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On Valentine’s Day I am thinking of love, and I’m worried about consumption. Love because it’s the foundation of existence, what drives us to do what we do. Consumption because it will lead to our demise, an addiction that will alter life as we know it. And it is everywhere in the world around us. 

For the past 40 years I’ve worked as a journalist on topics ranging from pesticide poisoning in Mexico to gunrunning in Africa. I’ve revealed pieces of truth lurking in dark corners, and battled the frustrations of dead ends and denial. I have been harassed, fired, accused of exaggeration, and hounded by people who never wanted to see my stories see the light of day. Through the hard times I have sometimes thought about leaving journalism, especially as the modern digital age has devastated and squeezed local reporting to the point that few local voices are heard anymore. The media is being attacked like never before. Why would anyone want to do this? 

But this week, the answers came to me from two young aspiring student journalists who contacted me separately, asking about stories I had worked on decades ago. They want to know how have things changed, and how they could get involved in journalism. Stay true to yourself I said, tell a good story, and get out and meet the people you are reporting on. We may live in the millisecond world of Twitter, a digital diaspora seemingly devoid of context. But journalists will always have a market for stories that tell a good tale, a yarn people can relate to. The youth of the world will inherit our environmental mess, a crisis that’s greater than ever. But they are smarter than I was at their age, and we must help them tell the stories in the future. For all of us. 

Which gets me back to my thoughts of the day. I love what I do because I believe in it. I work on environmental stories because they matter, to my kids, the people I love, for my hound dog who is my faithful companion. Love really is about truth. Though journalists get dinged for getting things wrong, most really are trying their best to get it right. In a time of fake news and political puffery, I believe even more in the mission of the media. We are the message, and we have an obligation to report the facts as they are. 

And consumption? Well that is the driving force of what’s afflicting our future. We live in a nation that consumes a quarter of the world’s resources, with a fraction of the population. At some point in the not-too-distant future, Mother Earth will be unable to sustain it. The science is clear; fisheries are rapidly being depleted, animals and insects are dying off in record amounts, forests are withering, our rivers and groundwater continue to be polluted by chemicals that put us all at risk. 

But it is climate change that will push us all over the edge. We are already seeing what’s in store. As our political leaders feed us false hopes of a consumer-driven future, we face a destructive path if we don’t change. We live in the petri dish called Earth. We should learn from Native Americans who understood that long before Europeans came: respect Mother Nature or suffer the consequences. The increasing droughts, floods, fires, melting glaciers and oceans of plastic are stark reminders they are right. 

Can we change? Absolutely. We have the solutions, the technology to get us out of the carbon-burning hell we are leaving for future generations. But we won’t change without the political will to get there. At some point, we will have no choice. It will be too late for millions of coastal residents and populations who lack the economic resources to weather the impending disaster. 

Call me old school, but the world has proved we were right in our protests of the 60s. Embrace love and consume less on this Valentine’s Day. Find a way to focus on your passions while leaving a lighter footprint on the earth. We owe our kids no less. 

By Rao M Sajjad Sharif, Erum Shahzadi and Fahad Munir

 

 

Human life is dependent on the dynamics of the Earth’s climate system. The interactions of the atmosphere, oceans, terrestrial and marine ecospheres, cryosphere and land surface determine the Earth’s surface climate. The historical meteorological records over the last few decades show a changing global climate due to natural as well as anthropogenic activities.

Climate change is a change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns that lasts for an extended period of time (i.e., decades to millions of years). It is a global, regional, and national problem connected to  exponential population growth, industrialization, globalization and urbanization.  It greatly influences natural ecosystems, natural cycles, aquatic systems, terrestrial systems, distribution of species, and human health.

Earth’s temperature has increased to 0.74 C, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA). Pakistan is one among the most vulnerable countries to climatic changes as an autonomous country that occupies a strategic location in south Asia, with a variety of landscapes. By geographical region, Pakistan is most vulnerable to climate change due to  global warming in a region where the temperature increases are expected to be higher than the global average temperature.

This region mostly consists of semi-arid and arid landscape. Pakistan is an agriculture country and its agricultural land is more sensitive to climate change. Due to its arid and semi-arid climate, water is the single most constraining factor to Pakistani agriculture. Hence the country faces larger risks of variability in monsoon rains, including large floods and severe droughts. Under these conditions the food water flood energy securities of the country are under serious threat.

From 1997-2016, Pakistan suffered from 141 extreme weather events, losing an average of 523.1 lives per year. The mammoth floods of 2010 and 2011 wiped out the entire agriculture apparatus of Pakistan. The floods have reportedly destroyed 71% of the standing rice crop, 59% of the vegetable crop and 45% of the maize crop across the country. Farmers claimed a 50% decrease in crop yields. In 2010’s heat waves, the hottest temperature recorded in Asia was 53.5^oC (128.3F) in Mohenjo-Daro, a city of Sindh in Pakistan. It was the fourth highest temperature ever recorded in the world.

Pakistan is ranked in 7th among countries threatened by the vagaries of climate change and global warming.  In short, Pakistan is at a serious risk to a changing climate, one of many lower developed countries threatening by rising carbon emissions from more developed countries around the world. 

The authors are involved in scientific studies in Pakistan.

On a warm summer day on July 11, moms from around the country came together on the Washington Mall for a “Play-In for Climate Action”  to protest Trump administration environmental policies and to fight for the health of their children and future generations. Kristin Mink, a DC teacher who confronted former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt in a restaurant just days before he resigned, gives a powerful voice to mothers seeking a better future for their children. “This administration is not protecting us, they’re not protection our children, and it’s not a partisan issue. We’re not going to have it.”

 

 

Ron Naveen found his calling counting penguins in the Antarctic three decades ago, lured by the iconic creatures that waddled upright like drunken butlers but swam like dolphins under pristine ice shelves that stretched untouched for thousands of miles. Over the years Naveen created a small nonprofit called Oceanites, named after the aerobatic seabird, and he built a network of colleagues, volunteers and other scientists who helped document penguin population data along the Antarctic Peninsula—until recently one of the fastest warming regions in the world.

Today, Oceanites has partnered with New York’s Stony Brook University to develop new cutting-edge satellite mapping technology that will allow scientists to further study the populations of penguins that thrive in the brutally cold Antarctic winters made famous in documentaries like March of the Penguins and The Penguin Counters. Oceanites released its State of Antarctic Penguins 2018 report today—World Penguin Day—that provides the most detailed documentation yet of what is happening to penguins in on the world’s seventh continent. And the results continue to be concerning.

Two of the three species of penguins, Adelie and chinstrap, have declined significantly in numbers in the fast-warming Antarctic Peninsula, while a third species, the Gentoo, has risen. Why? No one really knows. It could be a drop off in the food supply, or a changing environment and melting ice. But Naveen’s band of penguin counters believe these noisy and curious flightless seabirds are crucial to understanding what will happen to humanity as the climate rapidly changes and the polar regions pour trillions of gallons of fresh water into the oceans.

“It is through these changes in the Peninsula that we hopefully will better understand how future generations of mankind may or may not adapt to a similar amount of warming in our own backyard,” Naveen says. His organization is working with scientists to come up with new ways to track what’s happening to our fitful feathered friends, trying to explain how rapidly warming regions of Antarctica are affecting penguins—and our future.

There is good reason to worry, since 90% of the world’s ice and 70% of the world’s fresh water are on this largely unexplored icy continent. If the ice melts, penguins and humans will suffer the consequences. So far, recent scientific studies have not been optimistic about the future in the frozen south. Reports show 10% of Antarctica’s massive glaciers are in full retreat, and new research shows melting is taking place underneath the ice sheets due to changing ocean currents, creating a potentially disastrous warming feedback loop.

This is not good for penguins—or us. Scientists are desperately trying to figure out what is happening to the mysterious frozen world that we know so little about. Because as Naveen says, what happens to penguins will happen to us. And that’s a story worth figuring out.

Rocky Kistner is an advisory board member of Oceanites.