How to Stop Mass Starvation from Global Warming

Guest essay by Jim Steele

Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism

Pictures of this starving polar bear have been circulating throughout the worlds’ most trustworthy media outlets, providing undeniable proof that global warming is not just some theory conjured by soul‑less models that predict devastation a hundred years into the future. Global warming is here and now and this widespread starvation of animals across the globe is exactly what climate models and 97% of the scientists predicted. For further video proof compare these BBC videos.

One of the chief promoters of polar bear doom and gloom, Steve Amstrup, has used this new evidence to honestly promote starving bears but with the proper caveat saying, “Shrinking sea ice is causing polar bears to starve with higher frequency, but “you can’t say that any one individual is starving because of climate change”

Extrapolating back into history scientists assure us no bears ever died of natural causes until CO2 began rising. Although this polar bear has never been examined, (as was the case for the floating/drowned bears a few years ago) the most sophisticated models have determined there is a high confidence that there is a high probability that this polar bear is not sick, is not injured, and is not elderly. Obviously with a climate on steroids, the only plausible possibility is it’s a victim of rising CO2. Normally this area is covered by sea ice and carpeted with seals. But now in the dead of winter there are only small slivers of ice, so small it is forcing seals into the water to drown and bears can barely keep their balance while hunting. Science deniers and uncaring human chauvinists have scoffed that this is just one bear observed within one square kilometer. However given the Arctic covers 14 million square kilometers where no one has been taking pictures, models have extrapolated there are very likely 14 million other skinny bears. But scientists are a conservative lot and lowered their estimate to one million plus or minus 100. Still it is worse than we once thought. Global warming is also starving every species across the planet. And like this bear picture, there is abundant photographic proof of this human‑caused tragedy.

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Global warming is increasing evaporation and that is drying our fields and pastures. The physics is well established: more CO2 means more evaporation. As a result, grass that once grew as high as a horses back, now barely reaches the bottom of their hooves. Without the normal lush pastures of the last Ice Ages, horses are starving. They are becoming so weak they are now incapable of carrying the smallest jockeys.

When CO2 concentrations were at pre-industrial levels during the Little Ice Age, horses remained thick and meaty throughout their lifetime. Meat from elderly horses was abundant and the main ingredient in dog food. But due to Big Oil and the selfish Koch brothers, CO2 rose and horses became increasingly emaciated and created a shortage of dog food. Only a pet hater, or anti-science Republican or denier Libertarian would ever deny that this epidemic of withering dogs is not real and requires immediate legislation.

When I was in graduate school, we would joke that if there was ever a nuclear holocaust, only insects and rats would ever survive. But according to reputable sources like Joe Romm, rising CO2 is like 400,000 Hiroshima bombs exploding every day. Unless you are a science denier, you can surely feel that heat. And like napalm these nuclear explosions are destroying our forests and prairies so that even the insects can no longer find refuge. Malnourished insects like the one below are the new normal. But there is still time to turn this global catastrophe around. But we must act now and elect every politician who tells a scary climate story!

I spent my career studying bird populations, analyzing how they adapt to changes in landscapes and natural weathers cycles. But the unprecedented 0.6°C global rise during the 20^th century is happening faster than birds can evolve; faster than they can fly from a hot sunlit lawn into the cool shade of a tree. In what now appears to be a desperate bare bones approach, and a last ditch attempt to adapt to this unbearable heat not experienced in the last billion years, birds are shedding all their feathers. As the anthropocene heats up, fewer feathers are promoting life saving cross breezes to cool their internal organs. But as the world continues to warm and the last feather has been shed, they will certainly go extinct.

But it is not just wildlife that is suffering. During the last Ice Age humans never wanted for food and 5 course meals several times a day were not uncommon. But despite our technological achievements in agriculture, our best scientists are telling us global warming is increasingly taking food from out tables. The lastest proof in a press release from the journal Nature provided this startling photograph of the new normal in human dining. Furthermore a study by Naomi Klein reports every single scientist is warning against false beliefs that because the growing season has become longer than it was the during the Little Ice Age, more food can be grown. 99.9% of the scientist agree, global warming is due to humans and the apocalypse is real.

It is the poorer nations, especially on Pacific Islands that are unfairly taking the brunt of global warming. Rising sea levels have flooded this couple’s island farm. Food that might normally be salvaged after a tsunami, were so completely dissolved by unprecedented ocean acidity, there was nothing to scavenge. As a result this couple and their neighbors have been forced to survive on the occasional coconut husks that wash on to their shores. Like statistics and graphs, photographs never lie or ever mislead. So please send all your money to any organization that promises to cut CO2 and spare the world from starvation, or maybe you or your children, or grandchildren or your great grandchildren or their children and their pets will suffer a similar horrible fate.