Oil, Gas, Coal Are Destabilizing All 9 Planetary Boundaries

• It’s well known that the fossil fuel industry made the industrial age possible and raised much of humanity’s living standard, while also causing the current climate crisis. Less known is how oil, gas and coal are destabilizing other vital Earth operating systems — impacting every biome.
  
• Scientists warned this year that, of the nine identified planetary boundaries, humanity has now overshot safe levels for six — climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, novel entities (pollution), biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and freshwater change.
• Fossil fuels, petroleum-based agrochemicals and petrochemicals (including plastics) are now significantly contributing to the destabilization of all nine planetary boundaries, based on the review of numerous scientific studies and on the views expressed by dozens of researchers interviewed by Mongabay for this article.
• According to multiple experts, if humanity doesn’t find alternative energy sources and phase out fossil fuels, agrochemicals and petrochemicals, then their production will continue driving the climate crisis; polluting the atmosphere, water and land; creating deoxygenated kill zones in the world’s oceans; and poisoning wildlife and people.

When it comes to fossil fuel emission-driven climate change, 2023 has been a hell of a year. Latin American countries were hit by an astounding mid-winter heat wave, Antarctica set a stunning sea ice melt record, the world’s oceans were battered by extreme marine heat waves, and stifling heat domes formed over the United States. All this comes as scientists confirm 2023 as “virtually certain” to be the hottest year in 125,000 years.

But those events, and many, many others — as extreme and unnerving as they feel — are not Earth’s only looming environmental threat.

Researchers recently assessed humanity’s actions and found that we’ve pushed Earth beyond six of nine “safe operating limits,” breaching hazardous thresholds for climate change, biodiversity loss, land system change, freshwater change, nitrogen pollution and chemical pollution (technically known as novel entities). Stress on two other planetary boundaries — atmospheric aerosol emissions and ocean acidification — is also worsening, but these two, and stratospheric ozone depletion, remain within safe limits, for now.

The severe destabilization of even one natural Earth operating system could prove devastating for life as we know it, say scientists, with the transgression of six of the nine boundaries setting off alarm bells in the scientific community.

This year’s extraordinary climate change-driven events, along with the evidence of five other serious boundary breaches, prompted Mongabay to ask a question: We know fossil fuel production is the primary driver of the climate crisis, but how much are the oil, natural gas and coal industries contributing to destabilizing the other eight planetary boundaries?

In talking to experts and reviewing studies, Mongabay found that the fossil fuel, petroleum-based agrochemical and petrochemical industries are likely sowing seeds of instability across the entirety of the planetary boundaries framework.

For Katherine Richardson, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and first author on the recent planetary boundaries update, it’s clear that fossil fuels impact not just one, but many of the boundaries, particularly the “core” two: climate and biodiversity.

“All of the other seven planetary boundaries are operating through one of those,” she says. Historically, “we thought fossil fuels were a completely inexhaustible source of energy and didn’t realize the externalities that were associated with them.”

Those harmful externalities — if not rapidly brought under control — could drive irreversible change and present an existential threat to our world.

Breaking Boundaries: Climate Change

We begin with the best-known planetary boundary transgression, the climate chaos linked to the production and burning of oil, natural gas and coal.

Extreme events in 2023 carry the clear fingerprints of the industry on climate change: fires in Canada; heat waves in South Asia, Africa and Europe; and Latin America’s drought, with this year now on track to be the hottest on record.

“We are continually seeing an increase in extreme weather impacts, and we are continually seeing a role of climate change in the extremes that are causing them,” says Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist with the World Weather Attribution Consortium.

Those extremes are driven by soaring global temperatures, and “it’s the fossil fuel industry through greenhouse gas emissions that are causing that warming,” she says.

Fossil fuel burning has admittedly done much good for humanity, powering the juggernaut of modern economies. But it has also contributed the lion’s share of the 1.2° Celsius (2.16° Fahrenheit) of warming in the industrial era, with hydrocarbon combustion responsible for 80% of CO2 emissions. Heat-trapping carbon — and other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide — released into Earth’s atmosphere have disrupted Earth’s carbon cycle with dire consequences.

“The industry has known for decades that fundamentally the use of fossil fuels is unsustainable for the planet,” says Benjamin Franta, senior research fellow and head of the Climate Litigation Lab at the University of Oxford. “This history of delaying the movement away from fossil fuels has come with an irreversible cost, and now we’re seeing those costs.”

In 2022, fossil fuel burning released an estimated 36.6 billion tons of CO2, increasing atmospheric CO2 to 417.06 parts per million. Despite warnings from scientists and the United Nations on the urgent need to slash fossil fuel use, subsidies by the world’s nations to the oil, gas and coal industries have risen, hitting a new record in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Researchers warn that continued emissions, and failure to curb them, is setting humanity on a collision course with 2.5°C (4.5°F) of warming by the end of the century.

Peter Thorne, a climate scientist at Maynooth University in Ireland and one of many co-authors on the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) report, notes that while the impacts of the 1°C (1.8°F) of warming already experienced is alarming, one and a half degrees “will be much worse,” and two degrees “unimaginably worse.”

A 2°C (3.6°F) rise is considered a “critical threshold” with the potential to amplify the climate effects we’ve already witnessed, bringing far more extreme heat waves, fires, droughts, storms, sea level rise and risks to human lives.

Last year, an international group of researchers published the “Lancet Countdown,” a report detailing how climate change is putting human “health at the mercy of fossil fuels,” endangering vulnerable communities, increasing disease and driving economic losses. Already this year, extreme weather events did enormous harm to people’s lives and livelihoods, says Marina Romanello, executive director of the “Lancet Countdown.” “What we’re seeing is things are getting even worse.”

The fossil fuel industry is the main driver of an unfolding global crisis impacting the most vulnerable people in rich and poor countries alike, she adds. “It has unfortunately shown us that the rapidly accelerating health risks we’ve been recording through our scientific studies are increasing very quickly.”

Experts and international bodies continue underscoring the urgent need to phase out fossil fuel use and prohibit their expansion. The International Energy Agency, for example, recently stated that fossil fuel demand must fall by a quarter by 2030 to keep narrow hopes open of staying within a 1.5°C increase.

“It’s what the IPCC has been hammering home in this assessment report cycle; it’s never too late to act,” says Thorne. Climate change is a “force multiplier,” he adds, exacerbating other environmental challenges — acting like a domino to destabilize other planetary boundaries. “If we don’t get our act together on climate change, it just makes it that much harder to stay within safe boundaries for the planet as a whole.”

The ‘Deadly Trio’: Fossil Fuels Put Global Oceans At Risk

Life began in the world’s oceans. But now they are at serious risk. This year, a mass bleaching event unfolded in the Caribbean, though the total damage to coral reefs there won’t be known for up to six months, explains Derek Manzello, Coral Reef Watch coordinator at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“This is the most severe heat stress event in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea region on record, and it’s still ongoing,” Manzello adds, noting that bleaching is also occurring in the eastern Pacific, Persian Gulf and Red Sea, making this a “really severe, near-global event.”2023’s naturally occurring El Niño, coupled with fossil-fuel driven warming, is the likely trigger. “You’re taking that natural variability in ocean temperature and you’re adding that on top of the warming,” Manzello explains. “These El Niños are progressively getting worse and worse through time.”

Bleaching alone isn’t a death knell for corals, experts say, but can leave them vulnerable years later. However, bleaching isn’t the only ocean stressor at work now.

Other pressures such as ocean acidification — one of the nine planetary boundaries — are undermining marine resilience. Around one-quarter of CO2 emissions are absorbed by the world’s oceans, lowering ocean pH levels, leading to “acidification,” which represents a threat to marine organisms, particularly calcifiers, such as shellfish.

The ocean acidification planetary boundary still “lies at the margin of the safe operating space” but with continued fossil fuel burning it, too, could soon be breached; ocean pH has already fallen from around 8.16 to 8.07 and could fall to 8.01 by 2100.

Increasing acidification is just one of a “deadly trio” of ocean killers linked to fossil fuel burning and the petroleum-based agrochemistry industry. The other two are climate change (causing increases in overall ocean temperatures, along with intensified marine heat waves), and eutrophication of coastal waters (causing a loss of ocean oxygen endangering sea life).

Eutrophication is caused by both warming seas and a massive influx of agricultural runoff in the form of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers sourced from fossil fuels (we’ll say more about that in the next section of this story).

All three of these oceanic threats must be considered together, says Hans-Otto Pörtner, a research scientist with the Alfred-Wegener Institute and former co-chair of IPCC Working Group II, as they are interconnected and interact to destabilize marine ecosystems.

“When these three things come together, species can lose their capacity to adjust, to adapt, to acclimate,” he explains, adding that ultimately, these threats are all connected to human activities — primarily fossil fuel burning and agrochemical overuse.

This is of great concern for ocean, experts say. “It’s no surprise that if you look into Earth’s history that mass extinction events, like the Permian-Triassic, [known as the Great Dying] were likely tied to the three drivers of warming, acidification and oxygen loss.” Pörtner says. The Permian extinction wiped out 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial life.

“Without global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the future for coral reefs is very dire,” Manzello says, emphasizing that degraded coral reefs not only undermine ocean health, but people’s livelihoods, food sources, economies, and exacerbate coastal flooding. “It’s a very severe situation we’re dealing with.”

(Published under Creative Commons from Mongabay-India. Read the original article here)