By Albert K. Bates
Multiple choice: read this
statement and then attribute the source:
"Experts
are beginning to agree that climatic warming is likely to have some major economic
impacts. Rising sea levels, for example, could flood agricultural land and
changing weather patterns could result in more violent storms and thus, more
expensive storm damage claims for insurance companies."
(a) Science
News, December 14, 1988
(b) Wall
Street Journal, January 20, 1997
(c) OPEC
Ministers Bulletin, June 30, 2015
(d) All
of the above.
Walking into the Eleventh
Annual Conference on Sustainable Development and Global Climate Change in
Washington D.C. a year ago, I had a strong sense that it was, as Yogi Berra
said, "deja vu all over again."
Many of the people milling
about over coffee and danish were familiar faces from the past decade: Bert
Bolin, the white-haired elder scientist who chairs the U.N.'s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); Robert Watson, the combative British
climatologist who now watches thermometers from inside Al Gore's wing of the
White House; Mohan Munasinghe, meteorological bean-counter for the World
Bank; Nick Sundt, Global Change's
cyber-ubiquitous Town Cryer; a busload from the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration; and a couple dumpster loads of industry
representatives, government staffers, scientists, lobbying lawyers and
diplomats.
The tale was a familiar one. The globally-averaged surface temperature was 0.40°C above the 1961-1990 average, according to observations made at land stations, sea surface temperatures measured from ships and buoys, and satellite infrared imaging. The previous warmest year in the record, 1990, had an anomaly of 0.36°C for the year as a whole.
Although differences of a
few hundredths of a degree between global average temperatures in individual
years are not significant, we have
been on a warming trend since the mid-70s. Most scientists, with a few oddball
exceptions, would concur with the IPCC statement that "the balance of
evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." The
credibility problem is that any rise in global temperature as emissions
increase will not be steady and uniform; there will still be colder years and
colder decades and even whole cooling regions due to natural climate
variability and geographic anomalies. If you want exceptions to prove the rule,
they're out there.
For people and other living
things, the warmest year on record did not bode well. In Chicago, they buried
hundreds of unidentified heat victims in mass graves, and brought in
refrigerated semi-trailers to serve as temporary morgues for the legions of the
known. Iowa got its second 100-year flood in 3 years. In New Orleans, homes
were overrun with cockroaches and termites after a 5th winter with no killing
frost. London had its driest summer since 1727, its hottest since 1659.
Then in the fall, a chorus
line of hurricanes danced across the Atlantic from the East African coast to
the shores of West Florida.
The speed at which
scientific predictions are being fulfilled is unsettling. In November, 1994,
the Argentine Antarctic Institute predicted that the Larsen Ice Shelf would
crack within 10 years if warming continued. In March, 1995, a 48 by 22 mile
chunk broke off, exposing rocks that hadn't seen daylight in 20,000 years.
Seven years ago, EPA warned
that global warming and destruction of rainforest habitat would lead to the
spread of new infectious diseases in the 21st Century. By 1991, just 2 years
later, algae blooms in Asia and South America infected more than 400,000 people
with cholera. In 1994, the mosquito responsible for dengue and yellow fever
doubled its range in Central and South America.
These are signposts to the
edge of an abyss. There are 10,000
new people arriving on Earth each hour. They are putting too much carbon into
the air. We need more trees. We need less coal and oil being burned. Deep down in this well of common sense
many of those attending the Eleventh Annual Conference commiserated.
"Suppose we were to
burn all our recoverable fossil fuel stockpiles (except oil shales) right now,
in just a year or two?" rhetorically asked Pieter Tans, and then proceeded
to answer himself. The rate of increase in warming would be 3 to 4 times faster
than at present and the temperature would hit a peak in perhaps 100 years and
only come down slightly over the next 2000 years, holding at a plateau
substantially above where it is today for at least 7000 years. And just how hot
is that, Pieter?
Well, we are now warmer than
we have been in 100,000 years. Burning everything at once would bump us to 2000
ppm of carbon by volume, and after 2000 to 7000 years we might get back down
close to present levels of 350 ppm if all went well. The problem is that
natural carbon absorption depends on plants, particularly in the mid-latitudes,
and at least a third of all vegetation changes with a doubling of atmospheric
carbon. The dynamic equilibrium which is Earth's healing process may not be as
dynamic when airborne carbon jumps to unprecedented levels. There are no
observable analogs for change on this scale.
Okay, so we don't burn it
all at once. Well, suppose we achieve the ambitious targets of the Framework
Convention on Climate Change and reduce our outputs to 1990 levels by the year
2005? That would probably put us at 450 ppm by 2100 and 600 ppm by 2200. Ooops.
If 450 ppm can only be
achieved with a significant cutback, we asked, what would the cutback have to
be which would keep us at, say, 350 ppm? The answer was bothersome. Cutting
back to 350 is probably not doable, because it means burning zero fossil fuels
forever. And at 350 ppm, where will temperature be? Probably about 5°C warmer
on average. That dye is cast, although global inertial factors like the surface
temperature of the oceans mean it could take a century more to unfold.
If a half degree increase in
average warming creates mass graves in Chicago, what will a 5 degree increase
do? Well, that is roughly the distance the Earth has traveled over the past
18,000 years, since our last small ice age. This time we expect to travel the
route in perhaps 100 years, and in so doing, make the planet warmer than it has
been in at least 1 million years.
And this room full of
scientists told us, in essence, that at this point, the writing is set in
stone.
Once you get to that giddy
state, the dancers get better. A public relations flack for the coal industry
said there are no good guys and bad guys in this, because it is all tradeoffs.
An economic consultant said that value judgments have no role because they
can't be quantified. Another official bean-counter said it makes no difference
whether you do the reductions now or in the future, in terms of total impact
and atmospheric lag mechanisms, so why not wait, because with technology
improvements, washout of near-term emissions, and discounting, later is always
better. He concluded that while the costs of stabilizing at 350 were very high,
stabilizing at 550 were almost zero. You do the math.
Near as I can tell, by that
equation, it will always be better to wait rather than do anything.
Okay, so here we sit, drifting, as Einstein said, toward unparalleled catastrophe. We are rummaging through the glove box and we can't seem to find the manual for this spaceship that tells us what to do when that red light starts flashing. Did the dinosaurs have that problem once before? Will we find it flashing again next time, say a 100 million years from now, when another species gets another chance?
I'm not ready, as that room full of the best and brightest minds our country has benighted seemed to be, to toss in the towel. I believe, as Buckminster Fuller said, that the closing years of this century will be a race between education and annihilation. Tell folks the truth, they'll do the right thing. They have to.
******************************
Recent laws protecting
brazil nut trees spared many of them from being bulldozed as the rainforests
were cleared. For a time, the majestic trees stood out in clearings, silent
witnesses to the loss of forest diversity. And then they began to die.
Brazil nut trees flower only
in November. They are pollinated by a forest bee. For the bees to survive, they
need to gather nectar from a whole series of different trees, each flowering in
turn, and each providing food for the bees in its season. The bees need a
wholesome variety to get through an entire year. If any significant gaps
develop in this variety, the bees leave and the brazil nut trees, as well as
many other species, no longer produce.
The male bees are also
dependent on orchids in the deep forest, which they visit at mating time.
Rubbing against the orchids, they pack the scents on their hind legs and then
fly off to form a lek, a group that attracts females for the mating ritual. If
the orchids do not find suitable conditions for growth, they vanish from the
forest, and with them go the bees, and with the bees, go the trees.
When brazil nuts fall to the
forest floor their outer shells are eaten by large rodents, called agoutis (Dasyprocta
cristata). The agoutis bury the seeds but often forget some of the caches. The agoutis' poor memory has the effect of dispersing seeds to favorable locations for new growth. The survival of the brazil nut trees is as dependent on the agoutis at the forest floor as on the bees in the tree canopy. If conditions are not favorable for any member of the forest community, all parts are endangered.
There are many examples of
interwoven ecosystems. There are plants that are protected by birds, birds that
are protected by hornets, hornets that are protected by trees, trees that are
protected by fungi, fungi that are protected by ants, ants that are protected
by plants. The demise of one plant species may eventually lead to the loss of
up to 30 animal species because of the complex interplay of consequences.
The global ecosystem is an
intricate lace of symbiotic species, and all that inhabit this macro-network
have evolved into a condition of interdependence, whether they recognize it or
not.
Wandering, like Alice,
through the looking glass into a climate meeting in Washington D.C., I'm left
wondering: what part of the stable macro-political-ecosystem are we missing
here? We have the scientists, and they are in pretty good agreement. We have
the government officials and they are somewhat behind the curve--purposefully
obtuse--but, at the highest policy levels, they are paying good people to see
the magnitude of the problem. The captains of industry are largely in denial
and obfuscation, and their money is doing a lot of damage to the clarity of
mind in capitol cities, but this diversion is nothing new, and should not pose
an insurmountable barrier to good policy winning out. So what is it, exactly, that
is missing? Why are good climate policies, like the BTU tax, or investment in
carbon reduction technology, dying like brazil nut trees?
What needs to be in this
picture for us to avert catastrophe? Could it be catastrophe itself? Given the
length of time it takes to change climatological patterning and the far greater
period required to restore the world we knew, that conclusion seems too dire to
adopt. A mere universal eco-spiritual awakening will have to do.
_____________
The correct
answer to the quiz was (b).
Albert
Bates is an attorney, educator and author who lives at The Farm community in
Summertown, Tennessee, where he serves as regional secretary for the Global
Ecovillage Network and publishes a quarterly journal of sustainability, The Design Exchange. Albert is
author of a seminal book on global warming, Climate in Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect and What We
Can Do.