http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4014
Foreign Policy In Focus |
The Inconvenient Truth, Part II
Tom Athanasiou | February 21, 2007
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
You've probably seen the movie; you've certainly heard about it. So
you already know the first part of the inconvenient truth: we're in
deep trouble. And one good thing about 2006 is that this ceased to be
a public secret. We not only know that the drought is spreading, the
ice melting, the waters beginning to rise, but we also know that we
know. And this changes everything.
The science is in; the "skeptics" aren't what they used to be.
They're still around, of course, but their ranks have thinned, and
their funders are feeling the heat. They've been reduced to a merely
tactical danger. They're flaks, and everyone knows it. Still, this
good news comes with bad-their job was to stall, and they did it
well. And it's now late in the game.
Don't just take my word for it. In 2006, scientists schooled in the
art of careful and measured conclusion chose instead to speak
frankly. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space
Studies and perhaps our single most respected climate scientist,
spoke for many of his colleagues when he said that we're "near a
tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built in
momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with
staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this
planet."1
It's time, past time really, for at least some of us to go beyond
warning to planning, to start talking seriously about a global crash
program to stabilize the climate. Gore knows this, but he's a
politician and must move deliberately. He is moving, though, and has
already passed beyond his film's gentle implication (most visible in
the upbeat visual call to action that ran under the closing credits)
that personal virtue will suffice. During a September 2006 speech at
the New York University Law School (a speech one wag called "the lost
reel") he made some necessary, and dangerous, connections:
"In rising to meet this challenge, we too will find self-renewal and
transcendence and a new capacity for vision to see other crises in
our time that cry out for solutions: 20 million HIV/AIDS orphans in
Africa alone, civil wars fought by children, genocides and famines,
the rape and pillage of our oceans and forests, an extinction crisis
that threatens the web of life, and tens of millions of our fellow
humans dying every year from easily preventable diseases. And, by
rising to meet the climate crisis, we will find the vision and moral
authority to see them not as political problems but as moral
imperatives."
The situation, alas, is worse than either Gore's movie or his speech
implies. So, this being a new year, let's move on a bit, into
territories through which no politician can guide us. And let's be a
bit more explicit about just what a real crash program to stabilize
the climate would actually imply.
Two Degrees of Separation
What happens if the temperature-or, more precisely, the average
global surface warming since pre-industrial times-rises past 2°C?
Even though we're not yet at the edge of the 2°C line, the Earth's
ice sheets are already becoming unstable. The Greenland ice sheet, in
particular, appears to be at significant risk of collapse at a
warming of less than 2°C, and this would eventually mean about seven
meters of sea-level rise.2 Since only three meters would put
virtually all coastal cities and their hundreds of millions of people
at great hazard, and given that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is also
at eventual risk, the ice situation is already, by any reasonable
standard, "dangerous."3
With 2°C of warming, killer droughts will settle in to stay. There
will be massive vegetation changes, agricultural disruptions, and
extreme weather including superstorms. Many disease-bearing pests
will have radically expanded ranges that put, for example, several
hundred million more people at risk of malaria. Arctic species such
as the polar bear will face extinction, along with 15-40% of other
terrestrial creatures. There will be horrifying refugee crises. The
key points, at least from the point of view of human suffering and
social instability, are the ice-melt, the widespread agricultural
disruption, and the refugees. Also crucial are the billions of
people, many of them in the mega-cities of the South, threatened by
permanent water stress. There will be more, and more terrible, water
wars, many of which are essentially civil wars.4
Most terrifying of all, 2°C of warming, particularly if sustained or
overshot, will likely trigger non-linear changes that would induce
further warming, and further changes, and further warming-"positive
feedbacks" in the jargon-until the nightmare scenario imagined by
James Lovelock (whom I am very sorry to report is not a crank)
finally comes to pass.
