Glimpse into the apocalypse — and even then, watered down
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Posted on April 6, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological overshoot, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Greenpeace International calls the new report from the 2nd Working Group of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “a glimpse into an apocalyptic future.”
Meanwhile, some scientists are so angry at last-minute deletions and watered-down language from a few governments that they said they would never participate in this process again.
Both seem to be the case. The report rings an alarm bell about global warming and climate change that is so loud that only the darkest and most cynical motivations could keep the world from responding now with a sharp change in our behavior on this planet.
It is also true that negotiators stayed up all night fighting about some of the language on the impacts of climate change that certain governments wanted deleted from the final report.
Guess which three governments raised the most objections?
China, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, nothing more consistent than this — the United States.
From the Washington Post just a couple of hours ago:
Agreement came after an all-night session during which key sections were deleted from the draft and scientists angrily confronted government negotiators who they feared were watering down their findings…
The United States, China and Saudi Arabia raised many of the objections to the phrasing, often seeking to tone down the certainty of some of the more dire predictions.
The US, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter. China, the world’s second biggest greenhouse gas emitter, planning to add 562 of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants to the planet over the next several years. Saudi Arabia, still sitting on huge oil reserves, a kingdom whose economy depends upon our consumption of their oil exports.
What kind of people can seek to find ways to avoid the truth of science that says our world is facing apocalyptic-scale catastrophes because of global warming due to our human burning of fossil fuels and ravaging of forests, peatlands, and more, releasing massive amounts of CO2, for the sake of corporate profit and our consumer lifestyles?
What kind of people are we?
For the US: more severe storms “with human and economic loss, and cultural and social disruptions,” reports the WP. More devastating drought, floods, hurricanes, tornados, “heat waves and wildfires.”
But we get off easy compared to Africa, where in the next 13 years — 13 years — 250 million people will be running out of water. “In some countries, production could fall by half,” this in a world where farmers and agribusiness are turning away from food production to crops to produce fuel to put in our cars.
The BBC reports that the co-chair of the Working Group, Dr. Martin Parry:
…outlined four areas of the world now thought to be the most vulnerable to climate change:
* the arctic, where temperatures are rising fast and ice is melting
* sub-Saharan Africa, where dry areas are forecast to get dryer
* small islands, because of their inherent lack of capacity to adapt
* Asian mega-deltas, where billions of people will be at increased risk of flooding.
Of the science that has led to such certainty, MSNBC reports:
There was little doubt about the science, which was based on 29,000 sets of data, much of it collected in the last five years.
In this unwieldy international process — representatives of 120 governments had to approve each word of the text by consensus — it is probably remarkable that more was not done to water down the findings. MSNBC reports that the arguing went on all night as scientists objected to government representatives that wanted to delete or water down the language.
Several scientists objected to the editing of the final draft by government negotiators but in the end agreed to compromises. However, some scientists vowed never to take part in the process again.
I wait in keen anticipation to hear what these scientists have to say about what was watered down, what was left out.
The report will be delivered to the G-8 meeting in June for deliberation by the richest countries in the world. There are things we could do, things we could do right now, to prevent greater horrors in the future. It means overcoming our adolescent sense of entitlement to these privileged lifestyles we enjoy here (meaning the richest of this society, not the growing number of poor here, too). It means spending some of our wealth on healing what we, more than any other society, have harmed by our industrial and postindustrial way of life. We owe this, at the very least, to the people of sub-Saharan Africa, and drowning island nations, and the Inuit living on the melting, cracking Earth in arctic communities, and the still-displaced and abandoned poor of New Orleans.
Okay, if you want to read the summary of the report, you can visit the IPCC website and download the document. Weekend reading. Something to add to our reflections on this sacred weekend, as we ponder the passion and liberation stories that are the heart of the Christian and Jewish religious traditions. Let’s hope we can find urgency there to expand these stories and reflections to the new realities of our world, these realities that threaten the human being and all living species as never before in our evolutionary history.
Technorati Tags: global warming, climate change, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, moral challenge of climate change
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