Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

This was what many feared. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, created under the auspices of the United Nations, is about to release its new report on global warming and its impact on climate. The UN is made up of governments with many competing interests. The IPCC is made of of scientists — thousands of them.

There is no question that the IPCC has research indicating that we are headed towards a very difficult, if not dire, future because of global warming. Early leaks seemed to indicate that the report would be especially hard-hitting.

But then there is this headline in this morning’s NY Times: Even before its release, world climate report is criticized as too optimistic.

Could make one weep. Here is the best opportunity the world has had in years for a unified alarm bell about our situation. We should be warned about the worst-case possibililties, or probabilities, if we are honest, in order to scare people enough to take action — meaningful action, not soothing salves. We don’t have time to buy here. The time for action has long past — yet, still, it is not too late.

Many scientists are concerned that, in predicting ocean level rise, the report is leaving out little things like the extent of glacier melt and the melting of inland ice sheets, little things like that.

These scientists say that the melting is outpacing computer models, a very bad sign that all these studies and reports are not keeping up with the reality — and imagine the years it will take for governments now to ’study’ this report, then the negotiations to come up with something less timid and underwhelming than the Kyoto Protocol.

We don’t have that kind of time.

This same day, there is this article in the Times, about the melting of one of the Andes Mountains’ most maginificant glaciers. Read this not just for the impact on this natural beauty and ski industry, but for all the human beings who depend on the glacer for their supply of drinking water. This is happening all through the Andean range.

Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, had this to say:

The melting of Greenland has been accelerating so incredibly rapidly that the IPCC report will already be out of date in predicting sea level rise, which will probably be much worse than is predicted in the IPCC report.

Which means, if we continue working this way, that we will always be behind the pace of the change, always reacting to the next disaster, the next dire study, rather than getting ahead of the crisis and dealing with it forthrightly.

Meanwhile, I see from the NY Times website that the report is now online. The headline is hardhitting — we have condemned ourselves to rapid warming over the next centuries. The hope — that drastic action can keep the worst from happening. You can find the report here.