Is global warming a human rights violation?

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Posted on December 19, 2006
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

This question will take on increasing importance as the impacts of global warming manifest in ever starker fashion now and in coming generations.  If global warming, caused in large measure by the industrial and post-industrial societies, endangers and even destroys cultures that are not responsible for the warming, are the human and community rights of those societies being violated?

Particularly now, when we know the global warming/climate change science is being verified over and over again.  From this point on, we cannot argue innocence in our defense.

The Inuit Circumpolar Conference took this question to the Organization of Americans States’ (OAS) Inter-American Committee on Human Rights.  In a petition filed a year ago, the indigenous cultures of the Canadian Arctic asked the court to find the US responsible for the destruction to their way of life because of our greenhouse gas emissions.  They were seeking some form of relief.

This is what they were asking for:

The petition urges the commission to recommend that the United States adopt mandatory limits to its emissions of greenhouse gases and co-operate with the community of nations to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” the objective of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. As well, the petition requests the Commission declare that the United States of America has an obligation to work with Inuit to develop a plan to help Inuit adapt to unavoidable impacts of climate change, and to take into account the impact of its emissions on the Arctic and Inuit before approving all major government actions.

Last week, the court rejected their petition.  The problem, according to the judges, is that there was not enough evidence of harm.

Okay, a couple days later, I arrive in Milwaukee and find this article on the front page of the Sentinel-Journal’s Pulse section.  For some time now, climate scientists have been saying that clouds may be key to understanding how and why global warming is occurring, especially at the extreme rates seen in the Arctic where the world is literally melting.  The Inuit have been observing this for a long time, and fearing for their future.

As this article explains, scientists have been surprised to discover that droplets in the clouds over the Arctic have a high rate of liquid water, not just ice.  Since liquid water absorbs more heat from the sun, while ice reflects it back out and away from the Earth, they believe they have found one of the keys to the rapid warming.

…the ice-to-water ratios in clouds may be very important in controlling the Arctic surface temperature and how it melts,” said one of the scientists.

For the Inuit, this means shorter winters, which means a shorter hunting season, which means economic losses, as well as nutritional losses as they are forced to buy more prepared foods in grocery stores.  It also means a profound threat to their culture.

But, hey, there’s no evidence of harm, right?

Scientists don’t seem to think there is any doubt.  While they acknowledge that there are cycles to warming and cooling of the Earth’s atmosphere, what is happening now, the sudden change, is not how those cycles occur in Nature.  According to one of the researchers, the Earth does, in effect, breathe in and out, taking carbon dioxide into vegetation, storing it in oceans and soils, then spewing it back out.

But this usually occurs over hundreds of thousands of years, not decades.

I don’t usually quote a linked article at length, but for those who don’t click to it, here’s what they say, this from Russ Schnell, of the NOAA’s Observatory and Global Network Operations:

All the carbon dioxide in the coal and oil was once in the air.  The plants took it and it went into the oceans or into the ground — and now we’re taking it back out…

The cycle is the same today, only you’re taking something that took 100,000 years and doing it in 100 years.  There’s a point where animals can’t change fast enough, there’s a point where plants can’t change fast enough, so they’ll either compete it out or go extinct.

Animals — remember, that would also be, well, us.

Sounds to me like the Inuit have a grievance, evidence of harm, don’t you think?

And it also seems to me that one of the things we humans are going to have to do in order to foster ecological hope is to take a good look at global governance and whether or not we have the necessary institutions to deal with the impacts of global warming and climate change and, if we do, to make them work, and if we don’t, create the ones that will.

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