poison ivy....connected with...climate change

About a month ago, I posted about a bad case of poison ivy that I got while I was digging for mineral specimens.

At the time, I thought little of it, expcept for getting it healed and needing to be much more careful to wear gloves the next time that I went out mineral collecting.

Then, recently, with the poison ivy little more than faint scars on my arm, I heard a report on npr that stunned me. Some researchers at Duke University have reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that, under conditions of increased CO₂ concentration, poison ivy grows more abundantly, and that it produces more copious quantities of urushiol, the irritating oil to which about 80% of the population is sensitive.

Hearing that, I realized an amazing connection in my life with events that have been linked with climate change. From my foresight to move away from the Mississippi Gulf Coast four years and one month before the landfall of Hurricane Katrina to last month's poison-ivy swollen arm, I have been affected by situations linked to climate change.

The linkage in each case is a statistical portion of a set of otherwise normal, naturally-occurring events. Hurricanes are part of normal Atlantic weather cycles. Poison ivy is certainly a naturally occurring species of primary succession meadows and secondary succession woodlands. Rather than being a completely new phenomenon easily detectable by a gas chromatograph, as man-made chemical compounds are, the phenomena associated with climate change are directed fluctuations in the occurrence of natural phenomena. Global warming is a large portion of current environmental concerns, while analytical chemistry paved the way for discussion of the environmental concerns of the 1970s and 1980s. This represents a major difference, because it is much easier to measure things like parts per billion of a man-made compound than it is to distinguish between natural occurrences of things like poison ivy and hurricanes and the increased proportion of those natural phenomena that may be caused by climate change.

This makes the assessment of what is and what is not caused by climate change more difficult than the simple assessment of something like environmental concentrations of a compound released by a manufacturing facility.

The response to a large-scale phenomenon like climate change is also much more complex than is the response to something like a pollutant released by one particular industry. Fossil fuel use underpins practically the whole economy, and perhaps, more importantly, the U.S. lifestyle. To address climate change will require widespread changes by individuals and families in transportation and lifestyle, rather than merely alteration in an industrial process in a few factories. For example, how many Californians would be willing to forego the 'commute to work' lifestyle and the car culture with a home in the suburbs?? HOw many Californians would be willing, say, to move to less crowded towns and cities in the Midwest where the commute is 5 miles rather than 50 miles each way for each person, but where there is a real winter (and they would need to conserve on heat, too)? These are the types of complicated questions that the potential for climate change presents, just within our own country. Even tougher is the question about what to do if sea level were allowed to rise? Should those who live in the hills of North Georgia suddenly welcome millions of Floridians who come in a sudden rush, causing chaos in the housing and employment markets, as the sea inundates South Florida? What should highland dwellers in Asia if Bangladesh were to be inundated by rising sea levels?

The potential for these sorts of enormous consequences to nature and society are the reason that humans need to address CO₂-induced climate change, rather than deny it. Humans need to address the situation with strong measures, not weak 'patch-up' measures. In other words, very large amounts of coal and fossil fuel usage will need to be displaced, rather than small amounts such as 5%.