The Malibu City Council has declared we are in a climate emergency. This was a sound decision in the aftermath of the Woolsey Fire, a fire that was only possible because of drought and extreme weather brought on by climate change. The city council should be applauded for its leadership.
One council member, Rick Mullen, voted against the measure, and as our town struggles with adapting to the difficult reality that climate change brings, Mullen’s comments stand out for their naïveté.
“There’s a lot of doomsday predictions on the environment that have been going on since I was a kid,” Mullen said, adding “a lot of good things” have happened to the earth in the last few decades as well. Mullen then referred to his view that gray whale population had increased as an example.
Then, he added: “The whole ‘emergency’ thing‑—the doomsday—they’re things that go on all the time; I think we freak out our kids a little bit too much.”
Mullen’s comments are at odds with the consensus of 99.9 percent of climate scientists and, as a person with influence, he should take the time to become educated on the topic.
Here are the facts:
CO2 levels are higher than they have been for the past three million years.
In the last decade, our carbon emission levels are the highest in history and if we were to stop emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow (which, of course, we won’t), we are still on track for much higher heat for at least 10 years.
The carbon in our atmosphere has triggered, and will trigger, further runaway warming systems that are not under our control, the most deadly of which is the release of methane gases that have been trapped for thousands of years under arctic ice.
Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon. In the first 20 years after its release into the atmosphere, it is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide. While the effect of heat from a carbon dioxide molecule takes 10 years, peak warming from a methane molecule occurs in a matter of months.
The Arctic and Antarctic icecaps are melting at rates far faster than even the most alarming predictions, and methane is pouring out of these regions.
Many scientists predict a methane “burp” of billions of tons when a full melt of the summer arctic ice occurs, something that has not happened for the past four million years. Should such a sudden large release of methane occur, the earth’s warming would rapidly accelerate within months.
The Arctic summer ice is currently two-thirds less than it was as recently as the 1970s, and the arctic is warming so fast that a full summer melt is likely within the next five years. The continent of Antarctica is also rapidly melting at an acceleration of 280 percent in the last 40 years. The massive ice melts that are happening there, such as the breaking off the Larsen B ice shelf, defied scientific predictions; the ice shelf known as Larsen C, which broke off in July of 2017, was 2,200 square miles in size.
The Arctic ice cools for the northern part of the planet. Over the past three decades, the oldest and thickest of the Arctic sea ice has declined by 95 percent, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2018 annual Arctic report.
Despite Mullen’s claim about whales, we are now in the midst of the sixth mass extinction with about 150 plant and animal species going extinct per day.
As a military man who should be applauded for his service, Mullen might note that General Mattis, former secretary of defense, has come out saying that climate change is a national security threat.
Council Member Mullen is simply wrong. I am thrilled the other council members know more about the topic than he does, and I hope he can take some time to learn about it himself.