisconsin”) peaked about 20,000 years ago, when sea levels were 340 feet lower than today. Since then, glacial ice has been melting and the seas have been rising.
Trabant said we began “pumping gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” which today measures 425 parts per million. “And this is just the beginning of the problem,” he added. In 2023, 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide were put into the atmosphere. “We’re really cooking ourselves.”
“Earth’s temperatures are soaring,” said Trabant. We are experiencing the worst heat on record (record highs in 2023 and February 2024 the highest ever), the worst droughts, the worst wildfires (“The Smokehouse Creek Wildfire, largest in Texas history, is a harbinger for future fires.”), and the worst response to it on record.
Trabant discussed the five mass extinctions on Earth and said, “Since 1970, we’ve lost 52 percent of the Earth’s bird, mammal, fish, reptile and amphibian populations.”
“Insects are facing the most serious risk of extinction,” said Trabant, “undergoing an unprecedented decline of 2 percent per year.” He illustrated the effect on the food chain with a drawing of a house of cards – once the lowest level, the insects, is gone, the rest of the chain will collapse. The decline of the insect population has many causes, including deforestation (logging), use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, light pollution, and climate change.
Trabant ended his talk with a drawing of an apocalyptic scene, next to the frequently spouted phrase, “It’s a hoax!” but added “Unfortunately it is NOT!”
Trabant stayed to answer many questions from the crowd, including “What should we do about it?” “Nothing – literally nothing,” he responded. “The less you do, the less energy you use, the better off we’ll be.”
He added that climate change is a slow process, and probably the “least of our worries right now…There are many worse pollutants out there.”