[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Think Again

[Bill Totten]

Climate Change

by Bill McKibben

Common Dreams (January 05 2009)


Act now, we're told, if we want to save the planet from a climate
catastrophe. Trouble is, it might be too late. The science is settled,
and the damage has already begun. The only question now is whether we
will stop playing political games and embrace the few imperfect options
we have left.

"Scientists Are Divided"

No, they're not. In the early years of the global warming debate, there
was great controversy over whether the planet was warming, whether
humans were the cause, and whether it would be a significant problem.
That debate is long since over. Although the details of future forecasts
remain unclear, there's no serious question about the general shape of
what's to come.

Every national academy of science, long lists of Nobel laureates, and in
recent years even the science advisors of President George W Bush have
agreed that we are heating the planet. Indeed, there is a more thorough
scientific process here than on almost any other issue: Two decades ago,
the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) and charged its scientists with synthesizing the peer-reviewed
science and developing broad-based conclusions. The reports have found
since 1995 that warming is dangerous and caused by humans. The panel's
most recent report, in November 2007, found it is "very likely" (defined
as more than ninety percent certain, or about as certain as science
gets) that heat-trapping emissions from human activities have caused
"most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the
mid-20th century".

If anything, many scientists now think that the IPCC has been too
conservative - both because member countries must sign off on the
conclusions and because there's a time lag. Its last report synthesized
data from the early part of the decade, not the latest scary results,
such as what we're now seeing in the Arctic.

In the summer of 2007, ice in the Arctic Ocean melted. It melts a little
every summer, of course, but this time was different - by late
September, there was 25 percent less ice than ever measured before. And
it wasn't a one-time accident. By the end of the summer season in 2008,
so much ice had melted that both the Northwest and Northeast passages
were open. In other words, you could circumnavigate the Arctic on open
water. The computer models, which are just a few years old, said this
shouldn't have happened until sometime late in the 21st century. Even
skeptics can't dispute such alarming events.

"We Have Time"

Wrong. Time might be the toughest part of the equation. That melting
Arctic ice is unsettling not only because it proves the planet is
warming rapidly, but also because it will help speed up the warming.
That old white ice reflected eighty percent of incoming solar radiation
back to space; the new blue water left behind absorbs eighty percent of
that sunshine. The process amps up. And there are many other such
feedback loops. Another occurs as northern permafrost thaws. Huge
amounts of methane long trapped below the ice begin to escape into the
atmosphere; methane is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon
dioxide.

Such examples are the biggest reason why many experts are now
fast-forwarding their estimates of how quickly we must shift away from
fossil fuel. Indian economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the 2007
Nobel Peace Prize alongside Al Gore on behalf of the IPCC, said recently
that we must begin to make fundamental reforms by 2012 or watch the
climate system spin out of control; NASA scientist James Hansen, who was
the first to blow the whistle on climate change in the late 1980s, has
said that we must stop burning coal by 2030. Period.

All of which makes the Copenhagen climate change talks that are set to
take place in December 2009 more urgent than they appeared a few years
ago. At issue is a seemingly small number: the level of carbon dioxide
in the air. Hansen argues that 350 parts per million is the highest
level we can maintain "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar
to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is
adapted". But because we're already past that mark - the air outside is
currently about 387 parts per million and growing by about two parts
annually - global warming suddenly feels less like a huge problem, and
more like an Oh-My-God Emergency.

"Climate Change Will Help as Many Places as It Hurts"

Wishful thinking. For a long time, the winners-and-losers calculus was
pretty standard: Though climate change will cause some parts of the
planet to flood or shrivel up, other frigid, rainy regions would at
least get some warmer days every year. Or so the thinking went. But more
recently, models have begun to show that after a certain point almost
everyone on the planet will suffer. Crops might be easier to grow in
some places for a few decades as the danger of frost recedes, but over
time the threat of heat stress and drought will almost certainly be
stronger.

A 2003 report commissioned by the Pentagon forecasts the possibility of
violent storms across Europe, megadroughts across the Southwest United
States and Mexico, and unpredictable monsoons causing food shortages in
China. "Envision Pakistan, India, and China - all armed with nuclear
weapons - skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared
rivers, and arable land", the report warned. Or Spain and Portugal
"fighting over fishing rights - leading to conflicts at sea".

Of course, there are a few places we used to think of as possible
winners - mostly the far north, where Canada and Russia could
theoretically produce more grain with longer growing seasons, or perhaps
explore for oil beneath the newly melted Arctic ice cap. But even those
places will have to deal with expensive consequences - a real military
race across the high Arctic, for instance.

Want more bad news? Here's how that Pentagon report's scenario played
out: As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern of
desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would
reemerge. The report refers to the work of Harvard archaeologist Steven
LeBlanc, who notes that wars over resources were the norm until about
three centuries ago. When such conflicts broke out, 25 percent of a
population's adult males usually died. As abrupt climate change hits
home, warfare may again come to define human life. Set against that
bleak backdrop, the potential upside of a few longer growing seasons in
Vladivostok doesn't seem like an even trade.

"It's China's Fault"

Not so much. China is an easy target to blame for the climate crisis. In
the midst of its industrial revolution, China has overtaken the United
States as the world's biggest carbon dioxide producer. And everyone has
read about the one-a-week pace of power plant construction there. But
those numbers are misleading, and not just because a lot of that carbon
dioxide was emitted to build products for the West to consume. Rather,
it's because China has four times the population of the United States,
and per capita is really the only way to think about these emissions.
And by that standard, each Chinese person now emits just over a quarter
of the carbon dioxide that each American does. Not only that, but carbon
dioxide lives in the atmosphere for more than a century. China has been
at it in a big way less than twenty years, so it will be many, many
years before the Chinese are as responsible for global warming as Americans.

What's more, unlike many of their counterparts in the United States,
Chinese officials have begun a concerted effort to reduce emissions in
the midst of their country's staggering growth. China now leads the
world in the deployment of renewable energy, and there's barely a car
made in the United States that can meet China's much tougher
fuel-economy standards.

For its part, the United States must develop a plan to cut emissions -
something that has eluded Americans for the entire two-decade history of
the problem. Although the US Senate voted down the last such attempt,
Barack Obama has promised that it will be a priority in his
administration. He favors some variation of a "cap and trade" plan that
would limit the total amount of carbon dioxide the United States could
release, thus putting a price on what has until now been free.

Despite the rapid industrialization of countries such as China and
India, and the careless neglect of rich ones such as the United States,
climate change is neither any one country's fault, nor any one country's
responsibility. It will require sacrifice from everyone. Just as the
Chinese might have to use somewhat more expensive power to protect the
global environment, Americans will have to pay some of the difference in
price, even if just in technology. Call it a Marshall Plan for the
environment. Such a plan makes eminent moral and practical sense and
could probably be structured so as to bolster emerging green energy
industries in the West. But asking Americans to pay to put up windmills
in China will be a hard political sell in a country that already thinks
China is prospering at its expense. It could be the biggest test of the
country's political maturity in many years.

"Climate Change Is an Environmental Problem"

Not really. Environmentalists were the first to sound the alarm. But
carbon dioxide is not like traditional pollution. There's no Clean Air
Act that can solve it. We must make a fundamental transformation in the
most important part of our economies, shifting away from fossil fuels
and on to something else. That means, for the United States, it's at
least as much a problem for the Commerce and Treasury departments as it
is for the Environmental Protection Agency.

And because every country on Earth will have to coordinate, it's far and
away the biggest foreign-policy issue we face. (You were thinking
terrorism? It's hard to figure out a scenario in which Osama bin Laden
destroys Western civilization. It's easy to figure out how it happens
with a rising sea level and a wrecked hydrological cycle.)

Expecting the environmental movement to lead this fight is like asking
the USDA to wage the war in Iraq. It's not equipped for this kind of
battle. It may be ready to save Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge, which is a noble undertaking but on a far smaller scale. Unless
climate change is quickly de-ghettoized, the chances of making a real
difference are small.

"Solving It Will Be Painful"

It depends. What's your definition of painful? On the one hand, you're
talking about transforming the backbone of the world's industrial and
consumer system. That's certainly expensive. On the other hand, say you
manage to convert a lot of it to solar or wind power -think of the money
you'd save on fuel.

And then there's the growing realization that we don't have many other
possible sources for the economic growth we'll need to pull ourselves
out of our current economic crisis. Luckily, green energy should be
bigger than IT and biotech combined.

Almost from the moment scientists began studying the problem of climate
change, people have been trying to estimate the costs of solving it. The
real answer, though, is that it's such a huge transformation that no one
really knows for sure. The bottom line is, the growth rate in energy use
worldwide could be cut in half during the next fifteen years and the
steps would, net, save more money than they cost. The IPCC included a
cost estimate in its latest five-year update on climate change and
looked a little further into the future. It found that an attempt to
keep carbon levels below about 500 parts per million would shave a
little bit off the world's economic growth - but only a little. As in,
the world would have to wait until Thanksgiving 2030 to be as rich as it
would have been on January 1 of that year. And in return, it would have
a much-transformed energy system.

Unfortunately though, those estimates are probably too optimistic. For
one thing, in the years since they were published, the science has grown
darker. Deeper and quicker cuts now seem mandatory.

But so far we've just been counting the costs of fixing the system. What
about the cost of doing nothing? Nicholas Stern, a renowned economist
commissioned by the British government to study the question, concluded
that the costs of climate change could eventually reach the combined
costs of both world wars and the Great Depression. In 2003, Swiss Re,
the world's biggest reinsurance company, and Harvard Medical School
explained why global warming would be so expensive. It's not just the
infrastructure, such as sea walls against rising oceans, for example.
It's also that the increased costs of natural disasters begin to
compound. The diminishing time between monster storms in places such as
the US Gulf Coast could eventually mean that parts of "developed
countries would experience developing nation conditions for prolonged
periods". Quite simply, we've already done too much damage and waited
too long to have any easy options left.

"We Can Reverse Climate Change"

If only. Solving this crisis is no longer an option. Human beings have
already raised the temperature of the planet about a degree Fahrenheit.
When people first began to focus on global warming (which is, remember,
only twenty years ago), the general consensus was that at this point
we'd just be standing on the threshold of realizing its consequences -
that the big changes would be a degree or two and hence several decades
down the road. But scientists seem to have systematically underestimated
just how delicate the balance of the planet's physical systems really is.

The warming is happening faster than we expected, and the results are
more widespread and more disturbing. Even that rise of one degree has
seriously perturbed hydrological cycles: Because warm air holds more
water vapor than cold air does, both droughts and floods are increasing
dramatically. Just look at the record levels of insurance payouts, for
instance. Mosquitoes, able to survive in new places, are spreading more
malaria and dengue. Coral reefs are dying, and so are vast stretches of
forest.

None of that is going to stop, even if we do everything right from here
on out. Given the time lag between when we emit carbon and when the air
heats up, we're already guaranteed at least another degree of warming.

The only question now is whether we're going to hold off catastrophe. It
won't be easy, because the scientific consensus calls for roughly five
degrees more warming this century unless we do just about everything
right. And if our behavior up until now is any indication, we won't.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/05-12

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4585

http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=277&Itemid=1


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