
Stefanie Penn Spear
One of my favorite events of the year is right around the corner—the Cleveland International Film Festival (CIFF) from March 22 to April 1. There are many aspects of the festival I enjoy, but perhaps what I find most valuable is the opportunity to engage in conversation on the plethora of topics addressed in the documentaries shown during the 11-day event.
Though I attend the festival to watch a variety of films, the environmental documentaries are always a favorite of mine. This year, EcoWatch is sponsoring Dirty Energy, which documents the personal stories of those directly affected by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and their struggles to rebuild their lives amidst the economic devastation and long-term health risks afflicting the area. Stay tuned to my column during the next two weeks for more details on this documentary and the other It's Easy Being Green films that are playing at this year's CIFF, one of the nation's finest and most attended festivals.
In preparation for my participation in the FilmForum on March 30, I previewed the acclaimed documentary Cape Spin. This film portrays the two sides in the fight over the approved plan for this country's first offshore wind farm which will place 130 wind turbines as tall as 440 feet about ten miles offshore of Nantucket Sound's cherished Horseshoe Shoal which is surrounded by the islands of Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and Cape Cod.
Cape Spin provides an in-depth look into the well-funded political tug-of-war that has transpired since the original 2001 proposal for Cape Wind's energy project. The two sides combined, as of August 2011, have spent more than $70 million in the struggle over this project. And, with numerous lawsuits pending, challenging rulings on fishing, navigation, endangered species and tribal rights, the costs of this monumental battle are sure to increase.
I've been following the Cape Wind project for years, but this film provided an inside glimpse of what this community has been going through for more than a decade. It's clear to me that proponents of this project, outside of the developer and the people being paid to promote the project, desperately want to see the U.S. transition to a sustainable and secure energy supply, and are willing, for the most part, to support any project regardless of its location and financial beneficiaries. Many of the opponents of this project support a renewable energy future, but refuse to sacrifice the public resource of Nantucket Sound to a privately-owned industrial wind farm that will generate electricity at more than double the average wholesale price at today's rates.
The film illustrates how the unlikely alliances that have formed on both sides further complicate the issue and cloud the debate. Cape Spin is entertaining and does a great job showing the comical side of this fight. However, our energy future is nothing to laugh about. Controversies like the Cape Wind project are being played out across the country where privately-owned industrial-sized renewable energy projects are being proposed or installed on our public lands. There are 17 utility-scale renewable energy projects—nine solar, six wind and two geothermal—representing about 7,000 megawatts that have been given priority status by the Bureau of Land Management.
I don't know if the Cape Wind project will ever be built, but I encourage you to see this thought-provoking film and decide for yourself which side you're on.
Cape Spin will be shown at the CIFF at Tower City Cinema at 230 Huron Rd., Cleveland, Ohio 44113 on the following days:
Thursday, March 29 at 11:45 a.m.
Friday, March 30 at 4:30 p.m. with FilmForum
Saturday, March 31 at 6 p.m.
To purchase tickets to Cape Spin, click here.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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