http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...l/14306512.htm
Posted on Sun, Apr. 09, 2006
Why we need to worry about global warming
WITH CLIMATE-RELATED CHANGES OCCURING FASTER THAN EXPECTED SCIENTISTS SAY WE HAVE 10 YEARS TO SLASH CARBON FUEL USE - OR ELSE
Ross Gelbspan
In 1995, a panel of the world's leading climate scientists declared that unless humanity cuts its use of coal and oil by 70 percent over the next hundred years, the world will suffer significant disruptions from global warming toward the end of this century.
Just six years later, that same body, the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), declared that warming had ``already affected physical and biological systems'' in many areas of the world. The news that at least some damage was happening faster than predicted was alarming; the United Nations' top environmental official said it ``should sound alarm bells in every national capital.''
Today, all bets are off.
In January, the famed British ecologist James Lovelock declared that we have already passed the ``point of no return.'' Others, including NASA'S James Hansen, one of the world's pre-eminent climate scientists, think we still have about a 10-year grace period in which to make major changes.
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, also sees a 10-year timeline and says dramatic cuts in carbon fuel use must be made ``if humanity is to survive.'' And British climate expert Peter Cox says: ``The scientific agenda has moved from improving predictions to thinking about . . . the chances of something awful happening.''
Although the IPCC no longer says exactly when we have to hit a 70 percent reduction of oil and coal to prevent disaster -- those scientists now say as soon as possible -- it's clearly a lot sooner than the end of the century, as they originally thought. To judge how big a change that would be, you need only consider that the current Kyoto Protocol calls for emissions cuts of a mere 8 percent by 2012, and that applies only to industrial countries.
A 70 percent reduction, in practical terms, means for instance that all next-generation cars worldwide would need to be hybrids, and the generation after that would need to run on fuel cells or use other technology. It also means we would need to virtually abandon coal and eventually gas and oil as fuels to produce electricity.
What's truly alarming -- aside from the totally unexpected speed of climate-related changes -- is the fact that most U.S. government and opinion leaders in the press are just beginning to accept the reality of global warming. Most still think we have far more time to begin to wean the world off oil and coal.
Even environmental groups are unwilling to sound the alarm clearly -- in good part because they work in Washington, where most change is a matter of slow negotiation, but also because they're afraid of being marginalized. It is, after all, hard to tell Americans just how much change is needed when they're only now understanding that change is needed at all.
Why the new urgency? Planetary changes that were supposed to occur toward the end of the century, according to scientific computer models, are actually happening today.
For example, the Greenland ice sheet, one of the largest glaciers on the planet, is melting from above and losing its stability as meltwater from the surface trickles down and lubricates the bedrock on which the ice sheet sits. Should that ice sheet slide into the ocean, it would raise sea levels on the order of 20 feet. The rate of sea level rise has already doubled in the past decade as a result of melting glaciers and the thermal expansion of warming oceans.
In addition, the proportion of severely destructive hurricanes that have reached category 4 and 5 intensity has doubled in the past 30 years, fueled by rising surface water temperatures.
And oceans are becoming acidified from the fallout of our fossil-fuel emissions. The pH level of the world's oceans has changed more in the past 100 years than it did in the previous 10,000 years.
Those troubling signals are made all the more disturbing by the fact that climate change does not necessarily follow a linear, incremental trajectory. As the climate system crosses invisible thresholds, it is capable of large-scale, unpredictable leaps.
``The concern is that there are tipping points out there that could be passed before we're halfway through the century,'' said Tim Lenton, an earth-systems modeler at Britain's University of East Anglia.
And then there is the problem of ``feedback loops,'' which means that small changes caused by warming can trigger other, much larger changes.
For example, the Siberian and Alaskan tundras, which for centuries absorbed carbon dioxide and methane, are now thawing and releasing those gases back into the atmosphere. A rapid release of greenhouse gases from these regions could trigger a spike in warming.
Scientists also recently detected a weakening of the flow of ocean currents in the Atlantic basin because of an infusion of freshwater from melting sea ice and glaciers. At a certain point, they say, the change in salinity and water density could change the direction of ocean currents, leading to much more severe winters in northern Europe and North America.
In the face of these changes, the Bush administration has turned its back on the challenge. The environmental movement seems to have gone into hibernation. And the press remains largely in denial. We are, as the British paper the Independent put it, ``sleepwalking into an apocalypse.''
President Bush has long been antagonistic toward the climate issue -- witness his decision to withdraw from the Kyoto talks in 2001 -- but the government's denial of real trouble has continued despite scientists' growing urgency. At the end of 2004, the United States used its diplomatic leverage to prevent delegates at that December's round of Kyoto talks from formulating action plans to drastically speed up changes to reduce carbon emissions.
Recently, the administration tried to silence NASA's Hansen -- and now requires contacts between many government climate scientists and the press to be monitored by government ``minders.'' And although the president in January called for us to overcome our ``addiction to oil,'' he followed up by promoting minimal auto-efficiency standards for certain light trucks and exempting most SUVs and small trucks from stricter standards altogether.
The mainstream press is doing better than it was a few years ago. At that time, the press consistently cast the issue of global warming as a debate -- thanks to the public-relations experts of big coal and big oil who insisted journalists ``balance'' the findings of the IPCC with pronouncements of a handful of dissident researchers, most of whom were on the payroll of the fossil-fuel industry.
Today at least some press titans such as Time magazine and ABC News are taking note of scientists' new urgency. (Time's recent cover on global warming warned: ``Be worried. Be very worried.'')
Still, most of the media seem reluctant to put the true magnitude of the challenge squarely in front of readers and viewers. (It might help if the media made the connection between global warming and the escalating number of floods, droughts and severe storms that occupy ever-larger portions of news budgets.)
By contrast, European media coverage of climate change has been far less qualified. As a result, Tony Blair has committed Britain to cuts of 60 percent in 50 years. Germany has vowed to cut its emissions 50 percent in the next 50 years. And French President Jacques Chirac recently called on the entire industrial world to cut emissions 75 percent in 45 years.
Many large environmental groups in the United States, meanwhile, still tell members they can help by, among other things, buying compact fluorescent bulbs, carpooling more and keeping tires properly inflated. But unlike many other environmental problems, climate change cannot be solved by lifestyle changes. Efficiencies can cut emissions by up to 30 percent -- not the 70 percent reduction required by nature to keep this Earth hospitable to civilization.
Those environmental groups that do promote more large-scale changes -- for instance, capturing carbon dioxide from power plants and burying it underground -- still fail to acknowledge the limitation of those measures.
What is needed -- yesterday -- is a project to transform the world's energy diet from oil and coal to a mix of wind, solar, tidal power, small-scale hydro and, eventually, clean hydrogen fuels.
There are ways to accomplish that, but they require unprecedented global coordination.
One such plan was presented in my book ``Boiling Point'' after it was refined by a group of energy-company executives, economists and energy-policy specialists who met several years ago at Harvard Medical School. It would cut emissions by the 70 percent required by nature while simultaneously creating millions of jobs around the world.