Note

Recent events have found me struggling to find some way to be useful. I decided that one thing I could do was to write–on a regular basis– a letter to the editor of the The Norman Transcript, our local paper. The bad news from Crowther et al in Nature served as the grist for this week’s letter. Writing it scratched a number of itches: it gave me a shot at explaining negative and positive feedback, it provided readers with actual phone numbers (not just the link in this version) to phone the local offices of our Senator’s and Representative, and it pressed the notion that there is always hope when people engage, even when times are dark. Below is a slightly modified version of the letter.

To the Editor:

Last week was a bad one for Planet Earth. While her workings are pretty complex, it has long been evident that when we pump millennia-old carbon into the atmosphere we warm the planet. Many of us scientists had hoped that this warming would be slowed by a variety of feedbacks. Trees, after all, scrub CO₂ from the atmosphere; more gets sucked up by our oceans. That, we hoped, may buy us more time to move away from fossil fuels and build the solar panels and windmills that are springing up over the state. These natural feedbacks protect us in the same way that, when you notice a bridge is out, you step on the brakes long before catastrophe strikes.

Well, there is another kind of feedback, and for that we can thank the microbes. Boatloads of carbon rest in the cold earth. And, just as we keep our bacon in the fridge to keep it from rotting, that cold earth has kept its microbes from chewing through the countless tons of dead carbon just below our feet. Now, 49 scientists have together revealed in the journal Nature that the warming Earth is waking the microbes from their cold torpor. And they are hungry. As the microbes break down the soil CO₂ pours into our atmosphere. This warms the Earth and makes the microbes even hungrier…

You are, by now, beginning to see how this other feedback works. It is as if, back in the car, you stomp on the brake pedal. Or…what you *thought* was the brake pedal. The car lurches forward, racing toward the chasm. So you stomp harder! (Why aren’t these brakes working??) In the same way that the car accelerates toward the chasm, every fraction of a degree that we further warm the planet drives Earth’s microbes to empty one of its last storehouses of carbon, making the problem even worse.

Bad timing, right? Just as we should be redoubling our efforts to find a solution, prez-elect Trump calls climate change “bunk” and his advisor on NASA wants to delete such “politicized science” from its budget. This is code for the hundreds of satellites that watch our Earth, informing our farmers about soil moisture, our sailors about sea ice, our friends and neighbors about approaching storms. All because some of that data is used by scientists to diagnose our warming planet. It is bad enough our car is hurtling toward a cliff. Trump’s NASA policy would disable the speed gauge and paint over the windows.

Now more than ever we need to phone our Senators and Representative. We need to urge them to preserve NASA’s world class Earth Observatory program. Why do I think you and I can convince climate change deniers that we need to do more, not less? Because over the past 23 years at OU I have had the privilege of teaching science to thousands of Oklahomans. These young citizens see the evidence, and in our conversations (and in anonymized polling) overwhelmingly agree humans are warming the Earth and that there is still time to save it. Full stop. These same people are our future governors and legislators, will be paying taxes when some of us are retirees, and are thinking about raising families of their own. I suspect these are some of the same people who will be answering the phone when you make those calls. They are our future. They are our hope.

Mike Kaspari
Norman Oklahoma