“Threshold changes in ecosystems all over the globe…”
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Posted on April 5, 2007
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
“It’s really entering a new world about which we know very little.”
I mentioned the other day that the second working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is about to issue its new report, this time on the impacts of climate change on different sections of our planet. Final drafts show that the report, to be released tomorrow, will be sobering, to say the least.
The Washington Post found this to be worthy of front page coverage today, and here is the link to their article, based on a ‘near-final’ draft.
The quote above comes from Robert Correll of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment in Washington DC. He points out that what we are dealing with is something we human beings have not experienced before.
In other worlds, we have a problem.
What the report will indicate is that climate change is not a future fear but happening right now. Already, habitats are being effected. The studies on which the IPCC report is based showed that real-world changes matched those predicted in computer models.
Reports the Post:
That led [the scientists] to find ‘with high confidence’ that the human-caused ‘component of warming over the last three decades has had a discernible influence on many physical and biological systems.’
Some of the trends that may have a familiar ring for you are things like drier regions becoming much drier (the US southwest, for instance) and an increase in intensity of rainfall, causing more flooding, even as warming will bring about more rapid evaporation and melting of glaciers, which means diminishing water supplies.
‘…water volumes stored in glaciers and snow cover are very likely to decline,’ which will cut water supplies in parts of the globe ‘where more than one sixth of the population currently live.’
For a more hard-hitting article on the IPCC report, click here for the BBC’s article today. They write that adaptation will not be enough to stave off disaster, and that the poorest societies will be the least able to adapt in any case. Like it or not, we must reduce carbon emissions, we must do so drastically and rapidly.
They also make note of the growing international hostility towards the Bush administration which refuses to take meaningful action to curb US greenhouse gas emissions. With 4% of global population, the US still emits more than a quarter of CO2, the main culprit in human-caused global warming. We just also happen to be the biggest contributer to the crisis we all face — all of humanity, all living species, all creatures great and small.
Thomas E. Lovejoy, one of our most noted climate scientists and president of the Heinz Center, said this of the IPCC working group report, as quoted in the Wash. Post:
It amounts to ‘a sad confirmation of that I have been following for 20 years, namely that nature is very sensitive to climate change, more so than anything else, and that we are seeing responses — including threshold changes in ecosystems — in the living world all over the globe.’
The is scary business. We already don’t like being told we need to cut back drastically on energy use, but this becomes an even bigger moral issue when we see what continued warming of the Earth’s atmosphere will mean for 1-2 billion people.
Which again leaves us with this question of how to live ethically and appropriately on this planet. How we answer that will determine whether or not the name of this project is warranted.
I have yet to hear the clarion call from our cultural, religious, educational, and other leaders that can truly rouse us, awaken us from our adolescent trance of consumerism, and even upset and anger us by making elements of our daily lives that we take for granted subject now to grave matters of conscience. Where is the moral strength to defy the logic of capitalist economic growth, concentration of wealth, and exploitation of the Earth for human purposes adequate to the crisis we are facing?
[To read Thomas Lovejoy’s testimony on climate change before the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Public Works, go here.]
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