George Will has a column below discussing global warming and the fact that since the scientists were wrong in 1976 --- they could very well be wrong in 2006.
This assumes, of course, that our science and technology has not improved much over the past 30 years.
It also ignores the fact that some of the information while inexact regarding temperature --- is exact regarding the rising of the ocean.
In 1976, we also did not have hypotheses regarding the effect of global warming/cooling on the intensity of storms...
Combating "warming" is still up for debate
By George Will
http://www.townhall.com/print/print_story..../02/192190.html
Apr 2, 2006
WASHINGTON -- So, "the debate is over.'' Time magazine says so. Last week's cover story exhorted readers to "Be Worried. Be Very Worried,'' and ABC News concurred in several stories. So did Montana's governor, speaking on ABC. And there was polling about global warming, gathered by Time and ABC in collaboration.
Eighty-five percent of Americans say warming is probably happening and 62 percent say it threatens them personally. The National Academy of Sciences says the rise in the earth's surface temperature has been about one degree Fahrenheit in the last century. Did 85 percent of Americans notice? Of course not. They got their anxiety from journalism calculated to produce it. Never mind that one degree might be the margin of error when measuring the planet's temperature. To take a person's temperature, you put a thermometer in an orifice, or under an arm. Taking the temperature of our churning planet, with its tectonic plates sliding around over a molten core, involves limited precision.
Why have Americans been dilatory about becoming as worried -- as very worried -- as Time and ABC think proper? An article on ABC's Web site wonders ominously, "Was Confusion Over Global Warming a Con Job?'' It suggests there has been a misinformation campaign implying that scientists might not be unanimous, a campaign by -- how did you guess? -- big oil. And the coal industry. But speaking of coal ...
Recently, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer flew with ABC's George Stephanopoulos over Glacier National Park's receding glaciers. But Schweitzer offered hope: Everyone, buy Montana coal. New technologies can, he said, burn it while removing carbon causes of global warming.
Stephanopoulos noted that such technologies are at least four years away and "all the scientists'' say something must be done "right now.'' Schweitzer, quickly recovering from hopefulness and returning to the "be worried, be very worried'' message, said "it's even more critical than that'' because China and India are going to "put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with conventional coal-fired generators than all of the rest of the planet has during the last 150 years.''
That is one reason why the Clinton administration never submitted the Kyoto accord on global warming for Senate ratification. In 1997, the Senate voted 95-0 that the accord would disproportionately burden America while being too permissive toward major polluters that are America's trade competitors.
While worrying about Montana's receding glaciers, Schweitzer, who is 50, should also worry about the fact that when he was 20 he was told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling:
Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.''
Science Digest (February 1973) reported that "the world's climatologists are agreed'' that we must "prepare for the next ice age.''
The Christian Science Monitor ("Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster than Even Experts Expect,'' Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers "have begun to advance,'' "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter'' and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool.''
Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World,'' April 28, 1975) that meteorologists "are almost unanimous'' that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that The New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said "may mark the return to another ice age.''
The Times (May 21, 1975) also said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable'' now that it is "well established'' that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950.''
In fact, the earth is always experiencing either warming or cooling. But suppose the scientists and their journalistic conduits, who today say they were so spectacularly wrong so recently, are now correct. Suppose the earth is warming and suppose the warming is caused by human activity. Are we sure there will be proportionate benefits from whatever climate change can be purchased at the cost of slowing economic growth and spending trillions? Are we sure the consequences of climate change -- remember, a thick sheet of ice once covered the Middle West -- must be bad?
Or has the science-journalism complex decided that debate about these questions, too, is "over''?
About the mystery that vexes ABC -- Why have Americans been slow to get in lock step concerning global warming? -- perhaps the "problem'' is not big oil or big coal, both of which have discovered there is big money to be made from tax breaks and other subsidies justified in the name of combating carbon. Perhaps the problem is big crusading journalism.
George F. Will is a 1976 Pulitzer Prize winner, whose columns are syndicated in more than 400 magazines and newspapers worldwide.
Full Version: Global Warming and Conservative Hypocrisy
Common Ground Common Sense > Issues that Affect Our Lives > Energy Independence, Environment, Science and Technology > Energy, Environment, Science and Technology Issues Archive
Apparently Will is drinking the same kool-aid that Bush and his cronies have been...that its all just a fantasy.
Well, unfortunately the weather and georgaphy of our planet are not the same fantasy that the Bushies seem to believe that geopolitics is...in which you can make your own reality...i.e. we are winning in Iraq...
Polar Ice Caps Are Melting Faster Than Ever... More And More Land Is Being Devastated By Drought... Rising Waters Are Drowning Low-Lying Communities... By Any Measure, Earth Is At ... The Tipping Point
The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame. Why the crisis hit so soon--and what we can do about it
By JEFFREY KLUGER
http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0...1176980,00.html
Apr. 3, 2006
No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry--a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180 m.p.h.--exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast--when the emergency becomes commonplace--something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.
The image of Earth as organism--famously dubbed Gaia by environmentalist James Lovelock-- has probably been overworked, but that's not to say the planet can't behave like a living thing, and these days, it's a living thing fighting a fever. From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us. Scientists have been calling this shot for decades. This is precisely what they have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows in from the sun and raising global temperatures.
Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it. If there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.
But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Nature, it seems, has finally got a bellyful of us.
"Things are happening a lot faster than anyone predicted," says Bill Chameides, chief scientist for the advocacy group Environmental Defense and a former professor of atmospheric chemistry. "The last 12 months have been alarming." Adds Ruth Curry of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts: "The ripple through the scientific community is palpable."
And it's not just scientists who are taking notice. Even as nature crosses its tipping points, the public seems to have reached its own. For years, popular skepticism about climatological science stood in the way of addressing the problem, but the naysayers--many of whom were on the payroll of energy companies--have become an increasingly marginalized breed. In a new TIME/ ABC News/ Stanford University poll, 85% of respondents agree that global warming probably is happening. Moreover, most respondents say they want some action taken. Of those polled, 87% believe the government should either encourage or require lowering of power-plant emissions, and 85% think something should be done to get cars to use less gasoline. Even Evangelical Christians, once one of the most reliable columns in the conservative base, are demanding action, most notably in February, when 86 Christian leaders formed the Evangelical Climate Initiative, demanding that Congress regulate greenhouse gases.
A collection of new global-warming books is hitting the shelves in response to that awakening interest, followed closely by TV and theatrical documentaries. The most notable of them is An Inconvenient Truth, due out in May, a profile of former Vice President Al Gore and his climate-change work, which is generating a lot of prerelease buzz over an unlikely topic and an equally unlikely star. For all its lack of Hollywood flash, the film compensates by conveying both the hard science of global warming and Gore's particular passion.
Such public stirrings are at last getting the attention of politicians and business leaders, who may not always respond to science but have a keen nose for where votes and profits lie. State and local lawmakers have started taking action to curb emissions, and major corporations are doing the same. Wal-Mart has begun installing wind turbines on its stores to generate electricity and is talking about putting solar reflectors over its parking lots. HSBC, the world's second largest bank, has pledged to neutralize its carbon output by investing in wind farms and other green projects. Even President Bush, hardly a favorite of greens, now acknowledges climate change and boasts of the steps he is taking to fight it. Most of those steps, however, involve research and voluntary emissions controls, not exactly the laws with teeth scientists are calling for.
Is it too late to reverse the changes global warming has wrought? That's still not clear. Reducing our emissions output year to year is hard enough. Getting it low enough so that the atmosphere can heal is a multigenerational commitment. "Ecosystems are usually able to maintain themselves," says Terry Chapin, a biologist and professor of ecology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "But eventually they get pushed to the limit of tolerance."
CO2 AND THE POLES
As a tiny component of our atmosphere, carbon dioxide helped warm Earth to comfort levels we are all used to. But too much of it does an awful lot of damage. The gas represents just a few hundred parts per million (p.p.m.) in the overall air blanket, but they're powerful parts because they allow sunlight to stream in but prevent much of the heat from radiating back out. During the last ice age, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was just 180 p.p.m., putting Earth into a deep freeze. After the glaciers retreated but before the dawn of the modern era, the total had risen to a comfortable 280 p.p.m. In just the past century and a half, we have pushed the level to 381 p.p.m., and we're feeling the effects. Of the 20 hottest years on record, 19 occurred in the 1980s or later. According to NASA scientists, 2005 was one of the hottest years in more than a century.
It's at the North and South poles that those steambath conditions are felt particularly acutely, with glaciers and ice caps crumbling to slush. Once the thaw begins, a number of mechanisms kick in to keep it going. Greenland is a vivid example. Late last year, glaciologist Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Pannir Kanagaratnam, a research assistant professor at the University of Kansas, analyzed data from Canadian and European satellites and found that Greenland ice is not just melting but doing so more than twice as fast, with 53 cu. mi. draining away into the sea last year alone, compared with 22 cu. mi. in 1996. A cubic mile of water is about five times the amount Los Angeles uses in a year.
Dumping that much water into the ocean is a very dangerous thing. Icebergs don't raise sea levels when they melt because they're floating, which means they have displaced all the water they're ever going to. But ice on land, like Greenland's, is a different matter. Pour that into oceans that are already rising (because warm water expands), and you deluge shorelines. By some estimates, the entire Greenland ice sheet would be enough to raise global sea levels 23 ft., swallowing up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh. The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 215 ft.
FEEDBACK LOOPS
One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating is that as the poles' bright white surface shrinks, it changes the relationship of Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that 90% of the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking much of its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90% of the energy it receives. The more energy it retains, the warmer it gets, with the result that each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that preceded it.
That is what scientists call a feedback loop, and it's a nasty one, since once you uncap the Arctic Ocean, you unleash another beast: the comparatively warm layer of water about 600 ft. deep that circulates in and out of the Atlantic. "Remove the ice," says Woods Hole's Curry, "and the water starts talking to the atmosphere, releasing its heat. This is not a good thing."
A similar feedback loop is melting permafrost, usually defined as land that has been continuously frozen for two years or more. There's a lot of earthly real estate that qualifies, and much of it has been frozen much longer than two years--since the end of the last ice age, or at least 8,000 years ago. Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of partially decayed organic matter, rich in carbon. In high-altitude regions of Alaska, Canada and Siberia, the soil is warming and decomposing, releasing gases that will turn into methane and CO2. That, in turn, could lead to more warming and permafrost thaw, says research scientist David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. And how much carbon is socked away in Arctic soils? Lawrence puts the figure at 200 gigatons to 800 gigatons. The total human carbon output is only 7 gigatons a year.
One result of all that is warmer oceans, and a result of warmer oceans can be, paradoxically, colder continents within a hotter globe. Ocean currents running between warm and cold regions serve as natural thermoregulators, distributing heat from the equator toward the poles. The Gulf Stream, carrying warmth up from the tropics, is what keeps Europe's climate relatively mild. Whenever Europe is cut off from the Gulf Stream, temperatures plummet. At the end of the last ice age, the warm current was temporarily blocked, and temperatures in Europe fell as much as 10°F, locking the continent in glaciers.
What usually keeps the Gulf Stream running is that warm water is lighter than cold water, so it floats on the surface. As it reaches Europe and releases its heat, the current grows denser and sinks, flowing back to the south and crossing under the northbound Gulf Stream until it reaches the tropics and starts to warm again. The cycle works splendidly, provided the water remains salty enough. But if it becomes diluted by freshwater, the salt concentration drops, and the water gets lighter, idling on top and stalling the current. Last December, researchers associated with Britain's National Oceanography Center reported that one component of the system that drives the Gulf Stream has slowed about 30% since 1957. It's the increased release of Arctic and Greenland meltwater that appears to be causing the problem, introducing a gush of freshwater that's overwhelming the natural cycle. In a global-warming world, it's unlikely that any amount of cooling that resulted from this would be sufficient to support glaciers, but it could make things awfully uncomfortable.
"The big worry is that the whole climate of Europe will change," says Adrian Luckman, senior lecturer in geography at the University of Wales, Swansea. "We in the U.K. are on the same latitude as Alaska. The reason we can live here is the Gulf Stream."
DROUGHT
As fast as global warming is transforming the oceans and the ice caps, it's having an even more immediate effect on land. People, animals and plants living in dry, mountainous regions like the western U.S. make it through summer thanks to snowpack that collects on peaks all winter and slowly melts off in warm months. Lately the early arrival of spring and the unusually blistering summers have caused the snowpack to melt too early, so that by the time it's needed, it's largely gone. Climatologist Philip Mote of the University of Washington has compared decades of snowpack levels in Washington, Oregon and California and found that they are a fraction of what they were in the 1940s, and some snowpacks have vanished entirely.
Global warming is tipping other regions of the world into drought in different ways. Higher temperatures bake moisture out of soil faster, causing dry regions that live at the margins to cross the line into full-blown crisis. Meanwhile, El Niño events--the warm pooling of Pacific waters that periodically drives worldwide climate patterns and has been occurring more frequently in global-warming years--further inhibit precipitation in dry areas of Africa and East Asia. According to a recent study by NCAR, the percentage of Earth's surface suffering drought has more than doubled since the 1970s.
FLORA AND FAUNA
Hot, dry land can be murder on flora and fauna, and both are taking a bad hit. Wildfires in such regions as Indonesia, the western U.S. and even inland Alaska have been increasing as timberlands and forest floors grow more parched. The blazes create a feedback loop of their own, pouring more carbon into the atmosphere and reducing the number of trees, which inhale CO2 and release oxygen.
Those forests that don't succumb to fire die in other, slower ways. Connie Millar, a paleoecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, studies the history of vegetation in the Sierra Nevada. Over the past 100 years, she has found, the forests have shifted their tree lines as much as 100 ft. upslope, trying to escape the heat and drought of the lowlands. Such slow-motion evacuation may seem like a sensible strategy, but when you're on a mountain, you can go only so far before you run out of room. "Sometimes we say the trees are going to heaven because they're walking off the mountaintops," Millar says.
Across North America, warming-related changes are mowing down other flora too. Manzanita bushes in the West are dying back; some prickly pear cacti have lost their signature green and are instead a sickly pink; pine beetles in western Canada and the U.S. are chewing their way through tens of millions of acres of forest, thanks to warmer winters. The beetles may even breach the once insurmountable Rocky Mountain divide, opening up a path into the rich timbering lands of the American Southeast.
With habitats crashing, animals that live there are succumbing too. Environmental groups can tick off scores of species that have been determined to be at risk as a result of global warming. Last year, researchers in Costa Rica announced that two-thirds of 110 species of colorful harlequin frogs have vanished in the past 30 years, with the severity of each season's die-off following in lockstep with the severity of that year's warming.
In Alaska, salmon populations are at risk as melting permafrost pours mud into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning. Small animals such as bushy-tailed wood rats, alpine chipmunks and piñon mice are being chased upslope by rising temperatures, following the path of the fleeing trees. And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears--prodigious swimmers but not inexhaustible ones--are starting to turn up drowned. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out."
WHAT ABOUT US?
It is fitting, perhaps, that as the species causing all the problems, we're suffering the destruction of our habitat too, and we have experienced that loss in terrible ways. Ocean waters have warmed by a full degree Fahrenheit since 1970, and warmer water is like rocket fuel for typhoons and hurricanes. Two studies last year found that in the past 35 years the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has doubled while the wind speed and duration of all hurricanes has jumped 50%. Since atmospheric heat is not choosy about the water it warms, tropical storms could start turning up in some decidedly nontropical places. "There's a school of thought that sea surface temperatures are warming up toward Canada," says Greg Holland, senior scientist for NCAR in Boulder. "If so, you're likely to get tropical cyclones there, but we honestly don't know."
WHAT WE CAN DO
So much for environmental collapse happening in so many places at once has at last awakened much of the world, particularly the 141 nations that have ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions--an imperfect accord, to be sure, but an accord all the same. The U.S., however, which is home to less than 5% of Earth's population but produces 25% of CO2 emissions, remains intransigent. Many environmentalists declared the Bush Administration hopeless from the start, and while that may have been premature, it's undeniable that the White House's environmental record--from the abandonment of Kyoto to the President's broken campaign pledge to control carbon output to the relaxation of emission standards--has been dismal. George W. Bush's recent rhetorical nods to America's oil addiction and his praise of such alternative fuel sources as switchgrass have yet to be followed by real initiatives.
The anger surrounding all that exploded recently when NASA researcher Jim Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a longtime leader in climate-change research, complained that he had been harassed by White House appointees as he tried to sound the global-warming alarm. "The way democracy is supposed to work, the presumption is that the public is well informed," he told TIME. "They're trying to deny the science." Up against such resistance, many environmental groups have resolved simply to wait out this Administration and hope for something better in 2009.
The Republican-dominated Congress has not been much more encouraging. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice been unable to get through the Senate even mild measures to limit carbon. Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, both of New Mexico and both ranking members of the chamber's Energy Committee, have made global warming a high-profile matter. A white paper issued in February will be the subject of an investigatory Senate conference next week. A House delegation recently traveled to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand to visit researchers studying climate change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were believers," says Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York. "Every one of the others said this opened their eyes."
Boehlert himself has long fought the environmental fight, but if the best that can be said for most lawmakers is that they are finally recognizing the global-warming problem, there's reason to wonder whether they will have the courage to reverse it. Increasingly, state and local governments are filling the void. The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that they will meet the Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in their cities to 1990 levels by 2012. Nine eastern states have established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of developing a cap-and-trade program that would set ceilings on industrial emissions and allow companies that overperform to sell pollution credits to those that underperform-- the same smart, incentive-based strategy that got sulfur dioxide under control and reduced acid rain. And California passed the nation's toughest automobile- emissions law last summer.
"There are a whole series of things that demonstrate that people want to act and want their government to act," says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense. Krupp and others believe that we should probably accept that it's too late to prevent CO2 concentrations from climbing to 450 p.p.m. (or 70 p.p.m. higher than where they are now). From there, however, we should be able to stabilize them and start to dial them back down.
That goal should be attainable. Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try? We did not so much march toward the environmental precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the scientific scolds who told us we had a problem.
The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we're finally coming to appreciate the knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century we've been monkeying with those margins. It's long past time we set them right.
—With reporting by Greg Fulton/ Atlanta, Dan Cray/ Los Angeles, Rita Healy/ Denver, Eric Roston/ Washington, With reporting by David Bjerklie, Andrea Dorfman/ New York, Andrea Gerlin/ London
Well, unfortunately the weather and georgaphy of our planet are not the same fantasy that the Bushies seem to believe that geopolitics is...in which you can make your own reality...i.e. we are winning in Iraq...
Polar Ice Caps Are Melting Faster Than Ever... More And More Land Is Being Devastated By Drought... Rising Waters Are Drowning Low-Lying Communities... By Any Measure, Earth Is At ... The Tipping Point
The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame. Why the crisis hit so soon--and what we can do about it
By JEFFREY KLUGER
http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0...1176980,00.html
Apr. 3, 2006
No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry--a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180 m.p.h.--exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast--when the emergency becomes commonplace--something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.
The image of Earth as organism--famously dubbed Gaia by environmentalist James Lovelock-- has probably been overworked, but that's not to say the planet can't behave like a living thing, and these days, it's a living thing fighting a fever. From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us. Scientists have been calling this shot for decades. This is precisely what they have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows in from the sun and raising global temperatures.
Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it. If there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.
But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Nature, it seems, has finally got a bellyful of us.
"Things are happening a lot faster than anyone predicted," says Bill Chameides, chief scientist for the advocacy group Environmental Defense and a former professor of atmospheric chemistry. "The last 12 months have been alarming." Adds Ruth Curry of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts: "The ripple through the scientific community is palpable."
And it's not just scientists who are taking notice. Even as nature crosses its tipping points, the public seems to have reached its own. For years, popular skepticism about climatological science stood in the way of addressing the problem, but the naysayers--many of whom were on the payroll of energy companies--have become an increasingly marginalized breed. In a new TIME/ ABC News/ Stanford University poll, 85% of respondents agree that global warming probably is happening. Moreover, most respondents say they want some action taken. Of those polled, 87% believe the government should either encourage or require lowering of power-plant emissions, and 85% think something should be done to get cars to use less gasoline. Even Evangelical Christians, once one of the most reliable columns in the conservative base, are demanding action, most notably in February, when 86 Christian leaders formed the Evangelical Climate Initiative, demanding that Congress regulate greenhouse gases.
A collection of new global-warming books is hitting the shelves in response to that awakening interest, followed closely by TV and theatrical documentaries. The most notable of them is An Inconvenient Truth, due out in May, a profile of former Vice President Al Gore and his climate-change work, which is generating a lot of prerelease buzz over an unlikely topic and an equally unlikely star. For all its lack of Hollywood flash, the film compensates by conveying both the hard science of global warming and Gore's particular passion.
Such public stirrings are at last getting the attention of politicians and business leaders, who may not always respond to science but have a keen nose for where votes and profits lie. State and local lawmakers have started taking action to curb emissions, and major corporations are doing the same. Wal-Mart has begun installing wind turbines on its stores to generate electricity and is talking about putting solar reflectors over its parking lots. HSBC, the world's second largest bank, has pledged to neutralize its carbon output by investing in wind farms and other green projects. Even President Bush, hardly a favorite of greens, now acknowledges climate change and boasts of the steps he is taking to fight it. Most of those steps, however, involve research and voluntary emissions controls, not exactly the laws with teeth scientists are calling for.
Is it too late to reverse the changes global warming has wrought? That's still not clear. Reducing our emissions output year to year is hard enough. Getting it low enough so that the atmosphere can heal is a multigenerational commitment. "Ecosystems are usually able to maintain themselves," says Terry Chapin, a biologist and professor of ecology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "But eventually they get pushed to the limit of tolerance."
CO2 AND THE POLES
As a tiny component of our atmosphere, carbon dioxide helped warm Earth to comfort levels we are all used to. But too much of it does an awful lot of damage. The gas represents just a few hundred parts per million (p.p.m.) in the overall air blanket, but they're powerful parts because they allow sunlight to stream in but prevent much of the heat from radiating back out. During the last ice age, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was just 180 p.p.m., putting Earth into a deep freeze. After the glaciers retreated but before the dawn of the modern era, the total had risen to a comfortable 280 p.p.m. In just the past century and a half, we have pushed the level to 381 p.p.m., and we're feeling the effects. Of the 20 hottest years on record, 19 occurred in the 1980s or later. According to NASA scientists, 2005 was one of the hottest years in more than a century.
It's at the North and South poles that those steambath conditions are felt particularly acutely, with glaciers and ice caps crumbling to slush. Once the thaw begins, a number of mechanisms kick in to keep it going. Greenland is a vivid example. Late last year, glaciologist Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Pannir Kanagaratnam, a research assistant professor at the University of Kansas, analyzed data from Canadian and European satellites and found that Greenland ice is not just melting but doing so more than twice as fast, with 53 cu. mi. draining away into the sea last year alone, compared with 22 cu. mi. in 1996. A cubic mile of water is about five times the amount Los Angeles uses in a year.
Dumping that much water into the ocean is a very dangerous thing. Icebergs don't raise sea levels when they melt because they're floating, which means they have displaced all the water they're ever going to. But ice on land, like Greenland's, is a different matter. Pour that into oceans that are already rising (because warm water expands), and you deluge shorelines. By some estimates, the entire Greenland ice sheet would be enough to raise global sea levels 23 ft., swallowing up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh. The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 215 ft.
FEEDBACK LOOPS
One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating is that as the poles' bright white surface shrinks, it changes the relationship of Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that 90% of the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking much of its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90% of the energy it receives. The more energy it retains, the warmer it gets, with the result that each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that preceded it.
That is what scientists call a feedback loop, and it's a nasty one, since once you uncap the Arctic Ocean, you unleash another beast: the comparatively warm layer of water about 600 ft. deep that circulates in and out of the Atlantic. "Remove the ice," says Woods Hole's Curry, "and the water starts talking to the atmosphere, releasing its heat. This is not a good thing."
A similar feedback loop is melting permafrost, usually defined as land that has been continuously frozen for two years or more. There's a lot of earthly real estate that qualifies, and much of it has been frozen much longer than two years--since the end of the last ice age, or at least 8,000 years ago. Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of partially decayed organic matter, rich in carbon. In high-altitude regions of Alaska, Canada and Siberia, the soil is warming and decomposing, releasing gases that will turn into methane and CO2. That, in turn, could lead to more warming and permafrost thaw, says research scientist David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. And how much carbon is socked away in Arctic soils? Lawrence puts the figure at 200 gigatons to 800 gigatons. The total human carbon output is only 7 gigatons a year.
One result of all that is warmer oceans, and a result of warmer oceans can be, paradoxically, colder continents within a hotter globe. Ocean currents running between warm and cold regions serve as natural thermoregulators, distributing heat from the equator toward the poles. The Gulf Stream, carrying warmth up from the tropics, is what keeps Europe's climate relatively mild. Whenever Europe is cut off from the Gulf Stream, temperatures plummet. At the end of the last ice age, the warm current was temporarily blocked, and temperatures in Europe fell as much as 10°F, locking the continent in glaciers.
What usually keeps the Gulf Stream running is that warm water is lighter than cold water, so it floats on the surface. As it reaches Europe and releases its heat, the current grows denser and sinks, flowing back to the south and crossing under the northbound Gulf Stream until it reaches the tropics and starts to warm again. The cycle works splendidly, provided the water remains salty enough. But if it becomes diluted by freshwater, the salt concentration drops, and the water gets lighter, idling on top and stalling the current. Last December, researchers associated with Britain's National Oceanography Center reported that one component of the system that drives the Gulf Stream has slowed about 30% since 1957. It's the increased release of Arctic and Greenland meltwater that appears to be causing the problem, introducing a gush of freshwater that's overwhelming the natural cycle. In a global-warming world, it's unlikely that any amount of cooling that resulted from this would be sufficient to support glaciers, but it could make things awfully uncomfortable.
"The big worry is that the whole climate of Europe will change," says Adrian Luckman, senior lecturer in geography at the University of Wales, Swansea. "We in the U.K. are on the same latitude as Alaska. The reason we can live here is the Gulf Stream."
DROUGHT
As fast as global warming is transforming the oceans and the ice caps, it's having an even more immediate effect on land. People, animals and plants living in dry, mountainous regions like the western U.S. make it through summer thanks to snowpack that collects on peaks all winter and slowly melts off in warm months. Lately the early arrival of spring and the unusually blistering summers have caused the snowpack to melt too early, so that by the time it's needed, it's largely gone. Climatologist Philip Mote of the University of Washington has compared decades of snowpack levels in Washington, Oregon and California and found that they are a fraction of what they were in the 1940s, and some snowpacks have vanished entirely.
Global warming is tipping other regions of the world into drought in different ways. Higher temperatures bake moisture out of soil faster, causing dry regions that live at the margins to cross the line into full-blown crisis. Meanwhile, El Niño events--the warm pooling of Pacific waters that periodically drives worldwide climate patterns and has been occurring more frequently in global-warming years--further inhibit precipitation in dry areas of Africa and East Asia. According to a recent study by NCAR, the percentage of Earth's surface suffering drought has more than doubled since the 1970s.
FLORA AND FAUNA
Hot, dry land can be murder on flora and fauna, and both are taking a bad hit. Wildfires in such regions as Indonesia, the western U.S. and even inland Alaska have been increasing as timberlands and forest floors grow more parched. The blazes create a feedback loop of their own, pouring more carbon into the atmosphere and reducing the number of trees, which inhale CO2 and release oxygen.
Those forests that don't succumb to fire die in other, slower ways. Connie Millar, a paleoecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, studies the history of vegetation in the Sierra Nevada. Over the past 100 years, she has found, the forests have shifted their tree lines as much as 100 ft. upslope, trying to escape the heat and drought of the lowlands. Such slow-motion evacuation may seem like a sensible strategy, but when you're on a mountain, you can go only so far before you run out of room. "Sometimes we say the trees are going to heaven because they're walking off the mountaintops," Millar says.
Across North America, warming-related changes are mowing down other flora too. Manzanita bushes in the West are dying back; some prickly pear cacti have lost their signature green and are instead a sickly pink; pine beetles in western Canada and the U.S. are chewing their way through tens of millions of acres of forest, thanks to warmer winters. The beetles may even breach the once insurmountable Rocky Mountain divide, opening up a path into the rich timbering lands of the American Southeast.
With habitats crashing, animals that live there are succumbing too. Environmental groups can tick off scores of species that have been determined to be at risk as a result of global warming. Last year, researchers in Costa Rica announced that two-thirds of 110 species of colorful harlequin frogs have vanished in the past 30 years, with the severity of each season's die-off following in lockstep with the severity of that year's warming.
In Alaska, salmon populations are at risk as melting permafrost pours mud into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning. Small animals such as bushy-tailed wood rats, alpine chipmunks and piñon mice are being chased upslope by rising temperatures, following the path of the fleeing trees. And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears--prodigious swimmers but not inexhaustible ones--are starting to turn up drowned. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out."
WHAT ABOUT US?
It is fitting, perhaps, that as the species causing all the problems, we're suffering the destruction of our habitat too, and we have experienced that loss in terrible ways. Ocean waters have warmed by a full degree Fahrenheit since 1970, and warmer water is like rocket fuel for typhoons and hurricanes. Two studies last year found that in the past 35 years the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has doubled while the wind speed and duration of all hurricanes has jumped 50%. Since atmospheric heat is not choosy about the water it warms, tropical storms could start turning up in some decidedly nontropical places. "There's a school of thought that sea surface temperatures are warming up toward Canada," says Greg Holland, senior scientist for NCAR in Boulder. "If so, you're likely to get tropical cyclones there, but we honestly don't know."
WHAT WE CAN DO
So much for environmental collapse happening in so many places at once has at last awakened much of the world, particularly the 141 nations that have ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions--an imperfect accord, to be sure, but an accord all the same. The U.S., however, which is home to less than 5% of Earth's population but produces 25% of CO2 emissions, remains intransigent. Many environmentalists declared the Bush Administration hopeless from the start, and while that may have been premature, it's undeniable that the White House's environmental record--from the abandonment of Kyoto to the President's broken campaign pledge to control carbon output to the relaxation of emission standards--has been dismal. George W. Bush's recent rhetorical nods to America's oil addiction and his praise of such alternative fuel sources as switchgrass have yet to be followed by real initiatives.
The anger surrounding all that exploded recently when NASA researcher Jim Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a longtime leader in climate-change research, complained that he had been harassed by White House appointees as he tried to sound the global-warming alarm. "The way democracy is supposed to work, the presumption is that the public is well informed," he told TIME. "They're trying to deny the science." Up against such resistance, many environmental groups have resolved simply to wait out this Administration and hope for something better in 2009.
The Republican-dominated Congress has not been much more encouraging. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice been unable to get through the Senate even mild measures to limit carbon. Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, both of New Mexico and both ranking members of the chamber's Energy Committee, have made global warming a high-profile matter. A white paper issued in February will be the subject of an investigatory Senate conference next week. A House delegation recently traveled to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand to visit researchers studying climate change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were believers," says Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York. "Every one of the others said this opened their eyes."
Boehlert himself has long fought the environmental fight, but if the best that can be said for most lawmakers is that they are finally recognizing the global-warming problem, there's reason to wonder whether they will have the courage to reverse it. Increasingly, state and local governments are filling the void. The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that they will meet the Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in their cities to 1990 levels by 2012. Nine eastern states have established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of developing a cap-and-trade program that would set ceilings on industrial emissions and allow companies that overperform to sell pollution credits to those that underperform-- the same smart, incentive-based strategy that got sulfur dioxide under control and reduced acid rain. And California passed the nation's toughest automobile- emissions law last summer.
"There are a whole series of things that demonstrate that people want to act and want their government to act," says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense. Krupp and others believe that we should probably accept that it's too late to prevent CO2 concentrations from climbing to 450 p.p.m. (or 70 p.p.m. higher than where they are now). From there, however, we should be able to stabilize them and start to dial them back down.
That goal should be attainable. Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try? We did not so much march toward the environmental precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the scientific scolds who told us we had a problem.
The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we're finally coming to appreciate the knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century we've been monkeying with those margins. It's long past time we set them right.
—With reporting by Greg Fulton/ Atlanta, Dan Cray/ Los Angeles, Rita Healy/ Denver, Eric Roston/ Washington, With reporting by David Bjerklie, Andrea Dorfman/ New York, Andrea Gerlin/ London
Feeling The Heat
Global warming is already disrupting the biological world, pushing many species to the brink of extinction and turning others into runaway pests. But the worst is yet to come
http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0...1176986,00.html
By DAVID BJERKLIE
Apr. 3, 2006
QUIVER TREE This striking giant aloe was given its name by the San people of southern Africa, who use the tree's hollow branches as quivers for their arrows. Scientists have discovered that quiver trees are starting to die off in parts of their traditional range. The species might be in the early stages of moving southward, trying to escape rising temperatures closer to the equator.
PINON MOUSE This tiny resident of the southwestern U.S. has long eked out its living in juniper woodlands, but in California it is heading for higher, cooler altitudes in the High Sierra conifer forests. The mouse is one of several small mammals in the region that have moved their homes 1,000 to 3,000 ft. higher in elevation over the past century.
RED-BREASTED GOOSE Twenty-six bird species, including this goose, which breeds in the Arctic, are listed by the World Conservation Union as threatened by global warming. Half are seabirds whose food supplies are diminished because of climate changes. The rest are terrestrial species, including several whose coastal habitats are at risk because of rising sea levels.
AFRICAN ELEPHANT Global warming might not only shrink the elephant's range within Africa but may also wreak havoc with the animal's love life. The relative abundance--or scarcity--of food affects the social hierarchy of the herd, which in turn can determine which animals get to breed.
BUTTERFLIES Researchers have documented shifts in the ranges of many butterflies. One study looked at 35 species of nonmigratory butterflies whose ranges extended from northern Africa to northern Europe. The scientists found that two-thirds of the species had shifted their home ranges northward by 20 to 150 miles. In the U.S., researchers have closely tracked the movements of the butterfly known as Edith's checkerspot (at right, middle). Though butterflies might be sturdier than they look, scientists believe many species will not survive the impact of climate change.
KING PROTEA It is the national flower of South Africa, just one among the many spectacular members of the large family of flowering plants named after Proteus, a Greek god capable of changing his shape at will. Scientists fear that more than a third of all Proteaceae species could disappear by 2050.
MISTLETOE The limber pine dwarf mistletoe is proliferating throughout western forests in North America, thanks to heat and drought-weakened trees that act as perfect hosts for this botanical parasite. It's not unlike what happens in your body, says researcher Connie Millar of the U.S. Forest Service: "When your system is stressed, you're more vulnerable to all kinds of things that want to get you."
FROGS Amphibians have been hopping, swimming and crawling about the planet for 350 million years. But their future is hardly assured. A global assessment of the state of this entire class of vertebrates found that nearly one-third of the 5,743 known species are in serious trouble. Climate change may well be the culprit in most cases, either directly or indirectly. The home habitat of the golden toad (at right, bottom) in Costa Rica moved up the mountain until "home" disappeared entirely. More than two-thirds of the 110 species of colorful harlequin frogs in Central and South America, two shown above, have also disappeared. Scientists believe that what killed many of the harlequins and what threatens a great many other amphibian species is a disease caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. Climate change seems to be making frogs more vulnerable to infection by the fungus.
What troubles scientists especially is that if we are only in the early stages of warming, all these lost and endangered animals might be just the first of many to go. One study estimates that more than a million species worldwide could be driven to extinction by the year 2050.
—With reporting by with reporting by Dan Cray/ Los Angeles
Global warming is already disrupting the biological world, pushing many species to the brink of extinction and turning others into runaway pests. But the worst is yet to come
http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0...1176986,00.html
By DAVID BJERKLIE
Apr. 3, 2006
QUIVER TREE This striking giant aloe was given its name by the San people of southern Africa, who use the tree's hollow branches as quivers for their arrows. Scientists have discovered that quiver trees are starting to die off in parts of their traditional range. The species might be in the early stages of moving southward, trying to escape rising temperatures closer to the equator.
PINON MOUSE This tiny resident of the southwestern U.S. has long eked out its living in juniper woodlands, but in California it is heading for higher, cooler altitudes in the High Sierra conifer forests. The mouse is one of several small mammals in the region that have moved their homes 1,000 to 3,000 ft. higher in elevation over the past century.
RED-BREASTED GOOSE Twenty-six bird species, including this goose, which breeds in the Arctic, are listed by the World Conservation Union as threatened by global warming. Half are seabirds whose food supplies are diminished because of climate changes. The rest are terrestrial species, including several whose coastal habitats are at risk because of rising sea levels.
AFRICAN ELEPHANT Global warming might not only shrink the elephant's range within Africa but may also wreak havoc with the animal's love life. The relative abundance--or scarcity--of food affects the social hierarchy of the herd, which in turn can determine which animals get to breed.
BUTTERFLIES Researchers have documented shifts in the ranges of many butterflies. One study looked at 35 species of nonmigratory butterflies whose ranges extended from northern Africa to northern Europe. The scientists found that two-thirds of the species had shifted their home ranges northward by 20 to 150 miles. In the U.S., researchers have closely tracked the movements of the butterfly known as Edith's checkerspot (at right, middle). Though butterflies might be sturdier than they look, scientists believe many species will not survive the impact of climate change.
KING PROTEA It is the national flower of South Africa, just one among the many spectacular members of the large family of flowering plants named after Proteus, a Greek god capable of changing his shape at will. Scientists fear that more than a third of all Proteaceae species could disappear by 2050.
MISTLETOE The limber pine dwarf mistletoe is proliferating throughout western forests in North America, thanks to heat and drought-weakened trees that act as perfect hosts for this botanical parasite. It's not unlike what happens in your body, says researcher Connie Millar of the U.S. Forest Service: "When your system is stressed, you're more vulnerable to all kinds of things that want to get you."
FROGS Amphibians have been hopping, swimming and crawling about the planet for 350 million years. But their future is hardly assured. A global assessment of the state of this entire class of vertebrates found that nearly one-third of the 5,743 known species are in serious trouble. Climate change may well be the culprit in most cases, either directly or indirectly. The home habitat of the golden toad (at right, bottom) in Costa Rica moved up the mountain until "home" disappeared entirely. More than two-thirds of the 110 species of colorful harlequin frogs in Central and South America, two shown above, have also disappeared. Scientists believe that what killed many of the harlequins and what threatens a great many other amphibian species is a disease caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. Climate change seems to be making frogs more vulnerable to infection by the fungus.
What troubles scientists especially is that if we are only in the early stages of warming, all these lost and endangered animals might be just the first of many to go. One study estimates that more than a million species worldwide could be driven to extinction by the year 2050.
—With reporting by with reporting by Dan Cray/ Los Angeles
A Science Adviser Unmuzzled
Q&A: NASA's chief climate scientist, who charged that his views on global warming were being squelched, says we're getting close to a tipping point
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...1176828,00.html
Posted Friday, Mar. 24, 2006
Earlier this year, James Hansen, NASA's chief climate scientist, made headlines when he accused the administration of muzzling him when he tried to speak out about global warming. Hansen, director of the space agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was one of the earliest researchers to sound the climate change alarm. He alleges that White House appointees in NASA limited his access to the press and ordered him to remove web postingss that contradicted the President's positions. The White House took a PR bruising when the charges went public and Hansen's profile has since been higher than ever. He recently spoke to TIME about both the science and the politics of the global warming crisis.
TIME: Are we correct in thinking that a climatological collapse has begun, and if so, when might we reach the stage at which it would be out of our power to fix things?
Hansen: We are getting close to a tipping point, despite the fact that most people barely notice the warming yet. We have witnessed 1?F warming in the past 30 years. There is 1?F more in the pipeline due to gases already in the air. Still another degree is certain because of energy infrastructure already in place, such as power plants and vehicles on the road. Three degrees will take us to a level at or just above the warmest in the past million years. The changes at that level are substantial but something we can probably adapt to. In order to limit change to that level we need to get on a track that I call the alternative scenario, which requires that we begin to slow emissions this decade and substantially reduce them before mid- century. If we stay on a business-as-usual path for another decade, the alternative scenario becomes impractical if not impossible.
TIME: What is that alternative?
Hansen: Business-as-usual will yield warming of 6 to 9?F by the end of the century and that will have two major impacts. First, sea level will rise. The last time it was 5?F warmer than now sea level was at least 80 feet higher. It may take a few centuries for most of that rise to occur, but once started, the ice sheets would continue to disintegrate out of our control, so every several decades we would need to rebuild above a higher shoreline. Those costs would dwarf any costs associated with learning to use energy more sensibly. Second, we'll lose animals and plants. We would push the polar species and alpine species off the planet. On the other hand, the climate change and CO2 in the air will be good for aggressive, weedy plants such as poison ivy.
TIME: The idea of tipping points and feedback loops catches a lot of people by surprise. Were the scientists blind-sided too?
Hansen: Not really, but not enough thought was given to the potential for large sea level changes, probably because of the assumption that it takes the ice sheets millennia to respond. I have argued the importance of sea level and I think that realization is catching on. I do think, on the other hand, that many scientists are spending too much time trying to figure out the effects of possible changes in the ocean's circulation. Europe, and the U.S., will not freeze over or get colder if the Atlantic circulation slows down. Global warming overwhelms the modest effects of reduced heat transport.
TIME: If atmospheric carbon is currently at 380 parts per million, how long do you think it take before aggressive action would begin to bring it down?
Hansen: We have to first level out emissions, then get them to start to decline. By the end of the century we could reduce emissions by perhaps 70% so that atmospheric CO2 would stabilize.
TIME: Have you noticed a sea change in public perception and willingness to do something about the problem?
Hansen: Not a sea change, but they are beginning to wake up, and this coincides with the science becoming a lot clearer in the past five or six years.
TIME: What about political perception and political willingness?
Hansen: Incredibly, there are still staunch deniers who would prefer to listen to a science fiction writer [Michael Crichton, author of "State of Fear," which challenges global warming science] rather than a real scientist. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the strongest deniers among the politicians have connections to the fossil fuel industry.
TIME: Do you have any hope that the White House will act?
Hansen: We can't give up, no matter what the odds look like. Another three years of business as usual will make it much harder to avoid large changes.
TIME: Aren't regional and local action like the mayors' and governors' initiatives mostly window dressing? Can they really make a dent in carbon output if Washington doesn't do something?
Hansen: They are useful practice, but, yes, it is absolutely essential that the U.S. take a real leadership role. Until that happens, it is basically business as usual.
TIME: If you could write the next Kyoto treaty, what provisions would you include?
Hansen: I should note that I don't make policy and my opinions are personal. We do need a strong disincentive for exploitation of the "worse than coal" energy sources such as tar sands and shale oil.
TIME: You started as something of an environmental scold and lately you've become more of an environmental hero. Feel vindicated?
Hansen: I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but there is no time for feeling good until the U.S. begins to take the leadership role that it is capable of.
Q&A: NASA's chief climate scientist, who charged that his views on global warming were being squelched, says we're getting close to a tipping point
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...1176828,00.html
Posted Friday, Mar. 24, 2006
Earlier this year, James Hansen, NASA's chief climate scientist, made headlines when he accused the administration of muzzling him when he tried to speak out about global warming. Hansen, director of the space agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was one of the earliest researchers to sound the climate change alarm. He alleges that White House appointees in NASA limited his access to the press and ordered him to remove web postingss that contradicted the President's positions. The White House took a PR bruising when the charges went public and Hansen's profile has since been higher than ever. He recently spoke to TIME about both the science and the politics of the global warming crisis.
TIME: Are we correct in thinking that a climatological collapse has begun, and if so, when might we reach the stage at which it would be out of our power to fix things?
Hansen: We are getting close to a tipping point, despite the fact that most people barely notice the warming yet. We have witnessed 1?F warming in the past 30 years. There is 1?F more in the pipeline due to gases already in the air. Still another degree is certain because of energy infrastructure already in place, such as power plants and vehicles on the road. Three degrees will take us to a level at or just above the warmest in the past million years. The changes at that level are substantial but something we can probably adapt to. In order to limit change to that level we need to get on a track that I call the alternative scenario, which requires that we begin to slow emissions this decade and substantially reduce them before mid- century. If we stay on a business-as-usual path for another decade, the alternative scenario becomes impractical if not impossible.
TIME: What is that alternative?
Hansen: Business-as-usual will yield warming of 6 to 9?F by the end of the century and that will have two major impacts. First, sea level will rise. The last time it was 5?F warmer than now sea level was at least 80 feet higher. It may take a few centuries for most of that rise to occur, but once started, the ice sheets would continue to disintegrate out of our control, so every several decades we would need to rebuild above a higher shoreline. Those costs would dwarf any costs associated with learning to use energy more sensibly. Second, we'll lose animals and plants. We would push the polar species and alpine species off the planet. On the other hand, the climate change and CO2 in the air will be good for aggressive, weedy plants such as poison ivy.
TIME: The idea of tipping points and feedback loops catches a lot of people by surprise. Were the scientists blind-sided too?
Hansen: Not really, but not enough thought was given to the potential for large sea level changes, probably because of the assumption that it takes the ice sheets millennia to respond. I have argued the importance of sea level and I think that realization is catching on. I do think, on the other hand, that many scientists are spending too much time trying to figure out the effects of possible changes in the ocean's circulation. Europe, and the U.S., will not freeze over or get colder if the Atlantic circulation slows down. Global warming overwhelms the modest effects of reduced heat transport.
TIME: If atmospheric carbon is currently at 380 parts per million, how long do you think it take before aggressive action would begin to bring it down?
Hansen: We have to first level out emissions, then get them to start to decline. By the end of the century we could reduce emissions by perhaps 70% so that atmospheric CO2 would stabilize.
TIME: Have you noticed a sea change in public perception and willingness to do something about the problem?
Hansen: Not a sea change, but they are beginning to wake up, and this coincides with the science becoming a lot clearer in the past five or six years.
TIME: What about political perception and political willingness?
Hansen: Incredibly, there are still staunch deniers who would prefer to listen to a science fiction writer [Michael Crichton, author of "State of Fear," which challenges global warming science] rather than a real scientist. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the strongest deniers among the politicians have connections to the fossil fuel industry.
TIME: Do you have any hope that the White House will act?
Hansen: We can't give up, no matter what the odds look like. Another three years of business as usual will make it much harder to avoid large changes.
TIME: Aren't regional and local action like the mayors' and governors' initiatives mostly window dressing? Can they really make a dent in carbon output if Washington doesn't do something?
Hansen: They are useful practice, but, yes, it is absolutely essential that the U.S. take a real leadership role. Until that happens, it is basically business as usual.
TIME: If you could write the next Kyoto treaty, what provisions would you include?
Hansen: I should note that I don't make policy and my opinions are personal. We do need a strong disincentive for exploitation of the "worse than coal" energy sources such as tar sands and shale oil.
TIME: You started as something of an environmental scold and lately you've become more of an environmental hero. Feel vindicated?
Hansen: I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but there is no time for feeling good until the U.S. begins to take the leadership role that it is capable of.
How to Seize the Initiative
You don't have to wait for Washington to tell you to reduce emissions. You can follow the lead of forward-thinking governments, retailers, artists and even a utility company
By UNMESH KHER, DAREN FONDA, MICHAEL D. LEMONICK, MARGOT ROOSEVELT
http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0...1176989,00.html
Apr. 3, 2006
THE ROCK BAND CAPITALIST TOOLS FOR CUTTING CO2
When Coldplay cut A Rush of Blood to the Head, the rock band didn't want the album's production and distribution to add to the greenhouse gases flowing into the atmosphere. So, working with a small British firm, the CarbonNeutral Co., the group bought 10,000 mango trees for villagers in Karnataka, India. Since plants breathe in carbon dioxide as they grow, Coldplay figures the mango trees will eventually neutralize all the CO2 released in the making and selling of its CDs.
It's a sweet deal all around. Coldplay gets to do right by the environment; the impoverished Indian villagers not only get the mangoes but will also earn money from the CO2 locked in the trees when the gas is sold on a surging new market--one that trades carbon saved for carbon burned.
Capitalism is nothing if not adaptive, and its champions have responded to global warming with a market-based solution that provides polluters with a profit incentive to mend their ways. It's called cap and trade, and it is the mechanism behind the so-called carbon markets spawned by the Kyoto Protocol. Firms in developed countries that pump out more CO2 than they are allowed under limits imposed by Kyoto are required by the protocol to offset that pollution by buying credits on the carbon market. Those that cut CO2 emissions below their allowance or help polluters in developing nations clean up their act get to sell the credits--as do groups that cut greenhouse gases by, among other things, planting trees.
Since January 2005, carbon markets in the European Union have traded at least 500 million tons of CO2. Because the Bush Administration dropped out of Kyoto, the U.S. doesn't participate in this booming global trade. But state governments are starting to set up regional carbon markets based on caps they establish under their own authority. In December, seven Northeastern states led by New York agreed to cut power-plant emissions via cap and trade, beginning in 2009.
For now, U.S. firms that want to trade emissions must join the Chicago Climate Exchange, a voluntary but legally binding bourse whose members, according to founder Richard Sandor, account for 8% of the greenhouse emissions from stationary sources in the U.S. "If we were a country," he says, "we'd be roughly the size of Britain." Members of the Chicago exchange, including Ford Motor Co. and DuPont, have pledged to cut their emissions 4% by the end of this year from the levels they averaged from 1998 to 2000. They have already taken tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gases out of play, which sounds impressive until it's compared with the 6 billion--ton plume of CO2 spewed into the atmosphere by the U.S. each year.
Meanwhile, the opportunities to offset emissions are growing. Conservation International, for instance, helped Mitsubishi and Pearl Jam funnel their offsetting funds into rain-forest protection in Madagascar. And Coldplay did more than enough to offset its last album, X&Y, by protecting forests in Mexico and Ecuador. Internet ventures with names like TerraPass, myclimate and Drive Neutral enable commuters and air travelers to calculate their emissions and neutralize the damage. Some even aim to turn a profit.
How do the consumer offsets work? Take the nonprofit Carbonfund.org It sells absolution for personal and commercial emissions at a cut rate of $5.50 per ton of CO2. (A full year of carbon neutralization typically costs $99.) Carbonfund allows buyers to choose where their money winds up--in alternative energy, forest conservation or energy efficiency. Co-founder Eric Carlson says Carbonfund has offset about 40,000 tons of CO2 so far. That's not much. But its ultimate aim, he says, is to channel what support it gets into driving down the cost of clean energy--and, along the way, increase awareness of climate change. "There is an educational value in these things," says Judi Greenwald of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "People realize that what they do can make a difference." So, apparently, do rock stars. --By Unmesh Kher
SWEDEN CLEANER AIR OVER SCANDINAVIA
Like the U.S., Sweden is addicted to oil. Unlike the U.S., it has a plan to kick the habit--and a deadline. By 2020, says Mona Sahlin, Minister for Sustainable Development, the country will no longer be dependent on fossil fuels. "By then," she declares, "no home will need oil for heating, no motorist will be obliged to use petrol [gasoline] as the sole option available."
Can Sweden do it? Probably. Back in 1970, before the first Middle East energy crisis, Sweden got 77% of its energy from oil. By 2003, even though industrial production had risen dramatically, that figure had dropped to 34%. Part of the country's impressive record comes courtesy of its abundant resources. "We have access to large amounts of hydropower," admits Sahlin, "large amounts of biomass and good conditions for increased use of wind power."
But that's not the only reason Sweden was rated the world's second greenest nation (just behind New Zealand) in a study issued at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Sweden's leaders have passed laws that would be unthinkable for a U.S. politician--taxes on fuel and CO2 emissions to induce car owners to trade in their gas guzzlers for hybrids, for example, and tax exemptions for home owners who switch from oil heating to renewable energy. Indeed, whereas Americans are likely to complain about higher taxes or infringements on their rights, most Swedes seem to embrace the idea of helping save the planet.
Take, for example, Sweden's nationwide rush to convert cars from gasoline to fuels like ethanol and biogas fermented from plant waste. Stations that sell alternative fuels are springing up all over the country, and fully 13% of new autos sold in February, the most recent month for which numbers are available, can run on ultra-low-emission substances.
What Americans might appreciate is the way local governments are encouraged to come up with their own strategies for meeting the national goals. For example, in Helsingborg, a coastal city of 120,000, buses run on biogas made from garbage and other organic waste from households and nearby farms. It's part of a program that dates from 2000, when city officials decided they would get 20% of municipal vehicles running on renewable fuel by 2010. By 2004, they had reached 23%. "We have upped our target so that 50% of the city's cars, vans and trucks should use renewable fuel by 2010--and we will meet that target," says Ulla Ingers, Helsingborg's assistant director of environment.
Similar programs are under way across the country. In the northern town of Aapua, a wind farm opened just last month, thanks to local residents who began lobbying town officials five years ago; it should supply 40% of Aapua's electricity. The old university city of Lund gets 30% of its heat from a geothermal plant. And Fjaras, in the southwest, just opened a solar-powered health center. Some of these are small efforts, to be sure, but when an entire nation embraces a pledge to wean itself from oil, there's no reason it can't be done. --By Michael D. Lemonick. Reported by Ulla Plon/Helsingborg
THE MAYORS SAVING ONE CITY AT A TIME
Seattle mayor Greg Nickels has news for President George W. Bush: global warming is also "local" warming. So for Nickels and his constituents, climate change is about the Cascade Mountains, where the city gets its water and hydropower and where the snowpack has shrunk by half over the past 50 years. It's about the effect of Puget Sound's warmer waters on wild-salmon runs. It's about hotter summers cooking up more smog. It's about a rise in sea level that could flood Seattle's port. "The stakes are high--globally and locally," he says. "We need to act."
So in February 2005, when the Kyoto Protocol took effect in 141 countries but not the U.S., Nickels launched the U.S. Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement. So far, 218 mayors in 39 states, representing nearly 44 million Americans, have signed on to its 12-step program for their own cities to meet or beat Kyoto's original target for the U.S.--cutting greenhouse-gas emissions to 7% below 1990 levels over the next six years. Some cities got a head start. Portland, Ore., which zeroed in on global warming beginning in 1993, has already slashed emissions by 13% per capita, partly by building light rail and 730 miles of regional bikeways. In Austin, Texas, the city-owned utility was able to cancel construction of a 500-MW coal-fired power plant--planned to power 50,000 homes--thanks in part to an intensive green building program that offers energy-efficiency audits to all residents and businesses, retrofits schools and installs insulation and shade screens to reduce sunlight in low-income housing. "We're frustrated by the lack of national leadership," says Mayor Will Wynn, an early backer of the Nickels initiative. "This is about the future of the planet."
Other cities are crafting their own solutions. St. Paul, Minn., which has had to forgo Winter Carnival ice sculptures and on-ice softball tournaments in recent years because of rising temperatures, is using a biomass-fired power plant for both heat and electricity. Keene, N.H., is harnessing methane and other gases at its landfill to run a generator that powers its recycling center. Salt Lake City, Utah, has converted 1,630 traffic stops to energy-efficient light-emitting diode signals--which alone will save more than 500 tons of CO2 pollution each year and cost the city $53,000 less than conventional bulbs. "The idea is to solve global warming one city at a time," says Glen Brand, an energy specialist for the Sierra Club, which has launched a "cool cities" website.
But though mayors prefer to downplay the costs of fighting global warming, there seems to be truth to the Bush Administration's contention that meeting the Kyoto targets involves pain--not just gain. And in Seattle, where population growth is projected to push up regional greenhouse gases by 38% in the next 15 years, ratcheting down to 1990 levels would require slashing emissions by 683,000 tons--the equivalent of taking some 148,000 cars off the road. To do that may require such unpopular measures as highway tolls and increased parking taxes. But in the absence of federal controls, Nickels says, he's ready and willing: "If it's not going to happen from the top down, let's make it happen from the bottom up." --By Margot Roosevelt
THE RETAILER THE GREENING OF WAL-MART
All around the world, shoppers flock to Wal-Mart to buy everything from socks to sofa beds. In McKinney, Texas, they come for another reason: to see the wind turbine. Rising 120 ft. above the ground, it's the tallest structure in town and supplies 5% of the store's electricity. It's not the only thing that makes this Wal-Mart a green giant. There are photovoltaic shingles on the roof, exterior walls coated with heat-reflective paint and a high-tech system that automatically dims or raises the lights depending on whether it's sunny or overcast. Brent Allen, who manages the experimental store, says customers tell him all the time that "they drove out of their way to shop at this Wal-Mart." Which makes you wonder: If folks drive farther than they have to, aren't they burning extra gasoline in their pickups and SUVS? And isn't that offsetting the store's energy savings?
The laws of unintended consequences can be cruel for companies trying to do the right thing. The laws of economics suggest that Wal-Mart is so big, with 5,200 stores worldwide, that it influences everything from the price of lumber to the size of the container your laundry detergent comes in. And if this retailing giant throws its weight behind environmental responsibility, the impact could be profound: less air pollution at factories in China, mass-market sales of organic products, cereal boxes that aren't half filled with air. "One little change in product packaging could save 1,500 trees," says Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott. "If everybody saves 1,500 trees or 50 barrels of oil, at the end of the day you have made a huge difference."
Scott wants Wal-Mart to do its part too. He has promised to cut greenhouse-gas emissions at existing stores 20% over the next few years and pledged to construct new stores that are 25% to 30% more efficient. He wants Wal-Mart's fleet of more than 7,000 trucks to get twice as many miles per gallon by 2015. Factories that show Wal-Mart they're cutting air pollution--even those in China--will get preferential treatment in the supply chain. Wal-Mart says it's working with consumer-product manufacturers to trim their packaging and will reward those that do so with prime real estate on the shelves. Scott has pledged to enlist Wal-Mart's army of lobbyists to push for pro-environmental policy changes in Washington, including incentives for utilities to cut greenhouse gases.
Cynics might call it a "greenwash," a bid to deflect attention from Wal-Mart's controversial labor and health-insurance practices. But it's not just window dressing, because Wal-Mart sees profit in going green. "We are not being altruistic," says Scott. "This is a business philosophy, not a social philosophy." Some top environmentalists seem convinced he's serious, including Amory Lovins, head of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who is a paid adviser. "We don't go where we don't think there's a genuine interest in change," says Lovins.
There's no question that soaring energy costs are fueling Wal-Mart's conservation drive. The company now insists that truckers shut off their engines when stopping for a break, yielding estimated savings of $25 million a year. By doubling the gas mileage of the fleet through better aerodynamics and lower-friction tires, Wal-Mart expects to pocket $310 million a year. One of the biggest items on its energy bill is lighting. Instead of going with the cheapest bulbs, the company is experimenting with costlier LED strips for refrigeration units that last longer and use less energy. Scott also wants to sell more organically grown food and cotton clothing, partly because it's good for the planet, partly because he believes he can get prices down and boost sales to low- income customers.
Like Bill Gates, who started his charitable foundation shortly after Microsoft's antitrust trial, Scott happens to be burnishing Wal-Mart's image at a time when his company's reputation is under siege. He acknowledges that he launched the plan partly to shield Wal-Mart from bad press about its contribution to global warming. "By doing what we're doing today you avoid the headline risks that are going to come for people who did not do anything," he says. "At some point businesses will be held accountable for the actions they take." Meanwhile, should Wal-Mart succeed at shrinking its environmental footprint and lowering prices for green products, both the planet and the company will profit. Sam Walton would have liked that. --By Daren Fonda. Reported by Steve Barnes/Bentonville, Rita Healy/Denver and Adam Pitluk/ McKinney
THE UTILITY ASKING TO BE TAXED AND REGULATED
Jim Rogers runs a power company that spews 62 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. That's a lot of greenhouse gas. But you won't find him on the hit list of environmental crusaders. The CEO of Cinergy, a utility with nine coal-fired plants in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, Rogers is an outspoken advocate of regulating carbon and imposing a price on emissions. His position makes him a renegade within his industry, which officially opposes any regulatory scheme that would force power companies to cut carbon emissions. It makes Rogers more likely to be invited to Sierra Club headquarters than to the White House, given that President Bush hasn't called for anything more stringent than voluntary cuts in greenhouse gases.
What is Rogers thinking? For one thing, he's personally worried about global warming and believes that the scientific debate about what causes it has long been settled. He thinks that the U.S. will be forced to regulate carbon--as most other industrialized countries have done--within the next five years, if not sooner. And as the CEO of a publicly traded company, he has to make decisions that will affect shareholders decades in the future. Power plants have life spans of 50 years, and if carbon is taxed, the fuel calculus of those plants changes radically. "We're very dependent on coal," says Rogers, "and if you're going to have earnings growth that's sustainable over a long period of time, you [need] certainty on the carbon issue."
With the approval last month by Cinergy's board of a merger with Duke Energy, Rogers is poised to run one of America's largest utilities, and he aims to lead by example. In recent years, Cinergy has spent $1 billion to increase its use of cleaner-burning natural gas, including $200 million to convert a coal-fired plant, and Rogers has cut Cinergy's reliance on coal from 87% of its fuel to 73%. He has pledged to reduce Cinergy's CO2 emissions 5% below 2000 levels by 2012, and he is investing in projects to sequester carbon in forests. Rogers is evaluating coal- gasification technology for a plant in Indiana, which could dramatically cut carbon emissions from burning coal, still the least expensive and most abundant fossil fuel in the U.S.
Even if he succeeds, Cinergy's environmental record will be far from perfect. A $1.4 billion settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency over alleged violations of the Clean Air Act fell apart when Cinergy backed away from the deal. The original suit is slowly working its way through the courts. And Cinergy supports Bush's efforts to roll back provisions of the Clean Air Act that govern utilities.
But with global warming, Rogers vows to keep the heat on his colleagues in the energy industry and on Washington politicians. "My greatest fear is that we don't deal with the problem now," he says, "and we wake up one day and don't have enough time." --By D.F. Reported by David Thigpen/Cincinnati
—With reporting by Rita Healy/ Denver, Reported by Ulla Plon/ Helsingborg, Reported by Steve Barnes/ Bentonville, Adam Pitluk/ McKinney, Reported by David Thigpen/ Cincinnati
You don't have to wait for Washington to tell you to reduce emissions. You can follow the lead of forward-thinking governments, retailers, artists and even a utility company
By UNMESH KHER, DAREN FONDA, MICHAEL D. LEMONICK, MARGOT ROOSEVELT
http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0...1176989,00.html
Apr. 3, 2006
THE ROCK BAND CAPITALIST TOOLS FOR CUTTING CO2
When Coldplay cut A Rush of Blood to the Head, the rock band didn't want the album's production and distribution to add to the greenhouse gases flowing into the atmosphere. So, working with a small British firm, the CarbonNeutral Co., the group bought 10,000 mango trees for villagers in Karnataka, India. Since plants breathe in carbon dioxide as they grow, Coldplay figures the mango trees will eventually neutralize all the CO2 released in the making and selling of its CDs.
It's a sweet deal all around. Coldplay gets to do right by the environment; the impoverished Indian villagers not only get the mangoes but will also earn money from the CO2 locked in the trees when the gas is sold on a surging new market--one that trades carbon saved for carbon burned.
Capitalism is nothing if not adaptive, and its champions have responded to global warming with a market-based solution that provides polluters with a profit incentive to mend their ways. It's called cap and trade, and it is the mechanism behind the so-called carbon markets spawned by the Kyoto Protocol. Firms in developed countries that pump out more CO2 than they are allowed under limits imposed by Kyoto are required by the protocol to offset that pollution by buying credits on the carbon market. Those that cut CO2 emissions below their allowance or help polluters in developing nations clean up their act get to sell the credits--as do groups that cut greenhouse gases by, among other things, planting trees.
Since January 2005, carbon markets in the European Union have traded at least 500 million tons of CO2. Because the Bush Administration dropped out of Kyoto, the U.S. doesn't participate in this booming global trade. But state governments are starting to set up regional carbon markets based on caps they establish under their own authority. In December, seven Northeastern states led by New York agreed to cut power-plant emissions via cap and trade, beginning in 2009.
For now, U.S. firms that want to trade emissions must join the Chicago Climate Exchange, a voluntary but legally binding bourse whose members, according to founder Richard Sandor, account for 8% of the greenhouse emissions from stationary sources in the U.S. "If we were a country," he says, "we'd be roughly the size of Britain." Members of the Chicago exchange, including Ford Motor Co. and DuPont, have pledged to cut their emissions 4% by the end of this year from the levels they averaged from 1998 to 2000. They have already taken tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gases out of play, which sounds impressive until it's compared with the 6 billion--ton plume of CO2 spewed into the atmosphere by the U.S. each year.
Meanwhile, the opportunities to offset emissions are growing. Conservation International, for instance, helped Mitsubishi and Pearl Jam funnel their offsetting funds into rain-forest protection in Madagascar. And Coldplay did more than enough to offset its last album, X&Y, by protecting forests in Mexico and Ecuador. Internet ventures with names like TerraPass, myclimate and Drive Neutral enable commuters and air travelers to calculate their emissions and neutralize the damage. Some even aim to turn a profit.
How do the consumer offsets work? Take the nonprofit Carbonfund.org It sells absolution for personal and commercial emissions at a cut rate of $5.50 per ton of CO2. (A full year of carbon neutralization typically costs $99.) Carbonfund allows buyers to choose where their money winds up--in alternative energy, forest conservation or energy efficiency. Co-founder Eric Carlson says Carbonfund has offset about 40,000 tons of CO2 so far. That's not much. But its ultimate aim, he says, is to channel what support it gets into driving down the cost of clean energy--and, along the way, increase awareness of climate change. "There is an educational value in these things," says Judi Greenwald of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "People realize that what they do can make a difference." So, apparently, do rock stars. --By Unmesh Kher
SWEDEN CLEANER AIR OVER SCANDINAVIA
Like the U.S., Sweden is addicted to oil. Unlike the U.S., it has a plan to kick the habit--and a deadline. By 2020, says Mona Sahlin, Minister for Sustainable Development, the country will no longer be dependent on fossil fuels. "By then," she declares, "no home will need oil for heating, no motorist will be obliged to use petrol [gasoline] as the sole option available."
Can Sweden do it? Probably. Back in 1970, before the first Middle East energy crisis, Sweden got 77% of its energy from oil. By 2003, even though industrial production had risen dramatically, that figure had dropped to 34%. Part of the country's impressive record comes courtesy of its abundant resources. "We have access to large amounts of hydropower," admits Sahlin, "large amounts of biomass and good conditions for increased use of wind power."
But that's not the only reason Sweden was rated the world's second greenest nation (just behind New Zealand) in a study issued at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Sweden's leaders have passed laws that would be unthinkable for a U.S. politician--taxes on fuel and CO2 emissions to induce car owners to trade in their gas guzzlers for hybrids, for example, and tax exemptions for home owners who switch from oil heating to renewable energy. Indeed, whereas Americans are likely to complain about higher taxes or infringements on their rights, most Swedes seem to embrace the idea of helping save the planet.
Take, for example, Sweden's nationwide rush to convert cars from gasoline to fuels like ethanol and biogas fermented from plant waste. Stations that sell alternative fuels are springing up all over the country, and fully 13% of new autos sold in February, the most recent month for which numbers are available, can run on ultra-low-emission substances.
What Americans might appreciate is the way local governments are encouraged to come up with their own strategies for meeting the national goals. For example, in Helsingborg, a coastal city of 120,000, buses run on biogas made from garbage and other organic waste from households and nearby farms. It's part of a program that dates from 2000, when city officials decided they would get 20% of municipal vehicles running on renewable fuel by 2010. By 2004, they had reached 23%. "We have upped our target so that 50% of the city's cars, vans and trucks should use renewable fuel by 2010--and we will meet that target," says Ulla Ingers, Helsingborg's assistant director of environment.
Similar programs are under way across the country. In the northern town of Aapua, a wind farm opened just last month, thanks to local residents who began lobbying town officials five years ago; it should supply 40% of Aapua's electricity. The old university city of Lund gets 30% of its heat from a geothermal plant. And Fjaras, in the southwest, just opened a solar-powered health center. Some of these are small efforts, to be sure, but when an entire nation embraces a pledge to wean itself from oil, there's no reason it can't be done. --By Michael D. Lemonick. Reported by Ulla Plon/Helsingborg
THE MAYORS SAVING ONE CITY AT A TIME
Seattle mayor Greg Nickels has news for President George W. Bush: global warming is also "local" warming. So for Nickels and his constituents, climate change is about the Cascade Mountains, where the city gets its water and hydropower and where the snowpack has shrunk by half over the past 50 years. It's about the effect of Puget Sound's warmer waters on wild-salmon runs. It's about hotter summers cooking up more smog. It's about a rise in sea level that could flood Seattle's port. "The stakes are high--globally and locally," he says. "We need to act."
So in February 2005, when the Kyoto Protocol took effect in 141 countries but not the U.S., Nickels launched the U.S. Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement. So far, 218 mayors in 39 states, representing nearly 44 million Americans, have signed on to its 12-step program for their own cities to meet or beat Kyoto's original target for the U.S.--cutting greenhouse-gas emissions to 7% below 1990 levels over the next six years. Some cities got a head start. Portland, Ore., which zeroed in on global warming beginning in 1993, has already slashed emissions by 13% per capita, partly by building light rail and 730 miles of regional bikeways. In Austin, Texas, the city-owned utility was able to cancel construction of a 500-MW coal-fired power plant--planned to power 50,000 homes--thanks in part to an intensive green building program that offers energy-efficiency audits to all residents and businesses, retrofits schools and installs insulation and shade screens to reduce sunlight in low-income housing. "We're frustrated by the lack of national leadership," says Mayor Will Wynn, an early backer of the Nickels initiative. "This is about the future of the planet."
Other cities are crafting their own solutions. St. Paul, Minn., which has had to forgo Winter Carnival ice sculptures and on-ice softball tournaments in recent years because of rising temperatures, is using a biomass-fired power plant for both heat and electricity. Keene, N.H., is harnessing methane and other gases at its landfill to run a generator that powers its recycling center. Salt Lake City, Utah, has converted 1,630 traffic stops to energy-efficient light-emitting diode signals--which alone will save more than 500 tons of CO2 pollution each year and cost the city $53,000 less than conventional bulbs. "The idea is to solve global warming one city at a time," says Glen Brand, an energy specialist for the Sierra Club, which has launched a "cool cities" website.
But though mayors prefer to downplay the costs of fighting global warming, there seems to be truth to the Bush Administration's contention that meeting the Kyoto targets involves pain--not just gain. And in Seattle, where population growth is projected to push up regional greenhouse gases by 38% in the next 15 years, ratcheting down to 1990 levels would require slashing emissions by 683,000 tons--the equivalent of taking some 148,000 cars off the road. To do that may require such unpopular measures as highway tolls and increased parking taxes. But in the absence of federal controls, Nickels says, he's ready and willing: "If it's not going to happen from the top down, let's make it happen from the bottom up." --By Margot Roosevelt
THE RETAILER THE GREENING OF WAL-MART
All around the world, shoppers flock to Wal-Mart to buy everything from socks to sofa beds. In McKinney, Texas, they come for another reason: to see the wind turbine. Rising 120 ft. above the ground, it's the tallest structure in town and supplies 5% of the store's electricity. It's not the only thing that makes this Wal-Mart a green giant. There are photovoltaic shingles on the roof, exterior walls coated with heat-reflective paint and a high-tech system that automatically dims or raises the lights depending on whether it's sunny or overcast. Brent Allen, who manages the experimental store, says customers tell him all the time that "they drove out of their way to shop at this Wal-Mart." Which makes you wonder: If folks drive farther than they have to, aren't they burning extra gasoline in their pickups and SUVS? And isn't that offsetting the store's energy savings?
The laws of unintended consequences can be cruel for companies trying to do the right thing. The laws of economics suggest that Wal-Mart is so big, with 5,200 stores worldwide, that it influences everything from the price of lumber to the size of the container your laundry detergent comes in. And if this retailing giant throws its weight behind environmental responsibility, the impact could be profound: less air pollution at factories in China, mass-market sales of organic products, cereal boxes that aren't half filled with air. "One little change in product packaging could save 1,500 trees," says Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott. "If everybody saves 1,500 trees or 50 barrels of oil, at the end of the day you have made a huge difference."
Scott wants Wal-Mart to do its part too. He has promised to cut greenhouse-gas emissions at existing stores 20% over the next few years and pledged to construct new stores that are 25% to 30% more efficient. He wants Wal-Mart's fleet of more than 7,000 trucks to get twice as many miles per gallon by 2015. Factories that show Wal-Mart they're cutting air pollution--even those in China--will get preferential treatment in the supply chain. Wal-Mart says it's working with consumer-product manufacturers to trim their packaging and will reward those that do so with prime real estate on the shelves. Scott has pledged to enlist Wal-Mart's army of lobbyists to push for pro-environmental policy changes in Washington, including incentives for utilities to cut greenhouse gases.
Cynics might call it a "greenwash," a bid to deflect attention from Wal-Mart's controversial labor and health-insurance practices. But it's not just window dressing, because Wal-Mart sees profit in going green. "We are not being altruistic," says Scott. "This is a business philosophy, not a social philosophy." Some top environmentalists seem convinced he's serious, including Amory Lovins, head of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who is a paid adviser. "We don't go where we don't think there's a genuine interest in change," says Lovins.
There's no question that soaring energy costs are fueling Wal-Mart's conservation drive. The company now insists that truckers shut off their engines when stopping for a break, yielding estimated savings of $25 million a year. By doubling the gas mileage of the fleet through better aerodynamics and lower-friction tires, Wal-Mart expects to pocket $310 million a year. One of the biggest items on its energy bill is lighting. Instead of going with the cheapest bulbs, the company is experimenting with costlier LED strips for refrigeration units that last longer and use less energy. Scott also wants to sell more organically grown food and cotton clothing, partly because it's good for the planet, partly because he believes he can get prices down and boost sales to low- income customers.
Like Bill Gates, who started his charitable foundation shortly after Microsoft's antitrust trial, Scott happens to be burnishing Wal-Mart's image at a time when his company's reputation is under siege. He acknowledges that he launched the plan partly to shield Wal-Mart from bad press about its contribution to global warming. "By doing what we're doing today you avoid the headline risks that are going to come for people who did not do anything," he says. "At some point businesses will be held accountable for the actions they take." Meanwhile, should Wal-Mart succeed at shrinking its environmental footprint and lowering prices for green products, both the planet and the company will profit. Sam Walton would have liked that. --By Daren Fonda. Reported by Steve Barnes/Bentonville, Rita Healy/Denver and Adam Pitluk/ McKinney
THE UTILITY ASKING TO BE TAXED AND REGULATED
Jim Rogers runs a power company that spews 62 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. That's a lot of greenhouse gas. But you won't find him on the hit list of environmental crusaders. The CEO of Cinergy, a utility with nine coal-fired plants in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, Rogers is an outspoken advocate of regulating carbon and imposing a price on emissions. His position makes him a renegade within his industry, which officially opposes any regulatory scheme that would force power companies to cut carbon emissions. It makes Rogers more likely to be invited to Sierra Club headquarters than to the White House, given that President Bush hasn't called for anything more stringent than voluntary cuts in greenhouse gases.
What is Rogers thinking? For one thing, he's personally worried about global warming and believes that the scientific debate about what causes it has long been settled. He thinks that the U.S. will be forced to regulate carbon--as most other industrialized countries have done--within the next five years, if not sooner. And as the CEO of a publicly traded company, he has to make decisions that will affect shareholders decades in the future. Power plants have life spans of 50 years, and if carbon is taxed, the fuel calculus of those plants changes radically. "We're very dependent on coal," says Rogers, "and if you're going to have earnings growth that's sustainable over a long period of time, you [need] certainty on the carbon issue."
With the approval last month by Cinergy's board of a merger with Duke Energy, Rogers is poised to run one of America's largest utilities, and he aims to lead by example. In recent years, Cinergy has spent $1 billion to increase its use of cleaner-burning natural gas, including $200 million to convert a coal-fired plant, and Rogers has cut Cinergy's reliance on coal from 87% of its fuel to 73%. He has pledged to reduce Cinergy's CO2 emissions 5% below 2000 levels by 2012, and he is investing in projects to sequester carbon in forests. Rogers is evaluating coal- gasification technology for a plant in Indiana, which could dramatically cut carbon emissions from burning coal, still the least expensive and most abundant fossil fuel in the U.S.
Even if he succeeds, Cinergy's environmental record will be far from perfect. A $1.4 billion settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency over alleged violations of the Clean Air Act fell apart when Cinergy backed away from the deal. The original suit is slowly working its way through the courts. And Cinergy supports Bush's efforts to roll back provisions of the Clean Air Act that govern utilities.
But with global warming, Rogers vows to keep the heat on his colleagues in the energy industry and on Washington politicians. "My greatest fear is that we don't deal with the problem now," he says, "and we wake up one day and don't have enough time." --By D.F. Reported by David Thigpen/Cincinnati
—With reporting by Rita Healy/ Denver, Reported by Ulla Plon/ Helsingborg, Reported by Steve Barnes/ Bentonville, Adam Pitluk/ McKinney, Reported by David Thigpen/ Cincinnati
COMMENT
CHILLING
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Issue of 2006-03-20
Posted 2006-03-13
THE NEW YORKER
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/talk/0...ta_talk_kolbert
I n March, 2002, NASA and the Deutsches Zentrum für Luftund Raumfahrt, the German aerospace agency, launched a pair of satellites from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, a former intercontinental-ballistic-missile site in northern Russia, to map changes in the earth’s surface. The satellites, nicknamed Tom and Jerry, have been chasing each other around the globe ever since. Separated by a gap of approximately a hundred and thirty-seven miles, they sometimes pull apart, only to draw closer again. By monitoring their relative positions to the fantastic exactitude of one micron—less than one-fiftieth the width of a human hair—scientists can detect tiny variations in the earth’s gravitational field.
Now, almost four years to the day after they were launched, Tom and Jerry have yielded a scarily significant result: Antarctica is losing ice. The rate of loss, according to researchers at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, who analyzed changes in the continent’s gravitational pull, is around thirty-six cubic miles per year. (For comparison’s sake, the city of Los Angeles uses about one-fifth of a cubic mile of water annually.) The finding, which was reported two weeks ago in the online version of Science, is particularly ominous, because climatologists had expected that even as the ice sheet lost mass at its edges, its over-all mass would increase, since rising temperatures would lead to more snowfall over the continent’s midsection. If the loss continues, it will mean that predictions for the rise in the sea level for the coming century are seriously understated.
The news from Antarctica follows a string of similarly grim discoveries. In September, satellite measurements showed that the extent of the Arctic ice cap had shrunk to the smallest area ever recorded, prompting a prediction that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer “well before the end of this century.” Around the same time, a group of British scientists reported that soils in England and Wales have been losing carbon at the rate of four million metric tons a year, a loss that is at once a symptom of warming and—as much of that carbon is released into the atmosphere—a likely cause of more. In January, researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies concluded that 2005 had been the hottest year on record, and, in February, a team of scientists from NASA and the University of Kansas announced that the flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland had more than doubled over the past decade. Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that the mountain pine beetle, a pest once kept in check by winter cold, has decimated huge swaths of forest in western Canada. Officials with the Canadian Forest Service say that the beetle has crossed the Rockies and they fear that it will soon start eating its way east. “People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about,” one official told the Post. “No. It’s now.”
In the face of such news, how does a country, i.e. the United States, justify further inaction? Certainly, there isn’t much tread left in the argument that global warming is, to use Senator James Inhofe’s famous formulation, a “hoax.” In January, six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, five of whom had served under Republican Administrations, met with the current administrator, Stephen Johnson, for a panel discussion in Washington. Panelists were asked to hold up their hands if they believed global warming to be a real problem, for which human activity was responsible. Every one of them, Johnson included, raised a hand.
But where there’s a will there is, indeed, always a way. The new argument making the rounds of conservative think tanks, like the National Center for Policy Analysis, and circulating through assorted sympathetic publications goes something like this: Yes, the planet may be warming up, but no one can be sure of why, and, in any case, it doesn’t matter—let’s stop quibbling about the causes of climate change and concentrate on dealing with the consequences. A recent column in the Wall Street Journal laid out the logic as follows: “The problems associated with climate change (whether man-made or natural) are the same old problems of poverty, disease, and natural hazards like floods, storms, and droughts.” Therefore “money spent directly on these problems is a much surer bet than money spent trying to control a climate change process that we don’t understand.” Sounding an eerily similar note, a column published a few days later in the National Review Online stated, “We can do more to help the poor by combating these problems now than we would by reducing carbon dioxide emissions.”
The beauty of this argument is its apparent high-mindedness, and this, of course, is also its danger. Carbon dioxide is a persistent gas—it lasts for about a century—and once released into the atmosphere it is, for all practical purposes, irrecoverable. Since every extra increment of CO2 leads to extra warming, addressing the effects of climate change without dealing with the cause is a bit like trying to treat diabetes with doughnuts. The climate isn’t going to change just once, and then settle down; unless CO2 concentrations are stabilized, it will keep on changing, producing, in addition to the “same old problems,” an ever-growing array of new ones. The head of the Goddard Institute, James Hansen, who first warned about the dangers of global warming back in the nineteen-seventies and recently made headlines by accusing the Bush Administration of censorship, has said that following the path of business-as-usual for the remainder of this century will lead to an earth so warm as to be “practically a different planet.” In a world thus transformed, the only sure bet is that there will be no sure bets.
A project like Tom and Jerry demonstrates all the strengths of American science: technological sophistication, restless curiosity, and monumental budgets. But, at the same time, it points to the fundamental disconnect in our culture. Why spend tens of millions of dollars to produce such an elegant set of measurements only to ignore them? With knowledge comes responsibility, and so it is that we turn from the knowledge we have gone to such lengths to acquire.
CHILLING
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Issue of 2006-03-20
Posted 2006-03-13
THE NEW YORKER
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/talk/0...ta_talk_kolbert
I n March, 2002, NASA and the Deutsches Zentrum für Luftund Raumfahrt, the German aerospace agency, launched a pair of satellites from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, a former intercontinental-ballistic-missile site in northern Russia, to map changes in the earth’s surface. The satellites, nicknamed Tom and Jerry, have been chasing each other around the globe ever since. Separated by a gap of approximately a hundred and thirty-seven miles, they sometimes pull apart, only to draw closer again. By monitoring their relative positions to the fantastic exactitude of one micron—less than one-fiftieth the width of a human hair—scientists can detect tiny variations in the earth’s gravitational field.
Now, almost four years to the day after they were launched, Tom and Jerry have yielded a scarily significant result: Antarctica is losing ice. The rate of loss, according to researchers at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, who analyzed changes in the continent’s gravitational pull, is around thirty-six cubic miles per year. (For comparison’s sake, the city of Los Angeles uses about one-fifth of a cubic mile of water annually.) The finding, which was reported two weeks ago in the online version of Science, is particularly ominous, because climatologists had expected that even as the ice sheet lost mass at its edges, its over-all mass would increase, since rising temperatures would lead to more snowfall over the continent’s midsection. If the loss continues, it will mean that predictions for the rise in the sea level for the coming century are seriously understated.
The news from Antarctica follows a string of similarly grim discoveries. In September, satellite measurements showed that the extent of the Arctic ice cap had shrunk to the smallest area ever recorded, prompting a prediction that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer “well before the end of this century.” Around the same time, a group of British scientists reported that soils in England and Wales have been losing carbon at the rate of four million metric tons a year, a loss that is at once a symptom of warming and—as much of that carbon is released into the atmosphere—a likely cause of more. In January, researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies concluded that 2005 had been the hottest year on record, and, in February, a team of scientists from NASA and the University of Kansas announced that the flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland had more than doubled over the past decade. Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that the mountain pine beetle, a pest once kept in check by winter cold, has decimated huge swaths of forest in western Canada. Officials with the Canadian Forest Service say that the beetle has crossed the Rockies and they fear that it will soon start eating its way east. “People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about,” one official told the Post. “No. It’s now.”
In the face of such news, how does a country, i.e. the United States, justify further inaction? Certainly, there isn’t much tread left in the argument that global warming is, to use Senator James Inhofe’s famous formulation, a “hoax.” In January, six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, five of whom had served under Republican Administrations, met with the current administrator, Stephen Johnson, for a panel discussion in Washington. Panelists were asked to hold up their hands if they believed global warming to be a real problem, for which human activity was responsible. Every one of them, Johnson included, raised a hand.
But where there’s a will there is, indeed, always a way. The new argument making the rounds of conservative think tanks, like the National Center for Policy Analysis, and circulating through assorted sympathetic publications goes something like this: Yes, the planet may be warming up, but no one can be sure of why, and, in any case, it doesn’t matter—let’s stop quibbling about the causes of climate change and concentrate on dealing with the consequences. A recent column in the Wall Street Journal laid out the logic as follows: “The problems associated with climate change (whether man-made or natural) are the same old problems of poverty, disease, and natural hazards like floods, storms, and droughts.” Therefore “money spent directly on these problems is a much surer bet than money spent trying to control a climate change process that we don’t understand.” Sounding an eerily similar note, a column published a few days later in the National Review Online stated, “We can do more to help the poor by combating these problems now than we would by reducing carbon dioxide emissions.”
The beauty of this argument is its apparent high-mindedness, and this, of course, is also its danger. Carbon dioxide is a persistent gas—it lasts for about a century—and once released into the atmosphere it is, for all practical purposes, irrecoverable. Since every extra increment of CO2 leads to extra warming, addressing the effects of climate change without dealing with the cause is a bit like trying to treat diabetes with doughnuts. The climate isn’t going to change just once, and then settle down; unless CO2 concentrations are stabilized, it will keep on changing, producing, in addition to the “same old problems,” an ever-growing array of new ones. The head of the Goddard Institute, James Hansen, who first warned about the dangers of global warming back in the nineteen-seventies and recently made headlines by accusing the Bush Administration of censorship, has said that following the path of business-as-usual for the remainder of this century will lead to an earth so warm as to be “practically a different planet.” In a world thus transformed, the only sure bet is that there will be no sure bets.
A project like Tom and Jerry demonstrates all the strengths of American science: technological sophistication, restless curiosity, and monumental budgets. But, at the same time, it points to the fundamental disconnect in our culture. Why spend tens of millions of dollars to produce such an elegant set of measurements only to ignore them? With knowledge comes responsibility, and so it is that we turn from the knowledge we have gone to such lengths to acquire.
These clowns know there is something wrong. All they are trying to do is to fool enough people for a long enough time to amass their own personal fortunes, then buy some island or some mansion in a fortified neighborhood to retreat to. Period.
"Scientists" did not have it wrong in 1976. I graduated in 1977, and we were discussing these very issues and problems in our schools then.
Go back further ......... while in junior high (7th grade, in fact), I was required to take a class on the environment and our impact upon it. We studied at length the effects of pollution and overpopulation. The things my teachers warned us would happen if society didn't take better care of our planet are the things I see happening on TV every night.
Some time between 1978 and 1979, the government started it's first small steps toward ethanol as an 'alternative' to ease gas usage. And one reason for that was to reduce green house gases that would lead to global warming.
George Will may choose not to believe, but he and all of us have been warned for decades by scientists who had it very much right.
Go back further ......... while in junior high (7th grade, in fact), I was required to take a class on the environment and our impact upon it. We studied at length the effects of pollution and overpopulation. The things my teachers warned us would happen if society didn't take better care of our planet are the things I see happening on TV every night.
Some time between 1978 and 1979, the government started it's first small steps toward ethanol as an 'alternative' to ease gas usage. And one reason for that was to reduce green house gases that would lead to global warming.
George Will may choose not to believe, but he and all of us have been warned for decades by scientists who had it very much right.
Published on Tuesday, April 4, 2006 by TruthDig
Global Warming: What, Me Worry?
by Molly Ivins
On the premise that spring is too beautiful for a depressing topic like Iraq, I thought I’d take up a fun subject—global warming.
Time magazine warns us to “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.” On the other hand, my sister is on the Global Warming Committee of the Unitarian Church in Albuquerque, N.M. They go around replacing old light bulbs with more energy-efficient models. My money’s on my sis.
It’s a good thing the phrase “the tipping point” became a cliche just in time to help us describe global warming. Just a few years ago, we were more or less cruising along on global warming, with maybe 50 years or so to Do Something about it. Suddenly, the only question is how soon to push the panic button, and 10 minutes ago appears to be the right answer.
People in journalism are the worst criers of “Wolf!” imaginable. We are always setting off alarms about Ebola, or avian flu, or the impending water shortage, or the Social Security crisis, or killer bees, or the pine bark beetle, or anorexia among teenagers (surpassed only by obesity among teenagers). Boy, if we can’t sell you a scare with a few headlines and some mashed facts, no one can.
Naturally, having listened to the media set off endless alarms, the public is inclined to discount them, not to mention that global climate catastrophe is not an inviting topic. We’re somewhere between “Don’t Panic Yet” and “Panic Now!”—edging toward “Now!”
What is happening is not just what climatologists told us would happen, but global warming turns out to reinforce itself by a number of feedback mechanisms. For example, when the polar icecaps start melting, there’s less blinding bright ice to reflect heat back into the atmosphere—over 90 percent of sunlight simply bounces off ice and back into space. Whereas the dark water left behind by melted ice does the opposite, pulling in more warmth and accelerating the process.
The political fight over global warming is over, except for the Bush administration, which has some weird problem with science in general. I’m still not sure what’s behind that: I recall Rush Limbaugh and the radio right taking great glee in pooh-poohing the Kyoto treaty and the whole idea of global warming. Maybe they associated global warming with Canadians or something equally awful.
You might think some premise like, “The whole world is getting hotter, and disastrous consequences will ensue,” would be more persuasive than, “I don’t like Canadians, they’re wusses,” but I suspect part of the fun of being Rush Limbaugh is never having to say the word “responsible.”
The shame for journalism is that it has always been so easy to expose those few “scientific” voices claiming there is nothing to global warming. When the money for “scientific research” on such a subject comes from oil companies, skepticism is required.
Instead, many “journalists” let the bullies on the right cow us with the “liberal media” nonsense and reported there was “a debate” over global warming. There was no debate. The only question is how fast it’s happening. And the answer that keeps coming up is “faster than we thought. And still faster.”
Time magazine, in its warm and fuzzy way, proposes that capitalism can solve much of the problem of global warming—Henry Luce would be so proud. Can’t you see it now? Boy, I’ll bet those titans can hardly wait to cut into next quarter’s profits. The insurance industry, for obvious reasons of its own, has long taken global warming seriously. By simply refusing to insure housing or enterprises near low shores, insurance can make quite a difference.
It’s true the United States could make a good thing out of specializing in green energy and green technology—but we are still living with an administration that subsidizes the oil industry. The question is where the political leadership is going to come from before we reach the Panic Point, before Miami Beach sinks underwater, before Wall Street needs a seawall.
Al Gore is all we’ve got, and the right wing is still prepared to dismiss him with contempt and ridicule, not because he’s wrong but because they’d rather talk about the time he was supposedly advised to wear earth tones.
As the Earth drifts toward crisis, our president does not yet seem capable of grasping even the First Rule of Holes. We’re in one, and it is time to quit digging.
At the very least, it is time to replace those old light bulbs. Get busy, team.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0404-32.htm
George Will is an idiot.
1. The Earth was entering a cooling period in the 1970's. That was what the natural cycle was supposed to be. Global Warming interrupted that.
2. We have 30 more years of research now. We know a heck of a lot more about what's going on, and yes, Global Warming is here.
3. Many of the same things we need to do to become energy independent are the same things we need to do to address global warming.
4. The economic damage that will result if we do nothing about global warming far exceeds the cost of doing nothing.
5. Lots of big corporations are starting to get serious about global warming because they see it as a threat to their bottom lines.
6. I repeat, George Will is an idiot.
1. The Earth was entering a cooling period in the 1970's. That was what the natural cycle was supposed to be. Global Warming interrupted that.
2. We have 30 more years of research now. We know a heck of a lot more about what's going on, and yes, Global Warming is here.
3. Many of the same things we need to do to become energy independent are the same things we need to do to address global warming.
4. The economic damage that will result if we do nothing about global warming far exceeds the cost of doing nothing.
5. Lots of big corporations are starting to get serious about global warming because they see it as a threat to their bottom lines.
6. I repeat, George Will is an idiot.
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