Today’s fright: the news just gets scarier and scarier
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Posted on October 31, 2006
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Ecology of war and peace, Renewable fuels
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
It’s Halloween, but who needs the extra fright these days? We have plenty to frighten us, and I, for one, am unnerved by what’s in the print media right now. As recently as a year ago, heck, even a few months ago, we could complain that the mainstream media, with a few notable exceptions, was ignoring the biggest news story of our time — global warming/climate change combined with the looming energy crunch — about to hit us in the span of our own life times — and I don’t just mean the lifetime of the young.
But as the media begins to figure out the extent of the trouble we are in, the onus begins to fall more heavily on policy-makers who would rather hold on to power and profits than act to save life on this Earth.
So, let me just say that the NY Times has made for sobering reading in the past two days, and for those of you who don’t look at it daily, let me give you a few article links, then comment on what’s going on.
From yesterday, this story, which also received quite a bit of coverage elsewhere: British government report calls for broad effort on climate issues, and this one which appeared on the front page above the fold: Budgets falling in race to fight global warming, yet another article on the immorally and woefully inadequate response on the part of the Bush administration to the biggest threat to humanity and the planet. Then today, Britain warns of high costs of global warming, another clarion call from our neighbors across the ocean; and from Nicholas Kristof, Scandal below the surface.
As I have done with Thomas Friedman’s stuff, because the Times makes you pay to view the article or have a subscription, I have pasted it in at the end of this post.
So, the articles out of Britain pertain to a new report commissioned by the government, coordinated by economist Sir Nicholas Stern, and released on Monday, that warns the world of catastrophic consequences if we do not act now to stop global warming. Besides the usual list of un/natural disasters (floods, apocalytpic drought, mass extinctions and die-offs, the spread of diseases, hundreds of millions of environmental refugees) is the instability it will cause in societies around the world leading to more chaos and violence.
For a glance at the report’s conclusions, go here.
Some experts say this study may still not be ’scary enough.’
Well, if you use these links to the BBC, you will find much more information, including a link to a pdf file of the report and even videos. The BBC remains way ahead of the US media on this crisis.
I also want to give you links to a couple of commentaries from The Guardian in London which are quite good, one by George Monbiot, who has been writing about this stuff for a long time. His proposals for policy changes in Britain should spark similar specific proposals for us here in the US — not proposals, folks, rather demands. And here’s another that sums up Stern’s recommendations for ‘putting a price on carbon,’ and some practical sugggestions for all of us.
This is tough stuff, friends, and we need to get up our courage to deal with this. It is going to mean big changes in our lives and a whole lot of national and international cooperation. It will require a very different political regimen from the one we have, a new political culture. This is the biggest challenge of our generation and we need to muster together the political movement to address it — for our children and their children’s children
Sorry for the length of this. More tomorrow.
The Kristof Column
Op-Ed Columnist
Scandal Below the Surface
The crucial issue this year is Iraq, and the most important issue this decade may be the risk that nuclear proliferation results in the incineration of Wall Street by terrorists. Both topics are spurring useful debate this campaign season.
But one of the more important issues this century is generating no serious discussion on the campaign trail. And, in place of a drumroll, let’s look at the chemistry experiment in which we’re all taking part.
If you think of the earth’s surface as a great beaker, then it’s filled mostly with ocean water. It is slightly alkaline, and that’s what creates a hospitable home for fish, coral reefs and plankton — and indirectly, higher up the food chain, for us.
But scientists have discovered that the carbon dioxide we’re spewing into the air doesn’t just heat up the atmosphere and lead to rising seas. Much of that carbon is absorbed by the oceans, and there it produces carbonic acid — the same stuff found in soda pop.
That makes oceans a bit more acidic, impairing the ability of certain shellfish to produce shells, which, like coral reefs, are made of calcium carbonate. A recent article in Scientific American explained the indignity of being a dissolving mollusk in an acidic ocean: “Drop a piece of chalk (calcium carbonate) into a glass of vinegar (a mild acid) if you need a demonstration of the general worry: the chalk will begin dissolving immediately.”
The more acidic waters may spell the end, at least in higher latitudes, of some of the tiniest variations of shellfish — certain plankton and tiny snails called pteropods. This would disrupt the food chain, possibly killing off many whales and fish, and rippling up all the way to humans.
We stand, so to speak, on the shoulders of plankton.
“There have been a couple of very big events in geological history where the carbon cycle changed dramatically,” said Scott Doney, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. One was an abrupt warming that took place 55 million years ago in conjunction with acidification of the oceans and mass extinctions. Most scientists don’t believe we’re headed toward a man-made variant on that episode — not yet, at any rate. But many worry that we’re hurtling into unknown dangers.
“Whether in 20 years or 100 years, I think marine ecosystems are going to be dramatically different by the end of this century, and that’ll lead to extinction events,” Mr. Doney added.
“This is the only habitable planet we have,” he said. “The damage we do is going to be felt by all the generations to come.”
So that should be one of the great political issues for this century — the vandalism we’re committing to our planet because of our refusal to curb greenhouse gases. Yet the subject is barely debated in this campaign.
Changes in ocean chemistry are only one among many damaging consequences of carbon emissions. Evidence is also growing about the more familiar dangers: melting glaciers, changing rainfall patterns, rising seas and more powerful hurricanes.
Last year, the World Health Organization released a study indicating that climate change results in an extra 150,000 deaths and five million sicknesses each year, by causing the spread of malaria, diarrhea, malnutrition and other ailments.
A report prepared for the British government and published yesterday, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, warned that inaction “could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century.”
If emissions are not curbed, climate change will cut 5 percent to 20 percent of global G.D.P. each year, declared the mammoth report. “In contrast,” it said, “the costs of action — reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change — can be limited to around 1 percent of global G.D.P. each year.” Some analysts put the costs of action higher, but most agree that it makes sense to invest far more in alternative energy sources, both to wean ourselves of oil and to reduce the strain on our planet.
We know what is needed: a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, a post-Kyoto accord on emissions cutbacks, and major research on alternative energy sources. But as The Times’s Andrew Revkin noted yesterday, spending on energy research and development has fallen by more than half, after inflation, since 1979.
Melting glaciers and corroding pteropods aren’t as sensational as a Congressional page scandal, or as urgent as the Iraq war. But they are just as scandalous. We have no responsibility greater than as stewards of our planet, and we’re blowing it.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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