It's Much Too Late to Sweat Global Warming: Time to prepare for inevitable effec

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It's Much Too Late to Sweat Global Warming

By Mark Hertsgaard

The San Francisco Chronicle

 

Sunday 13 February 2005

 

Time to prepare for inevitable effects of our ill-fated future.

 

At the core of the global warming dilemma is a fact neither side

of the debate likes to talk about: It is already too late to prevent

global warming and the climate change it sets off.

 

Environmentalists won't say this for fear of sounding alarmist or

defeatist. Politicians won't say it because then they'd have to do

something about it. The world's top climate scientists have been

sending this message, however, with increasing urgency for many years.

 

Since 1988, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change, comprised of more than 2,000 scientific and technical experts

from around the world, has conducted the most extensive peer-reviewed

scientific inquiry in history.

 

In its 2001 report, the panel said that human-caused global

warming had already begun, and much sooner than expected. What's more,

the problem is bound to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before it gets

better.

 

Last month, the climate change panel's chairman, Rajendra

Pachauri, upped the ante. Although Pachauri was installed after the

Bush administration forced out his predecessor, Robert Watson, for

pushing too hard for action, the accumulation of evidence led Pachauri

to embrace apocalyptic language: " We are risking the ability of the

human race to survive, " he said.

 

Until now, most public discussion about global warming has focused

on how to prevent it - for example, by implementing the Kyoto

Protocol, which comes into force internationally (but without U.S.

participation) on Wednesday. But prevention is no longer a sufficient

option. No matter how many " green " cars and solar panels Kyoto

eventually calls into existence, the hard fact is that a certain

amount of global warming is inevitable.

 

The world community therefore must make a strategic shift. It must

expand its response to global warming to emphasize both long-term and

short-term protection. Rising sea levels and more weather-related

disasters will be a fact of life on this planet for decades to come,

and we have to get ready for them.

 

Among the steps needed to defend ourselves is quick action to

fortify emergency response capabilities worldwide, to shield or

relocate vulnerable coastal communities and to prepare for increased

migration flows by environmental refugees.

 

We must also play offense. We must retroactively shrink the amount

of warming facing us by redoubling efforts to remove existing

greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and sequester them where they are

no longer dangerous. One way is to plant trees, which absorb carbon

dioxide via photosynthesis.

 

Researchers are exploring many other methods as well, some of them

supported by the Bush administration. And Norway is burying carbon

dioxide in abandoned oil wells beneath the North Sea.

 

The problem with the Kyoto Protocol is not that the 5 percent

greenhouse gas emission reductions it mandates don't go far enough,

though they don't. (The climate change panel urges 50 to 70 percent

reductions.)

 

The problem is that Kyoto governs only future emissions. No matter

how well the protocol works, it will have no effect on past emissions,

which are what have made global warming unavoidable.

 

Contrary to the impression given by some news reports, global

warming is not like a light switch that can be turned off if we simply

stop burning so much oil, coal and gas.

 

There is a lag effect of about 50 to 100 years. That's how long

carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, remains in the atmosphere

after it is emitted from auto tailpipes, home furnaces and industrial

smokestacks.

 

So even if humanity stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the

planet would continue warming for decades.

 

So far, the greenhouse gases released during two-plus centuries of

industrialization have increased global temperatures by about 1 degree

Fahrenheit and raised sea levels by 4 to 7 inches.

 

They have also given rise to the larger phenomenon of climate

change. The climate change panel scientists predict that because of

global warming, the future will bring more and deadlier weather of all

kinds - more hurricanes, tornadoes, downpours, heat waves, droughts

and blizzards - and all that comes in their aftermath: flooding,

landslides, power outages, crop failures, property damage, disease,

hunger, poverty and loss of life.

 

In California, torrential rains induced a mudslide on Jan. 11 that

killed 10 people, buried children alive and crushed dozens of houses.

In 2003, a record summer heat wave killed 35,000 people, most of them

elderly, in Western Europe. And this is just the beginning.

 

Scientists are careful to say that no single weather event can be

definitively linked to global warming, but the trend is unmistakable

to the insurance companies that end up paying the bill.

 

" Man-made climate change will bring us increasingly extreme

natural events and, consequently, increasingly large catastrophe

losses, " an official of Munich Re, the world's large reinsurance

company, said recently. Swiss Re expects losses to reach $150 billion

a year within this decade.

 

British Prime Minister Tony Blair regards climate change as " the

single biggest long-term problem " of any kind facing his country. His

government's top scientist, Sir David King, goes further, calling

climate change " the biggest danger humanity has faced in 5,000 years

of civilization. "

 

Although the Bush White House continues to downplay the urgency of

global warming, some parts of the Bush administration have recognized

the gravity of the situation. A report released last year by the

Pentagon's Office of Net Assessments said that by 2020, climate change

could unleash a series of interlocking catastrophes including

mega-droughts, mass starvation and even nuclear war as countries like

China and India battle over river valleys and other sources of scarce

food and water.

 

All of this underlines the urgency of revising the world's

response to climate change. To be sure, it remains essential to reduce

greenhouse gas emissions by strengthening the Kyoto Protocol and

augmenting it with other measures. Otherwise, the amount of warming

that civilization eventually will have to endure will prove too great

to survive.

 

In the meantime, it is imperative to prepare against the climate

change already on its way.

 

The need for such a two-track strategy of prevention and

protection is gaining acceptance from most of the world's governments.

In Britain, the Department of the Environment promises to publish its

strategy for adapting to global warming by the end of 2005.

 

At the most recent international meeting on global warming, held

in Buenos Aires in December, a majority of the delegates supported the

establishment of a fund to aid countries already suffering from the

early effects of global warming.

 

A leading candidate for such aid is Tuvalu. A Pacific atoll whose

highest point is 12 feet above sea level, Tuvalu was largely submerged

last year by 10- foot seasonal high tides. But the United States

opposed the adaptation assistance, arguing that there is no " certainty

what constitutes a dangerous level of warming... "

 

Preparing to live through the global climate change bearing down

on our civilization will be an enormous undertaking. It will require

immense financial resources, technical expertise and organizational

skill. But perhaps what's needed most of all, especially in the United

States, is fresh thinking and political leadership - an acceptance

that climate change is inescapable and requires immediate

counter-measures.

 

The unspeakable death and destruction wrought by the Indian Ocean

tsunami showed what can happen when people are unprepared for

disaster, but there is no reason global warming should take us by

surprise.

 

Our civilization's early warning system - the scientists of the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - have been telling us for

years that great danger is approaching. The question is, will we act

quickly and decisively enough to protect ourselves against the coming

storm? Or will we simply stand and face our fate naked, proud and

unafraid?

 

Mark Hertsgaard is the author most recently of " The Eagle's

Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World; " and " Earth

Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our Environmental Future. "

 

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