Outdoors | Planet saw numerous earthshaking events in 18 - The Columbus Dispatch

No year has it all, but 2018 delivered plenty.

Wildfires, floods, droughts, water shortages, heatwaves, shrinking ice, melting permafrost, struggling ecosystems, dwindling species, deforestation, industrial agriculture, abandonment of regulatory constraints, convenient denial and dire warnings marked a year in which carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere reached its highest level in perhaps 400,000 years, according to NASA.

Whew.

In October, the International Panel on Climate Change predicted that, should the track of greenhouse gas emissions remain unaltered, the planet by 2040 will have warmed 2.7 degrees from pre-industrial levels with accompanying catastrophic consequences. Avoidance will require changes on a scale for which “there is no historical precedent,” the report said.

Among the alterations required in many western nations, a British study reported, will be as much as a 90 percent reduction in the consumption of beef and pork, and large cuts in the consumption of lamb, sugar and milk products. Consumption of legumes, fruits, nuts, seeds and veggies will have to commensurately increase.

Farmed poultry amounts to about 70 percent of the birds on the planet, based on biomass. Livestock, primarily cattle and pigs, comprises 60 percent of all mammals, with humans 36 percent and wild animals a mere 4 percent. The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01 percent of all living things, figuring for termites and bacteria. The estimates come from a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A 60 percent decline in the world’s wildlife population occurred between 1970 and 2014, according to a report from the Zoological Society of London. The so-called World Wildlife Index tracks more than 16,000 creatures representing more than 4,000 species.

Excluding Antarctica, 77 percent of the world’s land mass has been modified by human activity, researchers at an Australian university reported, up from only 15 percent a century ago.

A federal court this month waived 28 U.S. laws in approving the construction of a section of border wall that will run through the National Butterfly Center along the Rio Grande in Texas. Many surveys indicated that insect populations are crashing all over the world, including the U.S.

Mountain birds, geared to live in zones shaped largely by temperature, are running out of climbing room as intolerable heat moves into higher elevations.

The world annual temperature in 2018 was projected to finish as the fourth-highest recorded, with the highest temperatures bunched into recent years. The subtropical belt has expanded about 70 miles farther into the Northern and Southern hemispheres during the past three decades.

Without significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, world temperatures could climb by 9 degrees from pre-industrial levels by 2100, said a U.S. National Climate Assessment report. Higher concentrations of CO2 are helping to cause nutrient decline in important food crops including wheat, maize, soybeans and field peas. The nutrition deficit could affect the health and lifespan of more than 122 million people by 2050, the journal Nature reported.

Atmospheric CO2 dissolved in oceans has raised the acidity of the water enough to begin dissolving the sea floor, said a November study conducted by Finnish researchers. Chinese scientists found plastic at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the lowest point on earth at almost 7 miles below the Pacific Ocean surface.

The digestive system of all 102 sea turtles checked in a British study held “plastics, microplastics and other synthetics.” The stomach of a dead whale in Indonesia contained 23 pounds of plastics. Red tide was blamed for 37 dead dolphins found in a single week on Florida beaches.

As of early December, the death toll from the Camp Fire in California, which has been linked to high temperatures and drought, stood at 85 with 11 still missing. President Donald Trump, who visited the devastated site and blamed the fire on unraked forest floors, said he wants “a great climate” but offered no details.

At a world climate meeting in Poland, the president’s adviser on energy and climate, Wells Griffith, told the group, “We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability.” The declaration was met with mocking laughter throughout the room.

The Trump administration scuttled an agreement to protect threatened sage grouse by opening 10 million acres in the West to oil and gas drilling. The administration announced plans to end Clean Water Act protection on some wetlands and watersheds that will benefit developers and hinder habitat conservation.

To direct the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the president chose former Monsanto executive Aurelia Skipwith, who has worked to undermine the Endangered Species Act, ease protections for migratory birds, jettison national monument safeguards and whom the Center for Biological Diversity called “utterly unqualified.”

On Christmas Day, veteran newsman Dan Rather wondered on social media: “Which should be considered more ‘marginal’ — believing in Santa at age 7 or not believing in climate change at age 72?”

outdoors@dispatch.com

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