Ross: Why hurricanes are not the worst part of climate change
Oct 19, 2018, 6:35 AM
The coal-fired Plant Scherer, one of the nation's top carbon dioxide emitters, stands in the distance in Juliette, Ga. (AP Photo/Branden Camp, File)
(AP Photo/Branden Camp, File)
Brad Warren protects fish for a living.
“I come from the seafood industry side of this, I worked as a fisherman,” he said.
Warren runs the National Fisheries Conservation Center in Seattle. And he says as catastrophic as Hurricane Michael was, hurricanes are not the worst consequences of our warming oceans.
“As it becomes warmer and more acidic, the ocean is developing plankton that are toxic,” he said.
And the problem with toxic plankton is that it kills shellfish. Which puts fishermen out of work. But it’s actually even worse than that.
“You can have an ocean that becomes no longer capable of making dinner,” he said.
Brad helped to negotiate Washington state’s carbon initiative — I-1631 — which would set up the first voter-imposed carbon fee if it passes. It could make gasoline significantly more expensive. But that money is supposed to go toward making cars and trucks so efficient they wouldn’t need as much gas.
Sounds a little iffy. So I asked him: couldn’t we just keep the status quo and learn to live with climate change?
“Well, in the big picture, I think a lot of people won’t live with it,” Warren said. “If we allow this course to continue unchanged, there will not be as many people.”
Because of food supplies?
“We will become self-limiting faster than we wish,” he said.
Well, that’s one way to impose term limits.
RELATED: A climatologist’s argument against I-1631
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