“This is real, this is real, this is real…”
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Reading the gazillion articles on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on global warming — well, it ain’t cheery weekend reading, is it? How long have these voices from scientists, deep ecologists, nature lovers, and others been trying to tell us exactly what this report now tells in dire terms. We have wasted a lot of time.
“This is real, this is real, this is real…”, said Dr. Richard B. Alley, one of the report’s lead authors (quoted in NYTimes).
Hammer it home: this is real. Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, all you CEO’s of oil and coal companies: this is real.
The scientists wrote that it is “very likely” that hot days, heat waves and heavy precipitation will become more frequent in the years to come, and “likely” that future tropical hurricanes and typhoons will become more intense. Arctic sea ice will disappear “almost entirely” by the end of the century, they said, and snow cover will contract worldwide.
While the summary did not produce any groundbreaking observations — it reflects a massive distillation of the peer-reviewed literature through the middle of 2006 — it represents the definitive international scientific and political consensus on climate science.
And yet, the consensus is not quite complete. Many scientists think the report is not yet dire enough, that certain things were left out, as we wrote yesterday — like the impact of melting glaciers and ice sheets on the rising sea levels. Even a member of Congress seems to understand this. The WP quotes Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), chair of the House Science and Technology Committee, saying that Gordon:
called the report “a unanimous, definitive world statement” on climate change that, if anything, was too conservative. “It’s time to end the debate and act,” Gordon said. “All the naysayers should step aside.”
Oh, we agreee. Yet the Post quoted one of those very naysayers, the guys with big bucks from Exxon Mobil:
At the George C. Marshall Institute, a think tank that receives funding from Exxon Mobil, chief executive William O’Keefe and President Jeff Kueter issued a statement urging “great caution in reading too much” into the report until the panel releases its detailed scientific documentation a few months from now.
“Claims being made that a climate catastrophe later this century is more certain are unjustified,” they said, adding that “the underlying state of knowledge does not justify scare tactics or provide sufficient support for proposals . . . to suppress energy use and impose large economic burdens on the U.S. economy.”
Oh yes, let’s wait a little longer. Let’s wait until the entire 1,600 pages of the IPCC report comes out, and then wait longer, months, years, to read through it, understand the implications, craft policies through tedious stretched-out negotiations — while the world melts, oceans rise, storms and droughts ravage our lands (btw, don’t move to Florida), etc., etc.
Let’s wait until we figure out the economic repercussions of moving out of a fossil-fuel-based way of life, until Exxon Mobil and the like to figure out how to protect their profit margins. Let’s wait until we are having that discussion in a world with hundreds of millions of environmental refugees, a world without polar bears or penguins, without pine forests in the Rocky Mountains, let’s wait until the ocean waters lap at the Wall Street Stock Exchange.
Friends, things are pretty bad already. The time to act is now, and as the report says, there are things we can do. We can’t stop the warming now; it is too late for that. But how much heat is produced, how bad it gets in the next couple of generations — that is up to us.
Last year, Dr. James Hansen, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whom I often quote here, said that we have ten years (he is also, by the way, one of the scientists the Bush administration has tried to silence). Al Gore repeats this in his film, An Inconvenient Truth and on the road in all his talks.
So, that’s now 9 years and counting. Let’s light a fire under our legislators. Let’s get ourselves used to the idea that our lives are about to change abruptly. Let’s not fear that. Let’s greet this as the adventure of our times.
Photo credits:
Polar bears: Dan Crosbie/Canadian Ice Service
Ocean encroaches on island nation of Tuvalu: Tuvaluislands.com
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