Climate change expert moves from blue California to red Alabama

photo James McClintock has been on 14 expeditions to Antarctica and his writings have appeared in more than 200 scientific publications and a 2012 book called "Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Land."
photo "Titans of the Ice Age 3D" is now open at the Imax Theater.

Climate change expert James McClintock grew up as an ocean-loving California boy before he moved to Birmingham, Ala. to become a professor of polar and marine biology at UAB.

Now he's a worldwide expert on climate change and Antarctica, but he can still remember "our California friends held a wake for my wife and me when we left for Alabama."

"They really thought our lives were over and no one would welcome someone talking about climate change in a Red State like Alabama."

But he's finding receptive audiences across the South (although not in Washington, D.C.).

Just back from an Arctic voyage among polar bears, McClintock came to Chattanooga this week to speak at the Tennessee Aquarium about climate change. His visit was part of the introduction to a new Imax movie called "Titans of the Ice Age." The film, which debuts tonight at the aquarium's Imax, uses computer-generated images to examine creatures that lived in this area tens of thousands of years ago.

McClintock's recent view of some polar bears -- beloved ice-loving titans in their own right -- was terrifying, and not because he was scared of being mauled or eaten.

McClintock led a group of tourists past melting glaciers and beautifully but weirdly warming Norwegian islands where he saw "emaciated polar bears, some seemed to be starving. The ice has melted so much that it is now too thin to support a polar bear's weight." Instead of eating big fat seals who sun themselves on ice floes, the majestic snowy bears are forced to hunt on land, where the food they mainly find are eggs in birds' nests.

McClintock has been on 14 expeditions to Antarctica supported by the National Science Foundation, where his research prompted the U.S. Geographic Board to name the north side of a key Antarctic harbor as McClintock Point. His writings have appeared in more than 200 scientific publications and a 2012 book called "Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Land," which spawned a documentary narrated by Harrison Ford.

An avid fisherman, McClintock is working on a new book called "Troubled Waters" about the impact that climate change and housing developments have on sport fishing around the world.

"Each chapter will be about a different type of fish that I've caught in a different location," he explains. "Examples include tarpon fishing in Costa Rica, speckled trout and red fishing in the Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana, tuna fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, lake trout and pike fishing is Manitoba, Canada, fishing for rock bass in Antarctica, fishing to blue cod in New Zealand, fishing for bass in Alabama's Cahaba River, and for anchovy-sized fish in the Mediterranean in France.

"Alabama's Cahaba River is one of my favorite places for bass fishing. But whenever there is a heavy rain in Birmingham, the river is so full of sediment, it turns chocolate brown due to all the housing developments being constructed nearby. Algae grows in that sediment and eats up oxygen fish need in their ecosystem."

A couple of years ago, a friend of his arranged a Capitol Hill trip for McClintock so he could meet Alabama's senators, Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby, both Republicans. He never did.

Instead, he met the senators' aides, who told him that both Republicans agreed climate change was a problem but "the senators didn't see why they should have to solve it if China wasn't going to help."

China is the world's leading producer of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. For McClintock, the answer to the senators' question is easy: He believes climate change will hurt Americans and there isn't time for the world to wait for China to become part of a solution.

Still, McClintock says that, in the past decade, he has seen Southerners become far more eager to hear about climate change and what they can do to stop it. The Birmingham Rotary Club invited him to speak on the topic and made him a member. Episcopal and Methodist churches invited him to talk about the connection between Christian tenets on stewardship of the Earth and climate change.

As an Alabamian, he is also concerned with how climate change is damaging the Gulf of Mexico seafood industry, which provides jobs and millions in income for state residents. He wrote an article for the Birmingham News in which he explained that warmer waters meant more ocean acidity, which can literally dissolve the shells of oysters and shrimp. Will they be able to survive or be edible to humans without their shells? he asks, then answers. Probably not.

For their part, people in the Chattanooga area need to understand that there is a tremendous ocean current that flows around Antarctica, a continent larger than China and India put together. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the only ocean current that flows completely around the globe, has been warming and affecting other ocean currents. The upshot is changing weather patterns all over the world.

"Chattanoogans should be aware that these changing patterns include hotter summers, possibly more droughts like the ones in California and Australia, more deadly outbreaks of tornadoes," McClintock says.

Contact Lynda Edwards at ledwards@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6327.

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