Climate Change and New Initiatives to Protect All Life Forms on the Planet
An Excerpt Adapted from Space Systems and Sustainability
“There are no passengers on Space Ship Earth. We are all crew.” – Marshall McLuhan
The world is changing dramatically with the worldwide introduction of broadband 5G cellular systems and the planned deployment of thousands of low and medium Earth orbit satellite constellations as well as high powered conventional geosynchronous satellites. They will open up the entire world to lower cost and broadband communications to the developing world, the so-called Global South countries, and to rural and remote localities all over the world including the oceans and polar regions.
Other types of satellite systems that can provide remote sensing coverage to rural and remote areas will now be able to provide coverage with a much higher level of resolution and hyper-spectral sensing, with much more rapid rate of return to specific locations all over the globe. These systems can provide enormous new capabilities to support agriculture, forestry and forest management, water, river, and stream management, and to oversee fishing regulation, detect pollution and assist with law enforcement. They can become enormously valuable when seeking to cope with natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis that flood coastal areas as well as other types of flooding events and volcanic eruptions. This use of satellite remote sensing capacity is useful in assessing areas of destruction, road blockages, power line damage, etc. and much more. Satellite telecommunications, especially mobile satellite connections can provide a lifeline between rescue workers and those handling logistics for relief supplies.
The challenge will be to connect these high-tech space capabilities with the local farming, forestry, fishing and other community enterprises. Likewise, there will be the need to connect such space resources with local law enforcement officials and environmental protection agencies. As is almost always the case, the ‘last mile’ of service connectivity is the biggest challenge of all.
The Essential Technologies
The use of satellite imaging to cope with issues related to climate change and weather patterns is now vital. Satellites with special sensors can monitor the global environment with greater and greater precision. These enhanced space capabilities include monitoring increasing rates of lightning strikes, changing storm patterns, increases or reductions in rain rates, and changes in ocean and atmospheric temperatures. These new space systems can more accurately measure the impacts of ocean acidification, desertification, changes to the ice caps and more. Satellite based lightning trackers have for instance verified that there are now some 45% more lightning strikes occurring worldwide. This is just one of the many indices indicating more intensive storms around the world. This is a result highly consistent with climate change and the world’s average temperature increase. (See Fig 2)
Only constant daily total coverage of the Earth by remote sensing and meteorological satellites can truly track and reveal the alterations to the entire world that climate change is bringing about each day, each week, each month, each year and each decade. The image in Fig 3 from NASA reveals the desertification process and the expansion of the Saharan Desert. The tracking of vegetation in Africa throughout the course of a year seems to almost show a continent that is breathing in and out as the green of plant life expands and retracts, but year after year the desert regions slowly but relentlessly expand and the green areas shrink in size. (See Fig 3)1
International Solutions
In the case of climate change, the challenge to the nations of the world is how to find a viable process that can truly lead to a sustainable world. In the case of the world at large and especially worldwide resources, sometimes call the ‘global commons,’ we do not have the necessary tools to enforce the needed environmental actions to create a sustainable world. When it comes to global resources such as the seas and oceans, the breathable atmosphere, the stratosphere, the geomagnetosphere, radio frequencies, or even the world’s tropical rain forests, we might negotiate treaties, conventions and such, but these are still not the same when it comes to oversight, enforcement and regulatory oversight.
As colleague Chris Johnson, an international space lawyer with the Secure World Foundation, has observed: “We find ourselves somewhat at a crossroad. There is much at stake here. We must avoid a ‘tragedy of the commons’ type scenario. We need to develop a regulatory and cooperative framework for broad and effective measures to ensure that the Earth can be protected from major natural and human-created disasters. Such an effort should encourage and support cooperative actions that are – to borrow a phrase from the Outer Space Treaty – clearly ‘in the interest of all countries’ and represent the ‘province of humankind.’”
Meeting the large challenges posed by these existential threats to humanity seem today to be almost unsolvable challenges. This is true, whether the challenge involves climate change, global pollution, racial intolerance, overpopulation, dirty carbon-based energy, reduction of nuclear or bio-chemical weapons, or even better ways to address natural disasters, cosmic hazards, or pandemics. Societal reforms are best achieved by not only by prohibitions and bans, but also by providing incentives to lead people, companies and organizations towards alternative behaviors. Tax breaks or other rewards for switching to electric cars, solar energy systems, and smaller greener, and smarter housing could help. If ‘green’ practices become fashionable or even a less expensive way to live, this allows an easier transition than a program that is forced on businesses or a populace by fines and penalties.
The challenges of climate change are great but logical steps forward now exist. Only a comprehensive, integrated, and interdisciplinary approach that looks at climate change in a big picture and holistic way will ultimately succeed. All the existential threats that face Earth’s sustainability are in some way interconnected. Only seeing climate change from this broader perspective will ultimately work. There is the old song about how all the bones in the body are interconnected. All of the problems related to climate form the bones that are the body of climate change problems.
Dr. Joseph Pelton, founding president of SSPI’s Board of Directors, is an award-winning author, futurist and space technology expert. His latest book, Space Systems and Sustainability, is published in eBook format by Springer Publishing.
1 http://www.Earthobservatory.nasa.gov (Last accessed Nov 15, 2020)