Bruce E. Johansen - Global Warming and the Climate Crisis: Science, Spirit, and Solutions

Since the age of 6 or so, I have been an avid weather watcher, fascinated by clouds and storms, rain and snow, how weather systems come and go. Moving with my siblings and parents halfway around the world (Dad was a senior officer in the U.S. Coast Guard; one might be surprised just how many places that the Coast Guard has bases). The onset of the monsoon in the Philippines with its dark, fat-bellied clouds, was a sight to behold, and not unlike a Puerto Rican tropical storm. The suburbs of Washington, D.C. sometimes received heavy snow and ice storms. I also love shoveling snow and chipping ice. I relished watching the first cirrus tendrils of a snowstorm move in from the southwest. I had a special hill with a wonderful view of the incipient inclemency.

Dad negotiated with the bureaucracy and got me on the subscription list for the U.S. Weather Bureaus daily weather map, which folded out to about 3 ft by 2 ft, the tool that the real weather forecasters used. I wanted to be a weatherman until I discovered that most of their time was spent indoors, in offices, with clacking teletype machines. Watching the sky from suburban hills had gone out of fashion among the professionals.

My family continued to move. The advent of frequent rains during in the Pacific Northwest got a bit boring during my 17 years there although we did have an occasional heavy, sloppy snowstorm, providing some entertainment. Watching the snow line slide down Olympic mountainsides from Seattle also gave me hours of pleasure.

Following Ph.D. work at the University of Washington, the time came to pick my professorial working location. A major qualification for adult life in Omaha, as I saw it, was real weather: thunderstorms, the occasional tornado (as long as it wasnt too close). As I write this, memory of an F-4 tornado, with winds of 170 miles an hour, 100 miles east of Omaha, is less than a week old.

Nature has kept its promise to me over the last 40 years. Deluges, droughts, snow and ice, bitter cold snaps, and stifling heat waves all have captured my sense of wonder and danger. An F-1 tornado rolled over a house that our family owns a few miles east of Omaha as my stepson Shannon was folding laundry. He watched a load, previously folded, rise and wildly dance, so it seemed, out a broken window.

All of this Midwestern mayhem comes to us between a few really nice, blue-skied late-spring and early fall days when we could watch spring foliage burst out or leaves turn brilliant color.

I have learned to look for clues in the sky, and not always where one might expect. The Sandhill Cranes, for example, pass through Nebraska each late winter on their way north, along with dark geese, trumpeter swans, and bald eagles. Years ago, the migration northward peaked in mid-March. By 2022, their stop in central Nebraska occurred in the middle of February, responding to temperatures and food availability (Ducey, 2022, B-1). Our climate world is changing around usfor human and the Sandhill Crane. The clues are before our eyes. As a teaching tool, this book should help explain these changes, and what they portend.

By the last half of the twentieth century, something very important was happening to humankinds relationship with the Planet Earth: the weight of human beings was passing that of every other creature on the planet. At the same time, each of us, on average (an important distinction) was using a larger proportion of the Earths resourceswood, oil, soil, and much more. We had, by the turn of the twenty-first century, reached what many scientists (and other literate people) were calling the Anthropocene, a new epoch, in which human beings exercise control of Earths futureno matter whether that influence is malign or benign. As the human race continues to squabble over resources as well as nationalistic differences based in religion and ethnicity that have plagued us since the time when wars were waged with sticks and stones (when humanity as a whole had very little influence on the course of the planet as a whole), we may ask whether our role in the Anthropocene is a blessing or a curse.

The term Anthropocene was so new that as of this writing (February, 2022) that the spell-checker on my brand-new Mac cannot find it. We, as human, about eight billion of us, have assumed control of Earths future at short notice, on borrowed time, whether we are ready or not to maintain a sustainable Earth that meets our energy needs without combusting fossil fuels, because their consumption of them will cause our atmosphere to heat beyond humankinds ability to withstand it. I do not say may. I say will, unless we banish fossil fuels from our energy equation, and do so very quickly, perhaps in 1020 years. Not many textbooks start with such an emphatic theme. There exists no way to objectify ourselves out of this. Thus, this is a textbook with attitude.

Ducey, M. (2022, February 20). Sand hill cranes are flowing into central Nebraska. Omaha World-Herald B-1, B-2.