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How
Hot Is Too Hot? by
Bob Herbert One of the more startling stories in The Times recently was Timothy Egan's article on the climate in Alaska, where the average temperature has risen seven degrees in the last 30 years and mosquitoes have shown up in normally frigid Barrow, the northernmost town in North America. Large portions of Alaska are melting and other strange things are happening. Just a few hours' drive from Anchorage, a four-million-acre spruce forest has been killed by beetles, a development that is both astonishing and depressing. It is believed to be the largest loss of trees to insects ever recorded in North America. "Government scientists," wrote Mr. Egan, "tied the event to rising temperatures, which allow the beetles to reproduce at twice their normal rate." Meanwhile, enormous wildfires have been raging in bone-dry regions of the West and Southwest. Fires whipped by high winds in the mountains of eastern Arizona have driven thousands of residents from their homes. One local official, Jim Paxon, said: "The forest is burning like you're pouring gasoline on it. And the wind is like taking a blow torch to it." In Colorado, which is enduring its worst drought in decades, residents have been trying to cope with at least five major fires, including the so-called Hayman fire, the largest in the state's history. Investigators believe it was deliberately set by a U.S. Forest Service worker. The long drought and continuing hot weather provided the conditions that enabled this apparent act of arson to explode into an unprecedented conflagration. Big fires are becoming the rule. By late last week authorities reported that in the first six months of this year, nearly two million acres have burned or are currently burning in the United States, which is almost twice the average of the last 10 years. Strange, indeed. Mosquitoes in northernmost Alaska. Much of the West and Southwest ablaze. Extended droughts. Extreme heat waves. Can you say global warming? The year 2001 was, globally, the second hottest on record. The hottest was 1998. Now imagine that just a few more years go by and the world becomes hotter still, which will almost certainly be the case. What then? Do you think, maybe, we should be paying more attention to this? What is missing in most conversations in the U.S. about global warming is a sense of urgency. A Bush administration report earlier this month acknowledged that human activity - the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere - was the primary cause of the recent warming of the planet, and that the warming will result in some extremely serious consequences in the U.S. President Bush (who has distanced himself from his own administration's report) wants to rely mostly on voluntary - not mandatory - efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Under the president's strategy, it's estimated that emissions will actually increase over the next decade. We're speeding toward a wall and the president is not only refusing to step on the brake, he's accelerating. Ten years is too long to wait to do something real about this problem. Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton who is an expert on climate change, has studied the imminent threat that planetary warming poses to the world's coral reefs. These are ecosystems so abundant in animal and plant life that they are sometimes called the rain forests of the oceans. Dr. Oppenheimer noted that one of the essential questions of the global warming debate is, "How warm is too warm?" When you consider that the increased warming is already threatening to decimate the world's coral reefs, and that we're already seeing the melting of the tundra in Alaska, and that alpine ecosystems are already being squeezed off the tops of mountains, it's not too difficult to reach the conclusion that "too warm," in Dr. Oppenheimer's words, "isn't awfully far from where we already are." Closing our eyes and pumping another decade's worth of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at the current very dangerous rate would not seem to be a very bright idea. The gases remain in the atmosphere for centuries, and in some cases millenniums, which means the damage cannot quickly be undone. What a miserable legacy for this generation to leave to its children and grandchildren. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/24/opinion/24HERB.html The
Truth On Warming by
Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation The journalist I.F. Stone used to joke that the government issues so much information every day, it can't help but let the truth slip out every once in a while. The Bush Administration's recent report on global warming is a classic example. Though far from perfect, it contains some crucial but awkward truths that neither George W. Bush nor his environmentalist critics want to confront. Which may explain why the Administration has sought to bury the report, while critics have misrepresented its most ominous conclusion. U.S. Climate Action Report 2002 made headlines because it contradicted so much of what the Administration has said about global warming. Not only is global warming real, according to the report, but its consequences--heat waves, water shortages, rising sea levels, loss of beaches and marshes, more frequent and violent weather--will be punishing for Americans. The report's biggest surprise was its admission that human activities, especially the burning of oil and other fossil fuels, are the primary cause of climate change. Of course, the rest of the world has known since 1995 that human actions have "a discernible impact" on the global climate, to quote a landmark report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the White House has resisted this conclusion. After all, if burning fossil fuels is to blame for global warming, it makes sense to burn less of them. To a lifelong oilman like Bush, who continues to rely on his former industry colleagues for campaign contributions as well as senior staff, such a view is nothing less than heresy. No wonder, then, that Bush and his high command have virtually repudiated the report. Although their staffs helped write it, both EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham claimed they were unaware of the report until the New York Times disclosed its existence on June 3. Bush himself dismissed it as a mere product of "the bureaucracy," that oft-vilified boogeyman of right-wing ideology. But he could equally have blamed his own father. The only reason U.S. Climate Action Report 2002 was compiled in the first place is that George Bush the First signed a global warming treaty at the 1992 Earth Summit that obligates the United States to periodically furnish such reports to the UN (one more reason, it seems, to despise treaties). But somebody in the Administration must have seen trouble coming, because the report could not have been released with less fanfare: It was simply posted on the EPA's website, three unguided links in from the homepage. If you weren't looking for it, you'd never find it. The Administration has been hammered for issuing a report that on one hand admits that global warming threatens catastrophe but on the other maintains there is no need to reduce consumption of fossil fuels. The report squares this circle by arguing that global warming has now become inevitable, so we should focus less on preventing it than on adapting to it. To deal with water scarcity, for example, the report advocates building more dams and raising the price of water to encourage conservation. Critics see such recommendations as proof that the Administration is doing nothing about global warming. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. The worst thing about the new global warming report is that it is absolutely correct about a fundamental but often unmentioned aspect of the problem: the lag effect. Most greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere for approximately 100 years. The upshot of this undeniable chemical fact is that no matter what remedial steps are taken today, humanity is doomed to experience however much global warming the past 100 years of human activities will generate. That does not mean we should make matters worse by continuing to burn fossil fuels, as Bush foolishly urges; our children and grandchildren deserve better than that. It does mean, however, that we as a civilization must not only shift to green energy sources immediately but also begin planning how we will adapt to a world that is bound to be a hotter, drier, more disaster-punctuated place in the twenty-first century. Many environmentalists know it is too late to prevent global warming; the best we can do is minimize its scope. They don't like to admit this truth, because they fear it will discourage people from making, and demanding, the personal and institutional changes needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is that risk. But a truth does not disappear simply because it is inconvenient. Besides, a green energy future would mean more, not less, economic well-being for most Americans, while also increasing our chances of avoiding the most extreme global warming scenarios. Sometimes the truth hurts. But avoiding it will hurt even more. Mark Hertsgaard is the author, most recently, of Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future (Broadway). His new book, The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World, will be published in October by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Source:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020708&s=hertsgaard
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