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6. GLOBAL WARMING: THE TRUTH. AND WHAT THE TRUTH MEANS. - New January 2005
"Yet the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and
diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human species
may aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed
that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their
original barbarism."
Edward Gibbon
The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire
_________________________________________________________________
"Now
I know it's a cliche, but yes I got conservative as I got older. Or, in my case,
even more conservative. I guess you can see it in my talk show. Which,
I'm proud to say, is about to enjoy its tenth anniversary next week.
"And, wouldn't you
know it, but who would be trying to rain on my parade when I'm feeling this
good, but some of the usual suspects, including a bunch of well-meaning
environmental wackos, with their ultimate wackoism, Global Warming, the Y2K of
the left. Let me tell you about Global Warming, friends. With a capital "G'
and a capital "W". Because this is big stuff, really big stuff, folks.
Stuff that's going to do us in.
"It's time to give
you the other side. The truth."
__________________________________________________________________
"The
sky is always falling, right? And now the sea is rising, right. To drown the
sky, or what? Oh come on. The sea wouldn't do that to us. Actually, I have to
say this, looking out from here, from my home here, I have to say the sea looks
the same as it did when I moved in twenty-eight years ago. You can say that's
anecdotal. Like everything is anecdotal. I don't mean it has the
same...fabulous, you know, very dangerous, very, very, sexy beauty, like a
dangerous woman. I mean, despite what I've read about millimeter-this and
centimeter-that-- and who the hell in America still knows what the hell metrics
mean and can't the elitist/internationalist snobs give it up and leave us alone
with our inches? That's the main point-- it looks no higher than when I arrived.
The only changes that weigh on me here, to be honest, are the human changes--
the wife I divorced, click, the second wife who split on her own, so god damn
her, women who've come and gone, the changes that sadden and disappoint me in my
own body, the coming and going of neighbors, the new thing in the garage, very,
very shiny, the coarsening in the kids who hang out in town, those are things
that weigh on me, because they are real.
"Some summers are
hot and some summers are cold, as ever and always, and blah blah. End of
story."
I. Heading To The Warm World
"Science Has Spoken: Global Warming Is a Myth". Don't let the fact
that this headline appeared in The Wall Street Journal (12/4/97)
prejudice you. Sometimes the right isn't just the right; it's also right. I
remember just yesterday, in my own place, New York City, when it was a
criminal's paradise and a citizen's hell. [See: "World Murder Statistics:
The Cities And Metropolitan Areas" in the Information Of General Interest
(Data Groups) section of this website.] The left basically cried that there was
no hope unless the root causes of crime were addressed. Policing couldn't solve
the problem. Social and economic justice had to come for all. The right said
that would be nice, but, immediately: Damn the roots! Just police!
The right turned out
right on that one.
Or another Apocalypse
Now. When the American welfare system was reformed in the 1990's, a conservative
idea taken up by a flexible, triangulating Democratic President, the left said
the result would be people dying in the street.
But nobody died in the
street. The reform went smoothly, many welfare people got on their feet with
their first real job, and the decade was a very prosperous one.
So it's incumbent upon us
to listen to all sides, since it seems everybody can be right sometimes.
And next coming-- some
supposed sort of climatic disaster? Apocalypse Now # 25-- or what?
Anyway, Arthur B. and
Zachary W. Robinson make short work of it in The Journal.
It's not just that
the case is weak: "...there is not a shred of persuasive evidence that
humans have been responsible for increasing global temperatures. What's more,
carbon dioxide emissions have actually been a boon for the environment....The
global-warming hypothesis...is no longer tenable. Scientists have been able to
test it carefully, and it does not hold up...major atmospheric greenhouse
warming of the atmosphere is not occurring and is unlikely ever to occur."
This is a bold, smashing
statement, made with the fierce and contemptuous confidence we have come to
expect from conservatives. In fact, they're so sure of their case I wonder why
they say "unlikely ever" to occur instead of a flat-out
"never".
At first, I resist it, as
I expect most will, because it seems so contrarian as to be ridiculous.
But they pile on the
points:
1.) Atmospheric
temperatures fluctuate all the time and there have been plenty of periods in the
last 3,000 years when it was warmer than now. So this is just another period of
natural warming.
2.) They present a chart
showing the world's atmospheric temperature trendline tending down between 1979
and 1997.
3.) Another chart shows a
close correlation, in the period 1750 to about 1990 (the chart's unclear),
between the Sun's magnetic cycle and world temperature. Their conclusion:
"...the gradual warming since the Little Ice Age [an almost 6-century period
of cold generally considered to have ended in the late 1800's] and the large
fluctuations during that warming have been caused by changes in solar
activity."
4.) They point out the
rise in temperature that occurred from 1900 to 1940, and how temperature then
went down.
5.) And how atmospheric
temperatures went down "the past 20 years" (presumably that means 1978
to 1997): "...during the 20 years with the highest carbon dioxide levels,
temperatures have decreased."
I wait for more. But
that's it for "hard data". They get in their good kick against that
favorite conservative bete noire the Kyoto Protocol (a UN treaty that has 30
industrial nations, not including the U.S., and definitely not including
"underdeveloped" nations like China and India, agreeing to cut back
their greenhouse gas emissions an insignificant 5% or so by 2012 compared to
1990), point out the obvious that the whole situation is very complex and
computer models flawed, and end with a great Technoconservative/Capitalist
anthem to the glories wrought by burning fossil fuel, not just past and present
but for a thousand years to come:
"What mankind is
doing is moving hydrocarbons from below ground and turning them into living
things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals
as a result of carbon dioxide increase [which they don't deny]. Our children
will enjoy an Earth with twice as much plant and animal life as that with which
we are now blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the industrial
revolution.
"Hydrocarbons are
needed to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe.
This can eventually allow all human beings to live long, prosperous, healthy,
productive lives. No other single technological factor is more important to the
increase in the quality, length and quantity of human life than the continued,
expanded and unrationed use of the Earth's hydrocarbons, of which we have proven
reserves to last more than 1,000 years. Global warming is a myth."
Too bad they wrote in
1997 and couldn't see what was coming.
Each of the 5 months that
were to follow the publication of their December 1997 article turned out to be
the hottest 5 such months on record, world-wide. (According to records that go
back to the mid-1800's.) "The temperatures we see in 1998 are unprecedented
in our observational data," said Thomas Karl of the National Oceanic And
Atmospheric Administration. This was following 1997, the warmest year on record
till then. 1998, when finished, would rank even hotter. Indeed, as of 2001 9 of
the 10 hottest years since 1860 came in the 1990's. (Data by the UN's World
Meteorological Organization.) It gets worse. A group of paleoclimatologists--
experts on ancient climate-- publishing in Nature, concluded, through
their study of samples of ice cores from the past, tree rings, marine fossils,
pollen fossils and other material, that the 20th Century was the warmest century
in 600 years. The World Meteorological Organization went even further, saying
the 1900's were the warmest century in the last 1,000 years. And it keeps going.
The first 3 months of 2002 were the hottest 3 such months since 1860
(definitely) and in the last 1,000 years (probably). 2003, concluded
climatologists at the University of Bern, Switzerland, was the hottest summer in
Europe in at least 500 years. The 2003 heatwave led to over 20,000 deaths in
Europe, almost 15,000 in France alone. (Lester Brown of the Earth Policy
Institute says 35,000 in 9 countries.) Overall, the 2003 summer in Europe was 2
degrees Centigrade (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the summer average of
the 20th Century. (1C = 1.8F, 5C=9F, etc.) Some parts of Europe reached as much
as 6C hotter. And 2004 was the 4th warmest year since 1861, its October the
hottest ever. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that global mean annual
surface temperature at the end of the 20th Century was a little over 0.6C or
around 1 to 1.1F warmer than at its beginning. However, some climatologists say
around 0.7C. Climate expert James Hansen thinks it may actually have risen as
much as 0.75C. By 2004 temperature in Europe had risen 0.95C since the beginning
of the 20th Century. A report issued by the European Environmental Agency in
2004 predicted cold winters in Europe would completely disappear by 2080. And in
2003 a group of British and American climate experts issued this finding: The
Earth is warmer than it's been in 2,000 years. (see: "Not just warmer: it's
the hottest for 2,000 years", 9/1/03, guardian.co.uk/climate change)
(As in other portions of
this website, in order to make a clean, swift read I'll only sometimes source
myself. But every point is backed. Feel free to e-mail or write me for any of my
sources.)
The Wall Street
Journal article says "...during the 20 years [1978-1997] with the
highest carbon dioxide levels, temperatures have decreased.", but that's
simply absurd. In its August 16, 2004 issue, BusinessWeek, hardly a
mouthpiece of the environmental movement, published a chart (page 63) showing
global temperature soaring since the mid-1970's. (In the same issue, in a
separate editorial, BusinessWeek summarizes in one sentence the right's
true view on global warming: "Conservatives see global warming as a hoax
designed to limit growth and expand government.") Looking at my rather
large collection of historical climate charts, I try to find one that shows
temperature decreasing in recent decades, but there isn't one, whether it's in
the troposphere (the atmosphere up to 8 miles) or on the surface or land near
the surface, whether it's temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific or just
the winter temperatures or just the summer temperatures in New York City, Alaska
coast air temperatures, New York City weather as a whole, Northern Hemisphere
only, Southern Hemisphere only, or the temperatures of the Earth's oceans, or
land and ocean surface combined, U.S. mean, global mean, or
any way you want to slice it. Some scientists do make cogent arguments about the
accuracy of the older climate data going back generations or centuries, and
that's interesting, and perhaps indeed if we knew everything there is to
know 1998 would be the 7th or 11th warmest year on record, not the 1st. But
there isn't one legitimate scientist on this
planet who denies temperature rise since the mid-1970's. The only possible debate left
is: Is it man-caused, natural or a combination?
I can hear the
conservatives screaming: "You still haven't answered our most powerful
specific points!" Okay. Let's have it out. Their point: Temperatures are
still within the range of fluctuations of the last 3,000 years, so current heat
may just be the result of one more natural fluctuation. I say: Why limit the
argument to just the last 3,000 years? Let's look over the 10,000 years since
the most recent Glacial Period ended and see just how high temperature went
beyond the present, and we'll take that as the natural limit of
post-Glacial warming. Post-Glacial heat peaked during what we call the Climatic
Optimum (or Hypsithermal). Different experts give different dates for the
Climatic Optimum, and of course the various regions of the world didn't peak in
exact sync, but basically we can take the period from about 5800 BC to 3000 BC
as the hottest in the last 10,000 years. E.C. Pielou in After The Ice Age
(page 281) has temperature about 1.5C higher than 1991 around 3500 BC. Gina L.
Barnes in China, Korea and Japan: The Rise of Civilization in East
Asia (page 72) has the average yearly temperature about 2C higher than 1993
between around 5000 and 4000 BC. John Gribbin in Future Weather (page 34)
has European and North American temperature peaking about 2-3C higher than 1982
between around 5000 and 3000 BC. Herman Flohn in Climate and Weather (page
214) has 2C over 1969 as the peak throughout previous Interglacial Periods.
Interesting Web articles from the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History and from
the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change both have the
Climatic Optimum maxing out about 2C over the 1990's.(Conservatives also love to
proclaim the Medieval Warm Period from the 800's to about 1300 AD a foretaste of
the happy world we'll be enjoying in global warming. They say: See, the Earth
was hotter and crops flourished, vineyards grew in England, cathedrals rose, the
Vikings traveled to Iceland and Greenland across less icy seas, etc. So why are
you agitating yourselves? Some scientists say world summer temperature in the
period rose about 0.7C to 1C above 20th Century temperature. But other
climatologists now say the warming was regional and inconsistent, and even the
peak temperatures were lower than today's. As for the vineyards in England, one
of the favorite chestnuts of the climatological right, there were 50 to 60 in
the 10th and 11th Centuries, as opposed to over 350 today. [David Hill, in his Atlas
of Anglo-Saxon England (page 113), shows 50 at most, and not as far north as
today's.] The Medieval Warm Period will no longer work as either weapon or
comforter.) So it would seem that if the world's average temperature now rises
more than 2C over the late 20th Century's temperature level it would show the
warming isn't natural. But, in truth, the temperature doesn't have to rise even
that much to prove it's man-made. After the end of the Climatic Optimum the
world's temperature tended, despite fluctuations, ever cooler. Even the rise of
near 0.7C since 1900 is strongly against the natural trend. Also showing the
power of global warming is that the world temperature rose strongly against a
0.1% decrease in solar radiation between the late 1970's and the late 1980's.
And temperature has increased by at least 0.2C in just the last 20 years or so,
and now it's apparently accelerated to at least 0.2C per decade. (In fact, a
study released in summer of 2004 by the European Environment Agency,
"Impacts of Europe's Changing Climate", has average world temperature
now rising by 0.36C per decade.) No doubt the last of the
Conservative/Capitalist right will resist until temperatures bust so high the
climate's unnaturalness can no longer be denied. The current scientific
consensus has global temperature rising somewhere between 1.4C and 5.8C
(2.5-10.4F) by 2100, so, yes, it could be a century or more before the last
global warming contrarian concedes defeat. But an objective analysis has already
convinced the vast majority of scientists that global warming is real,
accelerating and man-made. But more than temperature trends are at work:
The conservative point:
Man and his fossil fuels aren't responsible; it's the Sun's fault. But that just
doesn't wash. Solar radiation does fluctuate, and apparently the Sun's changes
are responsible for some global warming, but less than half the warming since
1900 can be attributed to that factor. (See The Long Summer, Brian Fagan,
page 250.) And a dramatic new study issued on August 25, 2004, by the U.S.
government, Our Changing Planet, and signed, amazing as this must be to
the President (assuming he skimmed it or is even aware of it), by George W.
Bush's Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Energy, and Science Advisor,
concludes that while Man probably can't be blamed for any global warming during
the first half of the 20th Century (I'd contest that conclusion, and more
importantly some scientists would, but that's neither here nor there), solar
activity simply cannot account for what's happened since. A second study issued
in 2004 by a group of Swiss and German scientists came to the same conclusion.
And one of Sun-warming's former strongest advocates, Danish scientist Knud
Lassen, has lately changed his position, agreeing that the latest data shows
solar activity cannot explain recent warming.
The point conservatives
keep making about how See! Temperature went down between around 1940 and the
mid-1970's while greenhouse gases were rising! is, to me, the most
meaningless of all their points. First of all, it's primarily a description of
what was happening only in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.
In the lower latitudes temperature was much more even, and for those
stretches when temperature went down they went down much less than further
north. The same holds for the Southern Hemisphere, and, in fact, when the high
latitude Northern temperatures were sinking in the 1960's the Southern
temperatures strongly rose. (See the excellent climate charts covering all this
in Gribbin's Future Weather, page 238, and in "Global Warming
Trends", Scientific American, 8/90, 89.) For myself, what's
taken place since the mid-70's makes any need for an explanation of temperature
drops over the 3-1/2 decades before the mid-70's irrelevant to our condition,
but for those who need it a multi-part explanation does seem at hand: The
eruption of Mount Agung in Bali in 1963 threw enough dust into the atmosphere to
lower temperature 0.2C worldwide, and in the nontropical Northern Hemisphere by
0.6C, and there were other strong volcanic explosions in the period which helped
induce some cooling too. There was much less major volcanic activity in the 1920
to 1940 period, which was warmer, and also a period when the warming was more
rapid than greenhouse models would have predicted. At the same time we should
remember that the cooler period was also a time of vigorous above-ground nuclear
testing by 5 nations. Some Russian scientists believe the cooling effect of the
dust thrown into the atmosphere by these tests was about equal to the volcanic
effect. Climatologists also observed cooling changes in atmospheric circulation
in the 1940-1975 period-- perhaps nothing more than the random fluctuations that
are always taking place, and will continue to do so even in a warming world.
Increasing industrialization in this period with its increase in sun-blocking
pollution (an effect now being over-ridden by the greater warming), combined
with the increasing dust-producing burning of land for agricultural purposes, is
thought by some scientists to have added to the cooling effect. Fluctuations in
solar radiation may have been another factor. All these mid-century cooling
factors also serve as an answer to the contrarians when they argue that the
Earth's warming should have been greater for the entire 20th Century if man-made
global warming is happening. And if I've given even this much attention to one
of the contrarian's weaker arguments, it's because they themselves continually
bring it up, but, really, this is a "talking point" they'd be better
off retiring.
(Nonetheless, this
cooling period shows the power of climate to alter history, though historians
don't really like to consider weather so important. When Hitler invaded
Russia in 1941 he didn't realize he would end up attacking into the teeth of the
worst Russian winter in almost a century-and-a-half [I rely on my memory for
this one, unable to track down the source], and this winter, for which the
Germans were unprepared by anything they'd ever experienced, contributed
strongly to their ultimate defeat. Heinz Guderian, the German Panzer Commander,
made a temperature reading of -63F in early December. He wrote how "many
men died while performing their natural functions, as a result of congelation
[freezing] of the anus." As we consider the possibility of a
radically-changed world climate, remember we are talking, finally, about life
and death, for individuals and even possibly for civilizations.)
So, somewhat disappointed
by The Wall Street Journal's article-- not really a challenge-- I
searched the Internet for contrarian opinion, working my way through the
websites of such organizations as the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, the Cooler Heads Coalition (guess what their position is), Capitalism
Magazine, and others, plus I examined accounts of contrarian opinion in more
general publications. But they just make the same points over and over, as if
working from the same "talking points" handout-- it's been warmer in
the past, it got colder after 1940, the Medieval Warm Period was wonderful, the
whole subject's complex, the temperature's been going down anyway, many who
believe in man-made global warming are basically neo-primitive anti-growth
pagans, etc., etc. (I leave out of my discussion clouds and global warming,
because there's no scientific consensus on the subject, but the contrarians'
fervent belief that clouds will in fact cool us is increasingly undermined by
incoming data.) Some of these articles are surreal. S. Fred Singer in Capitalism
Magazine in 1998: "Undiluted hype about global warming and climate
disasters is polluting the journals and airwaves; multimillion-dollar propaganda
campaigns are underway by environmental activists....in the last two
decades...climate has not warmed....sea level will drop-- not rise....warming is
definitely better than cooling....Should we ruin our economies and cause
tremendous hardship for people to counter a phantom threat?" The only good
points contrarians make are really marginal ones, such as: uncertainty in the
older data (as said), the heating hasn't been as
rapid as predicted, extreme weather events like great hurricanes haven't
happened as much as predicted, or that the computer models involved have flaws.
But is that it?
And I've also been
impressed when some of these same strong enemies of the global warming idea
occasionally -- through gritted teeth no doubt-- end up conceding that maybe,
yes, something really warm is happening out there after all:
Duncan Maxwell Anderson, Crisis
Magazine, 2/11/04: "The surface of the planet has warmed one Fahrenheit
degree over the past century."
Jonathan H. Adler,
Competitive Enterprise Institute (1996): "It is certainly possible that
human activity will contribute to a warming of the planet. Yet this fact, in and
of itself, is no cause for alarm."
Even the University of
Virginia's Environmental Sciences Professor Patrick J. Michaels, one of the
leaders of the contrarians, and co-author with Robert C. Balling Jr. (which
climatologist, in a burst of contrarian panglossianism, has declared "there
will be engineering schemes that will allow our children's children to have
whatever climate they want") of The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air
about Global Warming, in testimony before Congress in July 2003:
"Scientific data really tells us how much it is going to warm over the next
100 years, and it's going to be at the low end of projections, and people will
adapt as long as their economies are free." Dr. Michaels predicts a
greenhouse warming of 2.3F by 2100, not a gigantic rise, but significant.
(Incidentally, is it
worth mentioning that during a 4-year period in the early 1990's Professor
Michaels took over $115,000 from coal and other energy interests, and that his
quarterly, World Climate Review, was funded by the Western Fuels
Association, a consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fueled utilities? Nor is he
the only contrarian to be the recipient of energy corporations' largess, or
other conservative largess. For instance, super-contrarian S. Fred Singer, whose
surreal article in Capitalism Magazine has been quoted from, has
an organization called the Science and Environmental Policy Project, which has
received free office space from the Reverend Sung Myung Moon's Unification
Church, and has other involvements with Moon.)
Dr. John Michael Wallace,
an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and once an
advocate of the position that all global warming was natural, is another who's
had to give in. As of 2000 he came to admit that the 1990's warming "pulled
me in a mainstream direction", and he's now about 80% sure global warming
is human-caused.
Another long-time
skeptic, Dr. Tim P. Barnett, a Marine Physicist at the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography in San Diego, came around in 2001: "I was maybe 60-40 before,
but I'm at least 90-10 now."
Even Dr. Richard S.
Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the King of the Konservative Kontrarians, predicts a
warming of 0.5C to a little under 2C in the 21st Century if atmospheric carbon
dioxide doubles, which it may. (And, though I'm sure it's never affected his
judgment, let's mention how Dr. Lindzen's been fortunate enough to receive
$2,500 a day from oil and coal interests for "consulting services",
once had a speech "underwritten" by OPEC, and had his 1991 trip to
Washington DC to testify before the Senate paid for by Western Fuels.)
Yet one more deep
skeptic, once a self-professed human warming "agnostic", Robert G.
Quayle, Chief of the Global Climate Laboratory of the U.S. National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, came around as early as 1996: "We're not
particularly agnostic anymore. There is such a convergence of data it gets to be
a little spooky."
And the only other point
made by contrarians that seems to need any addressing is: that a minority of
world glaciers, and some of the ice of West Antarctica, are stable or still
growing. But this seems a result of nothing more than some local increases in
precipitation (snow), which itself is probably a result of global warming.
(Melting sea ice is sucked into the air as moisture, and the warmer the air, the
more water vapor it holds. [Water vapor is itself an immensely powerful greenhouse
gas.])
Meanwhile, nowhere have I
seen conservatives answering the fact that man-made global warming advocates
have issued very specific predictions since the 1980's. They've gone out on limb
after limb and their predictions are coming true. The importance of these
predictions is that they couldn't come true under natural warming, only
man-made. The main one's this: Natural warming would be globally even, man-made
warming (except in deep ocean) most powerful in the Arctic and Antarctic, significant but less powerful
in the temperate regions, mildest in the tropics.
So what's happened?
As we've seen, global
temperature as a whole has risen over 0.6C, or 1-1.1F, since 1900. In the last
50 years average winter temperature has risen nearly 9F on the 800-mile-long
Antarctic Peninsula, while its annual temperature rose 5F from the late 1940's to
the late 1990's (which is 10 times faster than the global rise).
Ecologist Bill Fraser,
who's been coming to the Peninsula for 3 decades, said in 2004: "A century
ago this was basically a polar environment. Now we have this subarctic system
impinging. I've watched the confrontation over the past 30 years, and the polar
system has really disintegrated at Palmer [his base]. I'm in awe that it has
taken such a short time to happen....It has gone to hell." ("No Room
to Run", Fen Montaigne, National Geographic Magazine, 9/04, 39, 48)
The West Antarctic
region's mean annual temperature has risen 4.5F in 60 years, faster than almost
anywhere.
And, overall, Antarctica
has warmed 2.5C since the 1940's, and almost 5C in winter. (Confirming yet
another prediction by human warming advocates, that warming, especially in the
high latitudes, will be greater in winter than summer. Such is happening up
north, with winter temperatures in Alaska and western Canada rising 5-7F faster
than summer temperatures.) (In fairness, I should add, other scientists think
Antarctica, or much of it, is actually cooling. The records and measurements
used by both sides are sparse, with reliable records going back less than 50
years and really detailed ones only about 10. Unquestionably, most of the
western coastal area is warming, indeed radically in some parts, and most of the
rest of Antarctica isn't. It balances out on paper to an overall Antarctic
warming, and a world warming that continues for centuries will eventually seize
every part of the long-frozen continent.)
Alaska?
Temperature has increased
as much as 4.4C in the last 30 years, and winter warmth has risen twice as fast
as summer warmth.
The rivers of Alaska and
northern Canada have warmed by 2.8C in the last 20 years. (If they warm much
more, they will become too hot for the salmon in summer.)
Much of Siberia has risen
by the same number of degrees as Alaska in the same period.
The Arctic as a whole?
After 1984 Arctic warming
speeded up to become 8 times faster than it was in the entire 20th Century, and
the Arctic now is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the world. And the
warming appears to be picking up speed. A 4-year study by the 8 Arctic nations, The
Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, released in November 2004, predicted that
by the 2090's surface air temperature in much of the Arctic may rise by an
unbelievable 18-21F.
The central Arctic is
warming 10 times faster than the planet as a whole.
Meanwhile, as predicted,
temperate region global warming has been significant but not as extreme as in
the Arctic or Antarctic.
For instance, the
increase in winter and spring water temperature in Narragansett Bay,
Massachusetts, over the last 3 decades has been 2-3C.
Wintertime temperature in
Chesapeake Bay has risen 2C in 40 years.
In Switzerland, the
temperature increase in the rock and mud of the Alps in the 20th Century has
been 1-2C.
Average annual shoreline
temperature at Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey Bay, California from 1933 to
1994 increased about 1.3F.
Water temperature off San
Diego rose 2-3F between 1951 and 1995.
In New South Wales,
Australia, temperature has risen almost 1C in the last 50 years.
Overall, temperatures in
the 20th Century generally rose faster the more distant a region was from the
Equator.
Another, perhaps
counter-intuitive, prediction that's come true-- another marker of man-made as
opposed to natural warming-- is that the lower atmosphere has warmed while the
atmosphere above it, the stratosphere, thinned and cooled.
And one more prediction, that nighttime temperatures would rise faster than
daytime temperatures, is also coming true, according to measurements made at
5,400 weather stations around the world between 1950 and 1993.
Another item which especially struck my attention, and should strike the
contrarians who say nothing's happening now that's really unique, was the
disintegration in early 2002 of an ice shelf the size of Rhode Island in
Antarctica, part of the larger Larsen B Ice Shelf. It disintegrated in 35 days.
It seems to have existed for at least 12,000 years, surviving all other high
temperature episodes since the end of the Glacial Period. "The speed of it
is staggering," said Dr. David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey.
(Since this event, glaciers in the area have started flowing 8 times faster into
the sea.) And the next year Canada's Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, the largest in the
Arctic, completed breaking up. It was on the north coast of Ellesmere Island,
and had existed for at least 3,000 years. But then, of all of the ice that had
edged the north coast of Ellesmere Island at the beginning of the 20th Century,
about 90% is gone.
We could go on and on and on now, piling up the evidence, but at some point
you're not just beating a dead horse, you're grinding its bones into dust. So
I'll just add one other clincher: In 2000 researchers at Imperial College
London, examining satellite data, found that between 1970 and 1997 infrared
radiation was indeed being increasingly trapped by greenhouse gases. But really,
re contrarians, didn't we go through something like this once with tobacco, when decades' worth of scientists made the
case with charts and lab work and logic that tobacco was harmless, or even
healthy for you? They're all gone now, those "experts", forever
discredited. Some were fools. Some were whores And, oh yes, O.J. Simpson was
innocent. Experts with DNA science showed up to prove that too.
And we haven't even reached the main point yet. Nor do the contrarians, so far
as I've seen, ever address it.
It's this:
Carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) (the 2 most significant greenhouse gases)
and the temperature of Earth have, as far as we can tell, moved in absolute
lockstep for 440 million years. If we focus on the last 400-420,000 years--
whose actual air has been examined by scientists in ice cores taken from ice
sheets-- it's stunning to see how the 3 move together. The shapes of the 3
graphs are essentially identical. Periods when the 2 gases have been at their
height are the warmest periods, and their low periods are the coldest. (For
instance, as the world warmed out of the Glacial Period methane entered the
atmosphere at a 50% higher rate than before.)
For over 400,000 years the gases remained in a narrow range, CO2 between about
180 and 280 ppm
(parts per million-- of all parts of the atmosphere) and methane between about
350 and 700 ppb (parts per billion). But suddenly we have broken through
ceilings established 100's of 1,000's of years ago and are soaring higher. CO2
was 375.64 in 2003. And climatologists have been shocked by the seeming speeding
up of the CO2 rise recently: 2.08 ppm from 2001 to 2002, and 2.54 ppm from 2002
to 2003, the first back-to-back rises of 2.0 plus. (The average yearly rise
between 1958 and 2003 was 1.3 ppm.)
Methane is now around 1,750 ppb-- well over twice what it was in even the
warmest period of the last 400,000 years. Other greenhouse gases, like nitrous
oxide and chlorofluorocarbons, have also risen.
We are going to a place where we have never been. The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change estimates that CO2 could rise as high as 970 ppm by 2100. That
would take us to a level not seen since the extremely warm Eocene Era of 36-55
million years ago. And beyond that is the CO2 level of the dinosaur age, which
may have been as high as 1,750 ppm, or even higher. Trust this: You do not want
to be a human being trying to survive in a hellish recreation of the dinosaurs'
climate.
(Quick science lesson, if by chance the only news items you've been paying
attention to the last several years are shark attacks, sports, Brad 'n' Jen and
the Murder-Trial-Of-The-Century-Of-The-Month: All fossil fuels are made up of
carbon and hydrogen atoms, in differing combinations. When you burn fuel the
hydrogen atoms are detached and the carbon atoms join with the oxygen in the
atmosphere to form CO2, carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas which keeps a lot of
the radiation from the Sun from returning to space after it bounces off the
Earth. The burning of trees and other plants also releases their carbon to join
with oxygen. Burning methane, splitting apart its carbon and hydrogen atoms,
does the same. But even if methane isn't split apart it still acts as a
greenhouse gas, in fact a much more powerful one [21 times] than carbon
dioxide.)
Smiley-face conservatism, endless optimism, the eternal sunnyboy grin and
twinkle in the eye of a Ronald Reagan, as much as Christianity, is the religion
of America, and has been its energy source, and there is something wonderful
about it, a counterweight to the long tragic doleful dirge of history. But it
must never become disconnected from reality, or it becomes nothing more than the
"up" phase of a manic-depressive. We will soon examine the possible
consequences of a deeply warmed world, and peeling away the smiley-face
confront its death-head.
I wish the global warming advocates are wrong and the conservatives are right,
because if the conservatives are wrong humanity goes to a new place, and it goes
there unprepared and naked to face monsters. If global warming carries to its
worst conclusion our civilization will not stand, to be replaced by a different
kind of civilization, or something less than that.
But before we look at this new place, let's examine if there is some hope. That
even at this late date the human race can come to its senses and make the needed
u-turn. It's too late to avoid some measure of global warming-- that's now built
into the Earth's climate system. But can we make enough changes to ameliorate
it, hold it within bearable limits?
Above all, can we cut back on use of fossil fuel, and its fiendish, ever-starved
and mewling get-- the automobile?
World oil production is now peaking. The world's maximum production capacity
(not including the exotic "heavy oils") is 30 to 35 billion barrels a
year, more towards the lower figure. But that level of production can only be
sustained for a decade, at the very most. Then world production of conventional
oil begins its inexorable slide downward, never to be reversed. (Oil production
in the United States peaked in 1970, and has been plummeting ever since-- why
we're so dependent on foreign oil in general and Saudi oil in particular. John
Kerry-- though on this subject he was like virtually all other politicians--
made a fool of himself in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention by
saying the time has come to break America of its dependence on Saudi oil. We
will indeed break our dependence on Saudi oil-- when it runs out. Or when Saudi
Arabia decides to keep the last portion of its reserves for its own use, as
every oil producer will do at some point in the coming generations.)
The consensus among oil experts is that by the 2030's, maybe even the 2020's,
world oil production will be in such freefall that it will no longer be able to
serve as the alpha fuel of our civilization. If this prediction errs, it's on
the optimistic side. This doesn't mean there will be no conventional oil after
2039. There'll be some, ever-diminishing and so expensive that only the rich and
the powerful (and their militaries) will be able to afford it. And the final
gallon won't be sucked from the planet till sometime early in the 22nd Century.
(In the spirit of fairness, I should report that George Bush's Department of
Energy, hunkered deep in its right-wing fantasy world, predicts oil production
will soar towards 50 billion barrels a year in the 2020's and continue upward.)
So will we see the windmills arise everywhere, and every house refitted with
solar power, and...?
Listen to me. Here is the truth. About energy and human psychology. It is harsh,
brutal and realistic:
Whatever environmentalists and alternative-energy advocates hope for, the human
race will not go gently, or intelligently, into its dark fuelless night. It will
do whatever it has to do to keep the party going, squeezing out as many extra
generations or even a few centuries of fossil fuel as it can, at whatever
expense of the well-being of 1,000's of years of humanity to come.
(Other nice energy possibilities that won't happen, apparently, are: Fusion
power: either a technical impossibility, or it will arrive too far in the future
to make a difference in global warming. Probably an impossibility. Plutonium:
too dangerous, makes nuclear weapons, and deadly poisonous waste lasts 240,000
years. Solar power from stations in outer space: too expensive, even it it
wasn't technically beyond our means. And what about a hydrogen economy? No, not
the answer. Hydrogen is extracted from fossil fuels, or you have to apply energy
produced in power plants to split water to get it.)
(And while we're at it, let's knock down another savior-solution, one President
Bush has high hopes for, CO2 sequestration, i.e., storing the CO2 we now produce
in the ground [into the sea would be too dangerous a risk], instead of letting
it fly into the atmosphere, the present situation. The problem with this idea is
that the technology is not really proven, would be very expensive, and requires
huge amounts of energy itself. But even if it could be done it wouldn't end
global warming. 1/3 of greenhouse gas emissions comes from the burning of
forests, grasslands, crops and other plant matter. 1/10 of Man's annual output
of CO2 may be caused by the continuing destruction of the Amazon forest alone.
And CO2 sequestration will do nothing to deal with methane and other greenhouse
gases. Methane may be responsible for up to 20-25% of Man's greenhouse warming.)
Humanity will be like a smoker who's warned of the dangers-- so increasingly
mixes his beloved Camels with other brands. But still 3 packs a day. In this
case, initially, the "other brands" will be natural gas and coal.
(John Kerry's energy "program", according to "Pump Dreams', John
Cassidy, The New Yorker, 10/11/04, 43-4, was going to involve
"promoting natural gas and coal...he will build a gas pipeline from
Alaska...and invest ten billion dollars in modernizing antiquated coal
plants." George Bush's "program" will be no more imaginative.)
Coal plus ever-diminishing supplies of natural gas plus some dribs of oil can
help get the world through, though in an ever-poorer fashion, to the 22nd
Century, and coal will get it deeper into the 22nd Century, for a few decades in
combination with the last tiny remnants of oil and gas, but more importantly
with "heavy oils" like oil shale and tar sands. Coal and the heavy
oils are dirty and deeply polluting fuels, and they pour much more carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere than regular oil. If humanity-- or, rather, the
favored portion of it (5 to 15%)-- goes this route to preserve some semblance of
fossil fuel civilization for itself-- the carbon dioxide levels in the
atmosphere will continue to soar up the graph.
Think it won't happen? Even as I write, a single Canadian province, Albert, is
preparing to double its tar sands output, from 1 million to 2 million barrels a
day, which will equal the current regular oil output of OPEC nations like Libya
and Algeria.
Think the coal route won't be taken? "The official treaty to curb
greenhouse-gas emissions hasn't gone into effect yet and already three countries
[the U.S., China and India] are planning to build nearly 850 new coal-fired
plants, which would pump up to five times as much carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere as the Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce....the world is facing a tidal
wave of new power plants fired by coal...." ("New coal plants bury
'Kyoto' ", Christian Science Monitor, 12/23/04)
And in the end what?
It's 2150 and now the oil, natural gas and coal are gone. Or, if there's
anything left of coal, the billionaires, warlords, Presidents, gated
communities, megacorps, superstars, tyrants, druglords and khans of the day will
keep it for themselves. And, like the noble families of ancient Rome after its
conclusive defeat by the barbarians in the late 400's AD, they still won't want
to let go of a life that has been so pleasurable for so long. There will be
heavy oil left-- and there's another potential fuel as well, which as I write is
virtually untouched, but which experts say surpasses all the oil, natural gas
and coal in the world.
Methane again.
This hydrocarbon and rabid greenhouse gas is trapped in the permafrost of the
Arctic and above all under ocean floors. It is trapped as gas hydrate, a single
methane molecule surrounded by molecules of frozen water, generally 6 molecules.
The substance is icelike, but not exactly ice. Methane could be drilled for in
the ocean, the methane molecules being removable from the frozen water molecules
by several proposed means. But, also, possibly a bargain with the Devil. There
is so much trapped methane on the planet, and its greenhouse effect is so
virulent, that its release could simply stun Earth's climate, overloading what
is already an overwarmed planet.
Nations and companies are looking at methane today.
We'll say that if every conceivable source is exploited, including methane,
whatever the long-term damage to Man and his world, fossil fuel civilization
will be extendable by up to 250 or 300 years.
After that it won't matter if there isn't a molecule of fossil fuel left. Cruel,
inexorable, overwhelming feedback mechanisms will be locked into Earth's
climate, and Man, for all his seeming power, will be unable to do anything other
than watch them play out over 4, 8, 10,000 years or more, likely not to be
reversed till the coming of the next Glacial Period, which will last for 100,000
icy years.
You think alternative energy will take charge? In 1980 President Carter offered
legislation to enable "us to reach our goal of deriving 20% of all the
energy we use by the end of this century directly from the sun." (He also
said in 1979: "Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more
foreign oil than we did in 1977-- never.")
As of 2002 solar energy provided 7/100th's of 1% of all U.S. energy. In 2001
U.S. consumption of renewable energy fell 12%. Solar energy dropped for the 3rd
year in a row. At the rate solar capacity is added in the U.S., it will take 30
years to add up to a single conventional plant. In all my years of walking
around my city of over 8 million people-- the "greatest city in the
world"-- I have never seen a solar panel.
(And between 1985 and 1997 U.S. oil imports doubled. The U.S. accounted for 1/3
of world oil consumption growth in the 1990's.)
Renewable energy sources, hydroelectricity from dams not included, supplied
about 1% of world energy in 2002, fossil fuel over 90%. (Oil and gas account for
about 65%.)
We've gone backward in auto energy efficiency. American passenger vehicles
averaged 27.5 miles per gallon in 1987, 24 in 2000. "In the 2003 model
year, the average fuel economy of G.M.'s cars and trucks fell to their lowest
level in two decades. And the company has lobbied vigorously to block more
stringent fuel regulations and has taken major roles in lawsuits against
California's antipollution rules." ("George Jetson, Meet the
Sequel", N.Y. Times, 1/9/05, Section 3, 1) The original Model T got
more miles to the gallon than today's average Ford. How did this happen? By
exempting the ever more popular SUVs, minivans and pickups from car laws.
"Proposals to hold SUVs to the same standards as cars are usually killed by
a coalition of union-backed Democrats and industry-backed Republicans..." (Time
Magazine, 2/24/03, 41) (The Republican Party received over 10 million
dollars from the auto industry in 2002.) To ensure that America never achieves
energy efficiency "Every year since Republicans took control of Congress in
1995, they have added riders to the Transportation Department's budget barring
any spending to investigate fuel-economy issues." (N.Y. Times,
10/5/99, A22) Squeezing even further, a provision in President Bush's 2003 tax
cut changed the tax write-off law, so that instead of being able to write
off your Hummer or other SUVs, minivans or pickups-- the vehicles must be for
"business purposes", of course-- only up to $38,200 a year, you could
write off up to $100,000. And to ensure the maximum possible damage to the
environment, Congress has limited the credit only to vehicles over 6,000 pounds.
(Also, 6,000+ vehicles are exempted from gas-guzzler taxes.) Bike riders,
walkers, rail users-- did you receive any $100,000 Federal tax gift? (FLASH!
October 2004: "most first-year write-offs" being reduced to $25,000. [N.Y.
Times, 10/12/04, C16]) Bike riders, walkers, rail users-- are you now
awaiting your $25,000?) As said, these vehicles being subsidized pour far more
pollutants and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than other cars. Think the
rest of the world is any different? Human beings are ravenous for cars, the
bigger, the shinier, the filthier and less efficient the better. Car sales in
China are growing by over 50 % a year. In Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the
Philippines collectively: 47%. Between 1993 and 2004 Chinese car ownership
increased 11-fold (from 733,000 to over 8,000,000). Between July 2003 and July 2004
car sales in India rose more than 18 %, and SUVs now account for 10 % of vehicle
purchases. To make China more modern, bicycles, once a major part of China's
transportation system, are being banned from the major avenues of cities. Over
70 % of travelers went by bike in Shanghai in 1990. It's now down to 15-17 %. As
bike-riding plummets, the Chinese cities fill with cars. Between 1998 and 2004
vehicles in Beijing doubled from 1 to 2 million. They burn the dirtiest,
cheapest oil-- so-called "sour crude"-- China can find. The leading
cause of death in China is respiratory disease. In 1996 Italy had more cars per
person than the United States. "All over Eastern Europe, but especially
here in wealthier Poland, people are buying cars in an explosion of ownership
that has come with better economic conditions and the growing acceptance of
credit." (N.Y. Times, 11/2/97, Sec. 4, 4) In Eastern Europe as a
whole the "rush for the automobile is already eroding the vast network of
trains, trams and buses, one of Communism's positive legacies." (N.Y.
Times, 11/3/94, A14) Budapest's tramway/bus ridership fell from 1.9 million
passengers in 1989 to under 1.5 million in 1993. When West Germany took over the
East, it raised tram ticket prices in East Berlin 14-fold. Berlin had 300,000
cars in 1989, over 500,000 just 5 years later. In the Netherlands, which has
about as dense and superb a national rail/bus system as exists on Earth, urban
transport's share of national passenger travel fell, between 1986 and 1995, from
4.3 % to 3.6 %. The automobile? Its share rose from 77.8 % to 78.7 %. Bicycling
fell off by 5.6 %, this in one of the most bike-friendly countries in the world.
(I know, I've been there, I've seen it.) "Dutch cities offer free subway
tickets to motorists who use car parks on the cities' edges, but the parks are
still stubbornly half empty." (Newsweek, 8/25/97, 35) Want more
cause for optimism? Recently in Europe "S.U.V. sales have soared...and,
just as they did in America, S.U.V.'s are spreading steadily across the European
landscape....It has proved hard to enact anti-S.U.V. legislation...partly
because of the influence of the automobile industry in places like Britain,
Germany and Sweden....S.U.V. owners like them for all the familiar reasons. They
like their muscularity, their swagger." ("American Icon: Big, Bad
S.U.V.'s Are Spreading to Europe", N.Y. Times, 11/14/04, Sec. 1, 3) Think
East Asia, with its "collectivist" orientation, could really be an
exception? In 1960 only 4.8 % of passenger transportation in Japan was by car.
By 1997 it rose to 58.2 %. Rail's share fell from 76.6 % to 29.5 %.
(Nonetheless, Europe and East Asia still retain a core of sanity on the subject
of transportation, as can be seen in public transportation figures that have
fallen but are still extremely high by U.S. standards, and as can be seen in the
fact France and Germany, with their great national rail systems [light rail to
190 mph super-trains] managed to cut oil consumption 10 % from 1973 to 2003,
while in the U.S. it rose 16 %, a sanity that eludes America. The U.S. once had
a great national light rail system-- about 600 miles in New York City alone,
about 760 miles in the Los Angeles area's magnificent Pacific Electric Railway--
plus an intercity rail network of spiderweb density and superb efficiency--
almost all of it torn up and thrown away so we could be modern and happy and
free.)
Gluttonous suburbs have
continued their spread-- not just in the United States-- well-designed to fail
any possible energy-efficiency test. In America proud of the fact that they ban
sidewalks. (Once, visiting Florida, I walked a couple of miles from my motel to
my grandparents' house, on grass or in the street, and I don't think I passed 2
pedestrians the whole way.) Proud of the fact they ban workplaces and stores
from residential sections, so that instead of walking 3 blocks to one and 2
blocks to the other, you have to ride 5 miles to one and 1 mile to the other, in
your shiny 6,400-pound (the German MaK MK20 A1 Wiesel AWC mini-tank weighs 6,160
pounds) and 8-10 miles per gallon (according to dealers; General Motors says
10-13 mph but by American law so that no efficiency test may ever be passed this
vehicle and others like it are exempted from having to have gas mileage figures
posted on window stickers) HUMMER H2! starting at $49,190 in 2003 but
approaching 6 figures with all the features "Hummer dealers are selling out
their inventory with no discounts, rebates or special financing, auto industry
trackers say" (cbsnews.com, 7/7/03) (SUV sales up 42 % 1998-2002) the
HUMMER H2 marketed as a "real" SUV by G.M. as opposed to the 3,998-pound
Jeep Grand Cherokee for sissy-men and men who are just "girlie-men" (Schwarzenegger
owned 6 Hummers by 2002 and "an incredibly precise and forceful
machine" he said) FORCEFUL Coolio the rapper ("Gangsta's
Paradise" his top hit) says "We drive it when we want to 'floss'
" in the N.Y. Times 12/4/97, D4 Detroit advertising executive Marcie
Brogan stands smiling beside her "bright red 6,400-pound Hummer"
"I've always said I'd like to drive a tank..."
While Paris' central city population fell 27 % between 1961 and 1991 and
Stockholm's fell 16 % their suburban populations rose 105 % and 164 %
respectively. I've been to Paris. It's the most exquisitely beautiful city in
the world, and its rail system is simply the best that human ingenuity and
government commitment can provide. But somehow it hasn't been enough...
Human beings are ravenous for energy, for rational reasons and because it meets
other hungers. For instance, in Thailand fuel oil consumption rose 22.5 % in the
first 2 months-- that's as in 60 days-- of 2004. China's electricity consumption
grew 10.4 % in 2002 followed by 15 % in 2003. Its oil demand is growing 30-40 %
a year, and China's oil imports for all of 2004 were up almost 35 %. Coal
consumption in China is growing by more than 10 % a year. (Again, the Kyoto
Protocol exempts China from any fossil fuel cutbacks.) In general, in those
countries with the fastest growing economies annual growth for oil is 5-9 % and
for gas it's 8-12 %. World fossil fuel demand is soaring beyond control.
Now, in fact, it's too late for the Chinese (and the like), they've started
their move too late in fossil fuel's history to make it to full Western
modernity, but they're going to give it a try anyway, like a 60-year-old virgin
in a swinger's club, for the same reason they're tearing down their older
architecture and neighborhoods to make way for the glassine and the pseudo-Americosuburban
which will not pass the 21st Century's severe energy tests.
The young people-- will they save us, the next generation (though it's a
succession of "next generations" which got us here)? The young people.
Every year for the last 38 the American Council on Education has surveyed
college freshmen on various matters. Asked whether it's important to work for an
environmental cause, only 35 % said Yes in 1992. By 2003 it was 17 %.
Yes, human beings, for the most part, are proud of the fact that they
"don't know much about history". But it's as if they operate through a
collective memory of it, of their starving days and peasant days, all the
raggedy incarnations they barely survived or didn't, and now are determined to
make up for every bare-ribbed or lost life. You can see it anywhere and
everywhere. You can see it in eating. In 1990 Americans were already bloated and
sickened by their overeating of meat and other edibles, but in the next 10 years
each American added an additional 140 pounds of food ("America Rubs Its
Stomach, and Says Bring It On", N.Y. Times, 7/7/02, Sec. 4, 5), and
also almost 10 pounds in weight. Over a 20 year period-- 1980 to 2000-- the
average weight gain was almost 20 pounds. But don't just blame the Americans. 50
% of Europeans are now overweight or obese. 40 years ago each Chinese averaged
8.8 pounds of meat a year. Now it's 119 pounds. Overall world meat consumption
tripled between 1961 and 2004. (In 2000 each American ate about 114 pounds of
red meat, 70 pounds of poultry and 15 pounds of fish, plus 75 pounds of added
fats like butter and lard, washed down by oceans of soda, in 2004 an average 574
cans' worth per person.) (If you're asking, yes I'm a vegetarian.) Want more
cause for optimism? The American fast food chain Hardee's (2,067 restaurants),
already enjoying the great success of its Thickburgers (2004 same-store sales up
7.8 % as of mid-November), recently introduced the Monster Thickburger, 1,420
calories, 107 grams of fat (almost 2 days' worth), 2/3 pound of beef plus bacon,
cheese, mayo, buttered bun...In no way apologetic for the sickness and death it
will be causing, Hardee's press release brags about it as "a monument to
decadence"-- the Center for Science in the Public Interest well describes
it as "food porn".
All this too is connected to global warming, not just as a psychological example
of a civilization entering its terminal phase, but objectively: Much of the
deforestation that spews carbon dioxide into the atmosphere comes from the
clearing of forests to create pasture for cattle. (And also, just through their
belching in 1992, the world's cattle added 60 million tons of methane to the
atmosphere. Overall, in 1992 1,280,000,000 cattle and other cud-chewers were
responsible for 12 % of methane emissions.)
(It's also worth noting that the U.S. produces so much food, and its citizens
are so over-stuffed, that almost half of it is thrown away, according to a
recent study by University of Arizona anthropologist Timothy W. Jones.
["Almost half of U.S. food is tossed", azcentral.com, 11/24/04] What's
more, between 1980 and 2000 Americans became more wasteful, not less, as their
discarding of food doubled. This is what happens in a society rich enough and
amoral enough to go beyond rational need, and find the transient satisfactions
past its edge. A comparable experience is that environmental holocaust wrongly
called commercial "fishing", whereby shrimpers kill and throw away up
to 15 pounds of fish and other sea life for every pound of shrimp they keep, or
whereby giant longlines and nets sweep the seas clean of seals, sea lions,
dolphins, whales, seabirds, turtles, invertebrates and so-called
"trash" fish to get at the few species wanted for sale.)
The entire cause of man-made global warming is human psychology. This is why
"rational solutions" to it haven't appeared. We are losing to our
instinct. In the 1700's a still impoverished human race suddenly broke through
to magic, and its unconscious desires were met, and can't be given up
(voluntarily). Suddenly the human race could fly, could dive to the bottom of
the sea, could move its ships without sails and its carriages without horses,
could fill its famished bellies with food till they burst, could go up the
mountains and then further to the Moon, could create magical windows to show us
everything, even naughty stuff (in 1999 computers consumed 13 % of America's
electricity), keep us finally warm all the time or cool all the time, enable us
to live 100's of feet in the air, speak across the world, set cities ablaze with
light-- and we're intoxicated, addicted, drunk, giddy, out of control-- pick
your words. "Researchers at Yale University...say that when laboratory
animals are fed healthy food, they will eat their fill but refrain from stuffing
themselves. Yet when they are switched to a high-calorie diet with lots of fatty
fare, they will keep on eating until they swell up to as much as three times
their original weight, possibly because of an instinctual preference for foods
that deliver the most calories-- as a way to stave off starvation in bad
times." (America Rubs Its Stomach, and Says Bring It On") Indeed, it's
like those lab rats pumpingpumpingpumping the levers for cocaine cocaine more
cocaine even though rats existed all right for 10's of millions of
years without it moremoremoremoremoremore till it kills them and they don't even
care new rats take the place of the dead rats and again pump pump pump for
moremoremore but nothing comes out all of a sudden. And you expect the rats to
be reasonable when this happens? Or us? Though our civilization is ultimately a
civilization of death it doesn't seem so, it seems totally otherwise, as we've
asked for and received: more, more cars, more light, more meat, more drugs, more
soda, more ice cream, more erections, more orgasms, more hair, more steel, more
speed, more power...The adjustment would be wrenching even if we were capable of
it.
I don't mean some of the human race won't attempt the adjustment. We're at least
one evolutionary cut above rats, and we don't consciously want to die. The
tragedy is that answers were available, other designs available, to avoid global
warming once, and even today it's not too late to ameliorate it, to hold it
within bounds. But who holds the power in the West, those who could or those who
can't? As we move deeper into our situation, and real panic begins to set in,
the use of alternative energy sources (and nuclear too) will grow. It'll
have to, to plug at least some of the holes left by fossil fuel diminishment.
When I said our civilization could get to 2100, and then 2150...Of course I
didn't mean entirely through coal, heavy oils and methane.
I don't see full collapse during the next few transitional centuries, just
chaos, turmoil, violence and suffering, with small successes in pockets, as
humanity wars not just against its situation but against itself, in a literal
civil war. The technocapitalist elite will continue to rule for a time, while
the ever more stupefied masses beneath will still mostly look to them for
answers-- everything worked so nicely for a while-- and others who were right
all along will finally explode in frustration. There are many human beings
on this planet who want a revolution in human affairs, and they won't be
satisfied with half-measures, with let's tweak, let's change emphasis and
proportions only, let's try some alternatives, to some extent, but
let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, and let's keep dancing with the
girls what brung us, and not change horses, or Hummers, in midstream, or go off
the deep end, there's no need to fall and "I assure you, my fellow
citizens, we will not fall" when there is still energy everywhere-- in
coal, in tar sands, in oil shale, in methane, in uranium, in plutonium, in the
hydroelectricity of great dams, and the others will say No, you are pulling us
into a fatal new reality and we mustn't go there, not while solar power and wind
power and tidal power and biofuels and rail and hybrid cars and bicycles and
conservation and recycling and new communitarian and anti-materialistic
possibilities exist for us, and these 2 sides will go back and forth back and
forth shouting at each other the way they do now in talk radio and in our
politics, neither, to their growing rage, ever able to fully have their way,
whoever tries to move will be sure to be partly blocked, and I literally
believe the guns are going to come out at some point. We're dealing not just
with fundamentally incompatible political views, as incompatible as those
between slavers and abolitionists in America in the 1850's, but really between
incompatible views of existence, different religions really-- one Manmaterialist,
the other Pantheistcommunitarian, and the sooner we recognize that this is
ultimately what the global warming debate is about the better-- and they are
irreconcilable and will finally have it out in a burning world, which will
contribute to keeping humanity from achieving the consensus that might have
limited the fire.
Meanwhile, those outside the West, unconstrained by our divisions, our
over-contentious democracies, will act as they see fit for themselves. China
will act, burning up its last grain of coal if necessary to keep from collapse.
(75 % of China's power plant production is by coal, and 2/3 of its overall power
comes from coal and coal products.) India will act. (In 1998 70 % of its power
came from coal.) Russia won't worry about political or environmental niceties.
The ever-more-powerful Islamic world will not involve an abstract future in its
energy decisions. The CO2 and methane will continue to fly into the air. All
this will be happening in a world that never really made it to modernity and
prosperity, with all those giant countries like Pakistan and India and China and
Indonesia and Congo and Bangladesh and Ethiopia and Nigeria, all eventually
nuclear-armed, who came close enough to almost taste it but in the end never
tasted it, even though they made one final fatal push in the 21st Century.
They'll hate us and blame us and we'll hate and blame them too. This will be a
damnable world to live in, and all we're describing is its beginning.
And what will come of democracy in the end? Democracy. The worst possible
system, except all the others are worse, to paraphrase Winston Churchill.
Democracy. The system that says the destruction of human civilization is all
right if 51 % vote for it. And dictatorship's no better. However it starts, it
soon devolves to greedy brutes and their murders. And no one's perspective is
shorter than a tyrant's. He will do what he has to do to stay in power and keep
warm, and keep enough others warm so that they don't murder him.
The human race is trapped. It's bumped up against its limits. It is in over its
head. So we're going to where we're going to. And here, finally, is the world to
come.
II. The Warm World
Many are the frightening effects of global warming. I mean extreme global
warming, the kind that blazes. But before looking at the grimmest possibilities,
I need to tell you that what you possibly thought would be the very worst-- sea
rise-- won't be.
The media, and environmentalists, have surely been scary on this subject,
sometimes describing it as if we're faced with a sudden catastrophe:
"Enough polar ice could melt to cause oceans to surge over New York,
Amsterdam and Bangladesh faster than people could build dikes or relocate to
higher ground." (N.Y. Times Magazine, 12/15/02, 72)
A headline in Science Digest, 8/86, 28, screamed:
"AMERICA WASHING AWAY
"From Malibu to Montauk, a rising sea lifts all houses, joining human
carelessness in wrecking the nation's finest beaches. Goodbye, Hamptons? So
long, Sea Island? Whither Santa Cruz?"
A whole series of scary headlines recently pulled from websites:
"Melting ice 'will swamp capitals' " (news.independent.co.uk, 12/7/03)
"German government report warns of 'devastating' climate changes due to
global warming, including flooding of the world's major cities such as
London, New York, Shanghai and Tokyo..." (eces.[Earth Crash Earth Spirit]org, 12/7/03)
"Global warming floods threaten 4m in UK" (education.guardian.co.uk,
4/22/04)
"Global warming could submerge three large Indian cities" (smh.com.au,
12/8/03)
Even a somewhat more reasonable Web article still terrifies:
"Thus a quick rise in sea level of 50 meters [164 feet] in 20 years with
total up to 100-110 meters [328 to 361 feet] in 40 years seems probable..."
(maxpages.com, 1999)
The climate, so to speak, in some media circles has become so extreme that even
nonsense like the following gets published: "In a worst-case scenario,
based on projections from some scientists, most of the earth will again be
covered with water..." (trinidadexpress.com, 9/12/04)
After all this hysteria, let me do something I have never seen done in any
article on global warming, and present a clear, concise account of how sea rise
really works when a world warms, beginning with the complete picture of sea rise
over the last 15,500 years. We start in 13,500 BC. The Glacial Period still
raged in all its icy brutality, but what the mammoth hunters couldn't know was
that their world was on the cusp of a profound change-- a great warming and
release from the 100,000-year-old cold. It would take over 5,000 years to break
from the freezing, but the beginning was at hand.
So much of the world's water was then trapped in ice sheets that the oceans
stood about 150 meters (492 feet) lower than today. (Scientists differ as to the
exact figure. 150 meters is at the high end of estimates, but some go even
higher.) Compensating for land lost under ice, a great deal of what is now ocean
bed was dry land. It was possible to walk from Australia to New Guinea, or,
leaving from Vietnam, across much of Indonesia.
Here is how the world's sea level has risen since 13,000 BC:
13,000 BC -10,500 BC: 50 meters (164
feet) 6.6 feet per century
10,500 BC - 7500 BC: 50 meters (164
feet) 5.5 feet per century
7500 BC - 5000 BC: 20 meters ( 66
feet) 2.6 feet per century
5000 BC - 3000 BC: 15 meters ( 49
feet) 2.5 feet per century
3000 BC - 1000 BC: 15 meters ( 49
feet) 2.5 feet per century
1000 BC - 400 AD: 1
meter ( 3.4
feet) 2.8 inches per century
400 AD - 1897 AD: 1.9 meters (
6.4 feet) 5.1 inches per century
1897 AD - 2000
AD:
9.8 inches
2000 AD - 2100 AD:
? 4 inches to 4 feet are the estimates
(Primarily based, re sea rise to 2000 AD, on information from the website of the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History plus a sea level chart in the N.Y. Times, 8/29/00, F1)
The century averaging makes the process seem more even than it actually was.
There were centuries, or periods of a few centuries, when the sea rise rate was
far greater. For instance, about 12,000 BC a gigantic Antarctic ice sheet melted
and raised the sea levels by 20 meters (66 feet) in just 200 years, accounting
for 40 % of the sea rise in the 13,000-10,500 BC period in the short time.
Another surge happened after 9300 BC, and the seas rose 12 feet per century.
(The N.Y. Times article, 8/14/90, C8, doesn't make clear how many
centuries this rate lasted.) And there were other centuries below our averages.
However, even in the worst case-- let's say 33 feet a century-- that only works
out to 4 inches a year. Nobody walking along a beach will be caught by
sea rise and suddenly swept away, or see their house-- or their city-- suddenly
drowned. And the rise is likely to be much less per year than 4 inches. (The
seas are currently rising by about 1/10 inch per year, though that is going to
speed up.) Unquestionably, in the exaggerations of their warnings (not just
regarding sea level rise), we see an environmental movement trying to scare
people into action through climatic hyperbole. They have a goal-- transforming
the social order-- yet you sense they lack confidence in the realities of the
situation sufficing to bring it about.
So as the greenhouse warms, how high, and how fast, really, will sea level rise?
First of all, there isn't another 150 meters worth of ice out there to melt. The
world's glaciers are rapidly melting away. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, which have
existed for 11,700 years, will soon be Memories of the Snows of Kilimanjaro
(scientists give it about 15 more years)-- 10 % of the glaciers of the Alps
melted in 2003 alone-- but the melting of all the glaciers, ice fields and ice
caps outside Greenland and Antarctica will only raise the seas by about 1.5
feet. From Antarctica: The Antarctic Peninsula adds another 1.5 feet, the Ross
Ice Shelf 2/5 of an inch, the Ronnie-Filchner ice shelves about 4-1/3 inches.
The non-inland ice of Greenland contributes about 2 inches. So far we've come up
with a little over 3-1/2 feet of sea rise, a problem but hardly a
civilization-killer, especially spread over a few centuries.
The permafrost-- the water held in frozen Arctic soil (a tiny amount's also in
high non-Arctic mountains)-- is potentially a more serious source of sea rise--
holding some 10 meters (about 33 feet) worth. But scientists seem unsure how
much of this would actually reach the ocean, and how much would stay in place,
creating wet, mushy land conditions, or new inland ponds and lakes. Enough
permafrost areas are low-lying, so let's figure an additional 10 feet of sea
rise from this source.
And so we have accounted for some 13-1/2 feet of sea rise, spread over, what, 5,
6, 7 centuries? If this was the only crisis it would be be very serious, but
still not an ultimate catastrophe.
Ah. But.
Greenland.
And Antarctica.
Many scientists believe that in the Interglacial Period before our own,
110-130,000 years ago, sea level was about 5 meters (16.4 feet) higher than
today. Some scientists think it was because much of Greenland's ice melted,
others say it was West Antarctica's ice. Perhaps there was some melting from
each, combined with melting from those lesser sources above. Whatever, this
proves that the great remaining ice caps are vulnerable. And we are going far
beyond the 2C maximum warmings of previous interglacials.
If Greenland melts the sea will rise between 21 and 24 feet. The West Antarctic
ice is a bit more extensive, and would raise the seas 26 to 27 feet. But the
truly great ice cap is the one on East Antarctica, with the potential to raise
sea level by up to 65 meters-- 213-1/4 feet.
Adding the melt of the great ice caps to the 13-1/2 feet already accounted for
gives us a maximum sea rise of 278 feet. Stand on the edge of your favorite
beach, where the water just laps your toes, look up and imagine a 28-story
building, then turn it into ocean.
How long would it take?
As we saw, looking back over the last 15,000 years, world ice melt is a process
that takes a huge amount of time. And Greenland and Antarctica are still in the
grip of an immense and ancient cold that will strongly resist melting even in
our significantly warmed world.
But perhaps at this point I should finally acknowledge that I am not a
scientist, and I'll bet there are scientists reading this who are contemptuous
of a layman's trespassing that area they have devoted their lives to, so why
don't I let these experts answer the question:
"Thresholds for disintegration of the East Antarctic ice sheet by surface
melting involve warmings above 20C...In that case, the ice sheet will decay over
a period of at least 10,000 years." ([The UN's] Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change [IPCC], 2001)
Except it's going to happen overnight, West and East combined:
"If, as one model predicts, the deep ocean water flowing around the
Antarctic ice sheets warms by just 0.9 degree [F], it could melt the ice sheets
from underneath at the catastrophic rate of about 10 feet a year." (Science
Digest, 8/86, 35)
Except: "at the current rate of melting, that would take [West Antarctica
alone] about 7,000 years, the researchers estimated." (N.Y. Times,
10/12/99, F4) except, au contraire, it really will happen overnight:
"Experts are concerned that if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet broke apart in
that manner, global sea levels could rise as much as 16 ft. in just a few
decades." (Time Magazine, 2/3/03, 54)
Greenland?
"This could raise the global average sea-level by 7 metres over a period of
1,000 years or more." (Nature, nature.com, 4/8/04) except "In
computer simulations, NCAR [National Center for Atmospheric Research]
researchers found that if levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were to
double, melting would would shrink the Greenland ice cap by 1.8 inches per year
[15 feet a century]." (Earth, 4/96, 17) Meanwhile, leading
climatologist Wallace Broecker says 300 years. (peopleandplanet.net, 12/9/04)
We'll synthesize all this confusion for you. But it's important to add this:
There are experts who believe that once the melting of Greenland or Antarctica
or both begins, the process is likely to be irreversible. We could ceases all
fossil fuel use at the instant and never burn down another tree-- it will make
no difference. Ice and snow deflect heat, soil and vegetation (and the water
that will rise over the land) absorb it, further warming the planet. With the
ice and snow of Greenland, West Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula, and the
other glacial areas replaced by soil and vegetation and sea, with fossil fuel
use and forest destruction continuing, with CO2 and methane continuing to pour
into the atmosphere, Earth will get hotter and hotter, melting even more ice and
snow, which will make Earth absorb even more heat, which will...Now we are
dealing with one of those deadly feedback mechanisms I referred to.
Has it begun?
In Greenland it apparently has, or is just about to. In the last few years,
Greenland's melt zone has expanded inland and upward, even to the middle of the
continent, and reached elevations over a mile high. Waleed Abdalati of NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Centre says flat-out that there's a "net loss of ice,
particularly in the south". As for West Antarctica, it apparently hasn't
yet, except just a tiny bit on its far western margin, but many experts believe
it inevitably will before the century is out, given the continued fossil fuel
use and heating. Many experts also remain conservative in their predictions,
because they think there's going to be a phasing out of fossil fuels in the next
few generations. In fact, the burning will continue, as stated, for 250 to 300
years, and that will doom the West Antarctic ice, as temperature reaches levels
not seen in millions, even 10's of millions of years.
The beginning of the melting of the great East Antarctic Ice Cap seems to be
centuries off, and would take millennia to complete. This ice cap has existed
for millions of years, surviving every Interglacial. But, really, scientists
mysticize it, treating it as if it was adamant, when in fact it is simply the
result of certain conditions, and if those conditions change the ice cap can
too. The Antarctic has been polar land for over 100 million years, and for most
of that time it has been ice-free. The West Antarctic ice has to go first, but
after enough of it does the East Antarctic Ice Cap is doomed. Now we deal with
another of the deadly feedbacks. "The collapse of the West Antarctic Ice
Sheet would leave the East Antarctic Ice Sheet...with no support, no
buttressing. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet would thus be destabilized in quite a
dramatic way. If the remaining one-third of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet
collapsed, there would be very wide gaps in the Transantarctic Mountains where
the East Antarctic ice would come flooding into the sea." (eces.[Earth
Crash Earth Spirit]org, 7/23/95) As the warming and melting continue,
increasing amounts of meltwater will lubricate the landbed of the East Antarctic
Ice Cap in its slide into oblivion, long though it will take.
The melting of our planet's ice is very slow at first, in no way a disaster
initially, but will gather speed and continue till Greenland and West Antarctica
are cleared of ice and snow, and East Antarctica will follow. How long? From the
moment I write this to the end of the process in West Antarctica will take 800
years. Greenland will be bare in 1,100 years. (West Antarctica goes faster
because so much of its ice is grounded on land below sea level.) East Antarctica
won't even begin to melt for centuries, and once it does the process will take
over 4,000 years to complete. But eventually all will be done.
It is a profound epic of change we're contemplating, yet even total melting and
maximum sea rise will leave our world recognizable to the end. Let's, briefly,
take a journey through this future to come, looking at its scenes in greater
detail. I don't completely imagine them-- I project from a wide variety of
predictive maps, obtained from many sources.
Global Warming - The Next 100 Years
We'll assume just a 2 foot rise over the next century. (My sea rise predictions
will be conservative.)
Some low islands in the world, for instance many of those in the Maldive chain
of the Indian Ocean, will have to be abandoned, and hopefully the world will be
generous in taking in the refugees. But even a low-lying area like New York's
Long Island will only have its shores eaten away at the edges, the sea moving
inland 300 yards here, 75 yards there, hardly at all here. At high tide the
Everglades will be mostly under water, as will most of the Louisiana shore
(though not New Orleans, under sea level but behind high levees), most of the
North Carolina shore, etc. Overall, the United States will have lost about
10,000 square miles out of 3,536,292, and that will include over 50 % of the
wetlands. The average erosion along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts will be about
200 feet. Most of our beloved beaches will be lost. Across the world, in China's
once-booming Guangzhou City (Canton) Delta, several million people will have to
be relocated. The same will hold around Shanghai. I wonder if the
conservative-libertarian spokesmen and websites of the day will still be telling
us that global warming is a "hoax".
Global Warming - The Next 200 Years
We will now assume a total 5 foot rise over 2 centuries. The melting of Greenland and West Antarctica will be solidly underway, and the con-lib warming-deniers will have disappeared, gone the way of flat-Earthers, Dodos, dinosaurs and "tobacco scientists". In some places the sea will have moved scores of miles inland, even 100 or more, but mostly much less, a few miles here, in other places 100's of yards, and other places will have been hardly affected or not at all. A chunk of Bangladesh in the south will be permanently under water, and almost all the country will be susceptible to unprecedented Monsoon flooding, but there will still be a Bangladesh. China will be desperately trying to save Shanghai and Guangzhou City, but it's going to be a losing battle, and many more millions will have been relocated over the century. Nonetheless, people around the world will not want to leave places that are only occasionally covered up, like the Nile Delta. Even Atlantic City (8 feet above sea level) and Miami (11 feet) will still be there, or at least parts of them, with strong sea walls having been raised since our time. Do you really think a change so gradual can bring about a revolution in human behavior? The waste of fossil fuel will still be floating into the air.
Global Warming - The Next 300 Years
The fossil fuel is gone, but man can still exercise his genius by hunting down and burning trees. Greenland and West Antarctica are melting away more rapidly now. Sea level is 10 feet above the sea level of 2005. My city, New York City, still exists, is still great, though more crowded, since it is functioning and therefore has become a place of refuge. It has raised high sea walls and dikes where needed. The cost of preserving New York City will be considerable, but the United States will understand the necessity, despite the grumbling of some "high altitude Senators" from places like Colorado and Montana. A few parts of New York City will have been abandoned to the sea, such as Coney Island, the Rockaways, Jamaica Bay islands, and most of the immediate Staten Island shore. Lower Manhattan can't be abandoned-- it will require strict, expensive attention. No doubt some people in the outer boroughs will complain about "Manhattancentricization". Other major cities and regions around the world will have been abandoned or soon will be. Miami can't be protected behind dikes like New York. The nature of its land-- porous limestone-- would require building the dikes 150 feet down, in addition to all the building upward and around. It's impractical. For most of the world the cost of such preservation is too great. People must move. Where? 100's of millions of people, mostly poor and unwanted, need new homes.
Global Warming - The Next 500 Years
The seas have risen 21 feet. With a sense of horror, yet fatalistic too, people understand that the East Antarctic Ice Cap has started to melt. Fossil fuels are long gone, but it doesn't matter. There are more pressing considerations anyway: The heat, the impossible h...how to make a vital journey of 50 miles....New York City survives, Manhattan Island and much of the outer boroughs ringed with sea walls and high dikes. Miami, Fort Lauderdale, the Everglades, the Nile Delta-- covered, abandoned. The White House, the Capitol, the Pentagon-- the shore reached too close. They have been disassembled, and reassembled in America's new capital inland. Sacramento is a port on a new inland sea. And Southeast Asia has taken a tremendous hit-- many of its major cities too low-lying; they have been abandoned. Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Rangoon, Haiphong...Canoes and small sailing craft float through them, pulling up next to the empty skyscrapers, to loot what's left. And to the north China finally had to give up Guangzhou City, Shanghai and others to the sea. Bangladesh is a memory. Increasingly, the many abandoned cities serve as the world's new mines. Too late, the world is completely committed to recycling.
Global Warming - The Next 5,000 Years
The process, the immediate process, is over. We have gone where we are going.
This world-- which will exist, by the way-- is alternate to ours, in too many
ways to predict in true detail. An Egyptian sits at his table in 2995 BC, and
tries to imagine the world 5,000 years later. His brush is dipped in ink, a
clean sheet of papyrus before him, the relatively new invention of hieroglyphics
awaiting his command. His little daughter shouts for her daddy. Ah, silly idea.
Limiting ourselves to a plane trip over this Earth (not that there will
necessarily be any planes then):
Sea level has risen to the maximum possible: almost 280 feet. The warm,
flowering continents of Greenland and Antarctica-- how many wars have been
fought over them? How many people live in balmy Siberia now-- at least those
parts that don't belong to the fishes and whales?
We see the changes time and Man have brought: Florida disappeared 1,000's of
years ago, little more than a myth now, of a distant golden age of wealth and
power and delicious, godlike self-indulgence, when nature offered a few
centuries of magic and the human race devoured it. America's East Coast has been
eaten away, its cities abandoned, even New York City-- though its highest towers
still soar out of the Atlantic. A couple of narrow inland seas thrust north from
the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the central Amazon region is covered by a sea, and a
second inland sea, centered over what was once northeast Argentina, also exists.
The Persian Gulf reaches much further inland, the Baghdad beneath it as lost as
Atlantis, the delta regions of Asia's great rivers have long disappeared under
water, taking their cities with them, much of China's best rice lands are ocean
now, and, as we said, Siberia is balmy, and some of it is sea.
Yet China, India, Europe, Africa, Brazil, the United States-- they all still
exist. We can recognize their general shapes from the air. The overwhelming
portion of Earth's land is too high to be covered. It is still inhabited. If
those are not specifically Americans or Chinamen down there, the human race
still exists, its journey through time-- still beginning. What have they
learned?
Global Warming - The Next 10,000 Years
5,000 more years have passed. The seas remain some 280 feet higher than 10,000 years before. Oh, there's been some small fluctuations up and down over the millennia, but you can say this about the climate-- it hasn't been pleasant, but for 5,000 years it has been stable. Humanity has made its adjustment. What had to die is long dead, and this world, not new, now ancient itself, has been accommodated. All the more startling, then, is a sudden chill, a chill the likes of which....
The World - The Next 125,000 Years
Cycles. Upon cycles. Upon. And most if it frozen.
_________________________________________________________________
The preceding scenario...is actually pollyannish, optimistic. It treats what is
coming as a simple story of getting warmer and moving inland, gradually and
predictably. It treats as even what will not be even, but will be a process of
sudden, catastrophic lurches, nightmarishly quick changes, sick surprises. This
is the true crisis, and if Man is not, at least occasionally, quick on his feet,
inspired, brave and lucky...
The heat will be overwhelming. As we saw, 20-35,000 Europeans died in the summer
heat wave of 2003, when the
temperature rose 2C. At the height of the dinosaur era the world's surface
temperature in the tropical Pacific near the Equator approached 11C higher than
today, and even late in the dinosaur era those tropic surface temperatures were
almost 5C higher than today (The Great Dinosaur Extinction Controversy,
Officer & Page, 39). The temperature in the Eocene Era (36-55 million years
ago) was comparable to late dinosaur times. As far as an 11C rise goes, modern
civilization simply couldn't survive it, though more primitive forms of human
order could presumably hang on. Even 5C could be a deal-breaker. Not all of
dinosaur Earth was so unbearable. 110 million years ago Australia was a much
more southerly continent, adjacent to Antarctica, and some of Australia lay
within the Antarctic Circle. Temperature was still much warmer than today, but
bearable-- probably comparable to present-day central Canada, or even Minnesota,
though with more darkness in winter. But would even this be practical,
civilization abandoning most of the Earth to hang on for 1,000's of years at the
Poles, without a molecule of fossil fuel to warm it or drive it, with uranium
depleted (people forget we have only a few century's worth of this resource
too), and solar power limited (or nonexistent in the dark winter months)? In the
real world, meanwhile, the heart of civilization lies between the Tropic of
Cancer and 60 degrees north, and the Tropic of Capricorn and 40 degrees south,
and this part of the world is going to be seared. Take a 7F rise for America's
East Coast. "Average summer temperatures for the southeastern United
States, an area roughly from Philadelphia to Miami, would rise from the current
80 degrees F to 87 degrees F. At the same time, the warmer air would hold more
moisture, raising the humidity and the 'heat index'. The average temperature
would feel more like 97 degrees. With the heat index it would feel like 105
degrees." ("Long-Range Global Heat Forecast: It's Very Warm",
Mark Jaffee, Philadelphia Inquirer, 5/3/99) A 3-year study
released in 2004 by a group of scientists at Columbia University concluded that
heat-related deaths in the New York region could increase 258 % by the 2080's.
Another study in 2004 by California-based scientists said heat-related deaths in
Los Angeles could rise 700 % by 2100. All this in a world where the cost of
running fans or air-conditioning, if you're fortunate enough to have them, will
be soaring. However, let's not worry. This century will still be vaguely
bearable. Then we'll invent fusion power.
The right wing likes to tell us how good the Warm World will be for agriculture.
Plants love heat, right? They breathe in CO2, right? So end of story. Harvests
will be better than ever. Remember those great grape harvests in medieval
England? And how about those Vikings in Iceland and Greenland? However, the
truth is hard: It's all nonsense. Different plant species react differently to
rises in CO2. In general, weeds appear to do better in a CO2-enriched world than
crops (see: "Plant Life in a CO2-Rich World", Scientific American,
1/92). And we need to remember that world agriculture is exquisitely attuned to
20th Century climate. Any strong deviation in either direction-- much hotter or
much colder-- can be deadly. Yes, a very modest rise in temperature-- say, an
additional 0.6C over the next 100 years-- that then stopped-- would not
be fatal, could even be helpful to certain areas, like Siberia. But we're going
way beyond that. The major crop species simply don't react well when temperature
rises too much. A recent study by the International Rice Research Institute
found that for every 1C rise in mean daytime temperature rice yields decline by
15 %. And at 40C/104F fertilization of rice seeds ceases. Studies have found
that wheat and corn yields also fall as temperatures rise, especially if
nighttime rise exceeds the daytime (which is what has been happening under
global warming). Wheat and corn yields fall about 10 % for every 1C up.
And it's a characteristic of our crop species that as CO2 rises they will
require more water, fertilizer, herbicides to fight weeds, and biocide
protection from insect pests. This latter is a problem not always noted. Insects
love heat. The closer we approach to dinosaur heat the louder they'll cheer. A
recent British study said the fly population in the United Kingdom could soon
double. For another example of what's coming look at the story of the spruce
bark beetle-- a forest rather than an agricultural pest, granted, but one with
plenty of cousins willing to do a number on crops-- which has recently killed
almost every white spruce in some 4 million acres of Alaska's Kenai Peninsula,
and wiped out over 10 million acres in British Columbia. The beetle and the
spruce have co-existed for about 8,000 years on Kenai. What happened? Recent
extreme heating has apparently doubled the beetle's reproduction rate. Other
forest beetles have also begun flourishing in ways never seen before. And
water-- our crops will require more of it in the Warm World? Already the world's
aquifers are being depleted and wells are going dry (or have to be dug ever more
deeply). So in one more area the human race seems to be bumping up against a
resource limit. Even without global warming the world was headed for a water
crisis, and unlike oil water has no substitute.
Science is straining to
understand how rainfall patterns will change in the Warm World. It's a difficult
and complex subject, with so many variables making prediction chancy. As a
general rule of climate, warmer means more rain and colder less, but
unquestionably there will be regional exceptions. The region of greatest concern
is of course the American and Canadian Midwest, the world's breadbasket, which
is counted on to play an ever greater role in the coming centuries in feeding
the world, whose population is still growing, A map on page 245 of Gribbin's Future
Weather shows a reconstruction of rainfall distribution for the world
between 6000 BC and 2000 BC, when it was a warmer place. 4 areas are shown with
less rainfall than today. 3 are of little or no consequence for agriculture--
north-central Canada, northernmost Greenland, and Scandinavia plus northwest
Russia. The fourth area is the American Midwest. And the future? The New York
Times (8/28/02, A10) reports that some climate experts expect agriculture
"to falter in arid subtropical areas like the Eastern Mediterranean and
southern Africa, while flourishing in northern climes-- like the North American
wheat belt-- as more precipitation and longer growing seasons boost
yields." But the computer models of other climate scientists trying to
predict a world with doubled CO2 show a northward shift of ecological zones,
turning our grain belt into a bone-dry copy of the American Southwest. And in
October 2003 the Pentagon issued a report entitled "An Abrupt
Climate-Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National
Security", filled with apocalyptic possibilities, such as mega-droughts
searing the world's major breadbaskets, including the American Midwest. For
China it offered as a possibility: "China, with its high need for food
supply, is hit hard by a decreased reliability of the monsoon rains. Longer,
colder winters and hotter summers stress already tight energy and water
supplies. Widespread famine causes chaos and internal struggles." Indeed,
it is possible that the precipitation picture will be weird and paradoxical.
Some regions could get more overall rain in a year yet still suffer
extraordinary water shortages, as the rainfall becomes less even, concentrated
in briefer tropical outbursts, the water quickly drying up in the unprecedented
heat, the crops damaged not nurtured by the briefer torrential rain and ensuing
floods. And the stronger winds brought by the heated atmosphere will blow the
dried-out soil away. Climatologists agree there will be more evaporation in the
Warm World. This could lead to the effect where the Great Lakes region receives
more rain yet the lakes shrink, some of their water replaced by reeking
expanses of mud. And yet in this same strange world the landlocked Caspian
Sea will apparently grow hugely. And then there is the problem of changed
precipitation form, as snowing increasingly fades away, replaced by rain. As
this happens, the phenomenon of spring or summer mountain snowmelt, relied on by
so many regions to provide irrigation, hydroelectric power, drinking water and
water for other uses, will disappear. Or even if it snows as hard in winter it
will melt away in the warmer wintertime, too early to be of use. In California,
in wintertime reservoirs have to be kept low for flood control purposes, so if
the snows melt then they must be allowed to run off into the sea, and farmers,
hydroelectric plants and other water users will have nothing left for later when
they need it. It is estimated that by 2050 snowpacks supplying the Northwest's
Columbia River will be down 30 %, meaning the salmon spawning in the river will
have to be sacrificed to preserve water for irrigation and power. The ways
global warming threatens the world's water supplies are endless. Here's one last
subtle, unexpected possibility: As Arctic sea ice melts heat escapes from the
ocean to warm the atmosphere, disturbing atmospheric airflow, deflecting winter
storms from the west coast, and reducing rainfall from British Columbia to
southern California by 30 %. And again the farmers will look in vain for the
irrigating water they once knew.
And the heated crop plants will need more fertilizer? Almost 2 % of world energy
consumption goes into the creation of chemical fertilizer. In the 1990's about 5
% of all natural gas went into fertilizer. Fertilizer has increasingly become
the product of fossil fuel. In India 40 % of natural gas consumption goes into
fertilizer, and China makes 60 % of its chemical fertilizer from coal. The more
fossil fuel goes into agriculture the greater the greenhouse effect the hotter
the world the more our crops will need and demand what fossil fuel provides in
order to survive-- not just fertilizer-- synthetic pesticides, for instance,
whose use in the U.S. grew 33-fold just between 1985 and 1990--
herbicides, fuel for tractors and farm machinery, for powering irrigation,
transporting food, cooking it, packaging it in plastics made of oil-- the hotter
the world grows, the more crops need-- but the less we will be able to provide,
as fossil fuels fade out over the next few centuries and their prices soar
beyond most of humanity's ability to pay, and the warming takes water and soil
away and brings plagues of insects and pests to devour the crops and weeds to
crowd them out, as the world population is set to grow from 6.3 billion in 2003
to 9 billion or more just a half century later and the seas seep across the
cropland and seep their killing salt into the water supply.
The 3 great crops-- wheat, corn and rice-- provide more than half the world's
food. All our lives are propped by 3 slim plants. The situation becomes even
more alarming because world grain harvests have been relatively static since the
mid-1980's, as opposed to the huge increases in output brought by the Green
Revolution in the generation before. It's as if the human race has bumped its
head up against a ceiling of agricultural possibility, leaving it no room for
the slightest faltering. But global warming points to a faltering, and more than
slight. The United Nations Environment Program offers 10 possible scenarios for
cereal crop production in the year 2060 compared to 1995, and in 9 of them
production declines, in the worst case by almost 20 %. And yet this study, like
virtually all studies of global warming, refuses to look beyond the 21st
Century, which in retrospect will be seen as a relatively mild prelude to
what follows. We are not headed for an agricultural happy time. The human race,
in fact, will be lucky to hold its own. That future Manhattan behind the sea
walls and dikes-- will have to grow much of its own food in Central Park and its
backyards. As I write, I know that we won't even hold our own, or only some of
us will, and for others on Earth the leanest of the Four Horsemen now mounts.
The ocean currents will change, not just in serious ways, but possibly in
ghastly ways. This is an aspect of global warming that has received great
attention in recent years, rightly so. The focus, above all, is on the warm and
cold currents in the North Atlantic. They're called by many names, and choosing
among them we'll go with the Atlantic Conveyor. This is the system that brings
warm water to Western Europe's shores (and to a lesser extent warms the
Northeast United States and Eastern Canada) and is the reason why northern
European cities like Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki and St. Petersburg are far warmer
and more livable places than Anchorage, Alaska or Okhotsk, Russia, which are
equally around 60 degrees north. How warm? Over 10C's worth in some parts of
Europe, the equivalent of 100,000 power stations providing heat. The system is
driven by the cold, dense, salty waters of the Labrador Sea plunging deep and
moving south, which has the effect of whipping warmer water north. The enemy of
the system is fresh water. If there's too much of it in the Labrador area ocean
water won't be salty or dense enough to sink as it has, ending the whipping
effect. Europe then loses its warm currents and some of it reaches Siberia-like
conditions. And the rest of the world? The Atlantic Conveyor is part of a larger
worldwide system of ocean circulation in which parcels of water circle the Earth
over a period of 1,000 years, and the Conveyor's potential shutdown is now seen
as affecting the whole world, including the tropics.
This system has existed for 10's of millions of years, maybe longer. It took a
hit 3 million years ago when Panama rose from the seas in a geological upheaval,
dividing the Atlantic from the Pacific. The circulation continued, but in a form
that made the world cooler, and may be the cause, or one of the causes, of the
coming of the Ice Age.
The Atlantic Conveyor seems to operate in a huge 1,500-year cycle, one of those
vast natural cycles like the cycles of the Sun or the cycles of Earth's rotation
that superimpose on each other in a bewildering but far-reaching way and
determine the course of Earth's climate. Every 1,500 years or so during the
Glacial Period the Conveyor weakened, but it never died. Since then there have
been 2, maybe 3, maybe 4 times when it did die for long stretches, once for as
long as 1,200-1,300 years, and there have been other instances when it shut down
or weakened for just a few years, in which case the effect on climate was much
less.
What can stop it?
An excess of fresh water, as we said. (Though if the North Atlantic ever becomes
too warm to form ice at all that could be an additional cause.)
Where could this excess of fresh water come from?
From increases in rain, increased flow by northern rivers into the sea-- or the
melting of the great ice caps.
Global warming increases evaporation, which means more water vapor in the air,
which means more precipitation (generally-- there are some regional exceptions
as we've seen). Through the 20th Century precipitation has indeed increased in
high northern latitudes. And between 1936 and 1999 the 6 largest Eurasian rivers
increased their freshwater runoff into the Arctic Ocean by 7 %. More
precipitation and perhaps the melting of ice and/or permafrost is responsible
for that. Though the fresh water of the rivers isn't moving directly into the
Labrador Sea, eventually it can make its way and affect the Atlantic Conveyor.
The Conveyor effect in the Labrador Sea seems to have flickered on and off
several times since the 1970's. Salinity maps for the North Atlantic show a
great freshening of the water between 1967 and 2000, both in strength and
geographical extent. And between 1968 and 1982 a gigantic blob of fresh water--
scientists gave it the name of the Great Salinity Anomaly-- drifted around the
North Atlantic, and probably was responsible, at least in part, for some very
cold European winters before it vanished. And of course the greatest influx of
fresh water is still to come-- when Greenland, West Antarctica and finally East
Antarctica melt.
We know from climate history what happens when the Atlantic Conveyor shuts down.
By around 10,800 BC the planet was approaching the end of the Glacial Period.
But then a gigantic lake that had formed from the melting of the Canadian ice,
covering a good deal of what is now the north-central United States and
south-central Canada and larger than all the present-day Great Lakes combined,
Lake Agassiz, burst through the ice dam to its east, and roared as a torrent
down the St. Lawrence River into the Labrador Sea, at maybe 30,000 tons a
second. Within a few generations at most deep Glacial Period cold returned
and the ice sheets were advancing again. Indeed, in the eastern U.S. and Canada
and in much of Europe average temperature may have dropped more than 10F in less
than 50 years. It was so cold in Europe that the forests that had replaced the
tundra all died and tundra returned, and then fire swept the European plain,
burning the dead wood. The effect of the Younger Dryas, as this new cold period
was called, was felt worldwide. There was severe drought in the Levant, which
could have spurred those Middle Easterners on to agriculture. The area that's
now Santa Barbara, California, may have become as cold as present-day Juneau,
Alaska. The snowline descended in the tropical Andes. But, still, the Younger
Dryas's strongest effect was in Europe.
A second great shutdown came in 6200 BC, when the Laurentide Ice Cap over
eastern Canada-- it had once stretched from the Atlantic to the Rockies, but had
been melting for about 10,000 years-- imploded, and again a titanic freshwater
torrent rushed down the St. Lawrence River to the Labrador Sea. What followed is
a 400-year period called the Mini Ice Age (or, more prosaically by some
paleoclimatologists, the 6200 BC Event). Average temperatures in Western Europe
dropped about 6F. And once more the effect was felt worldwide. For instance, sea
surface in one Indonesian region cooled by 3C.
A 2-century-long period of coolness and drying between 3200 and 3000 BC may have
also been caused by an Atlantic Conveyor shutdown. (Remember that our last major
period of ice-melting and sea level rise didn't end till about 1000 BC.) The
droughts of the time may have rendered the final coup de grace to the Sahara,
which even into the 3000's BC had lakes, woods, grassland and marshland full of
game and fish, and pasturage for peoples' sheep, goats and cattle. These
droughts probably contributed to the lowering of the vital Nile inundations and
general drying out of Egypt in this time.
It is possible that a shutdown of the Atlantic Conveyor was also responsible for
the Little Ice Age, that period of chaotic and generally colder-- at times
brutally colder-- weather between around 1300 AD and the late 1800's. At the
depths of the Little Ice Age, between around 1680 and 1730, sea ice often
blocked the Denmark Straight in summer, and through most of 1695 Iceland
was completely locked in by ice. Immense wind storms struck northern Europe. A
harsh phase of the Little Ice Age killed off the Viking settlement in Greenland
in the 1400's. To the east, Iceland barely survived. A Britisher who visited
Iceland, Joseph Banks, wrote of "so violent a cold in 1753 and 1754, that
horses and sheep dropped down dead on account of it, as well as for want of
food, horses were observed to feed upon dead cattle, and the sheep eat of each
others' wool. In the year 1755, towards the end of...May, in one night the ice
was one inch and five lines thick. In...1756, on the 26th of June, snow fell to
the depth of a yard, and continued falling through...July and August."
Between 1753 and 1759 1/4 of Iceland's population starved to death. Between 1783
and 1786 famine, plus misery brought by a volcanic eruption, killed 1/5 to 1/4
of the population. Famine struck throughout the world. Possibly as much as 1/3
of the population of Finland died of starvation and disease in 1696 and 1697.
Even in a well-favored place like Burgundy, a report to its King declared in
1662, "famine this year has put an end to over ten thousand families in
your province, and forced a third of the inhabitants, even in the good towns, to
eat wild plants." Another account reported "Some people ate human
flesh." The period 1805-1820 was also particularly terrible, made worse by
the explosion in 1815 of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the greatest volcanic
eruption of the last 10,000 years, which in turn led to 1816, the notorious
"year without a summer". In terms of material ejected into the
atmosphere, the Tambora explosion was 100 times more powerful than
Vesuvius in 79 AD or Mt. St. Helens in 1980. It seems to have blocked out more
than 20 % of the Sun's radiation, and of course again led to famines.
But the weather of the Little Ice Age affected the whole world. A million
Japanese died in the Temmei Famine of 1783-87, simultaneous with the Iceland
famine. (Volcano Weather, Stommel & Stommel, page 119) In Korea,
"The rebellion of Hong Kyongnae had no sooner been put down than a terrible
drought struck the nation in the years 1812 to 1813, producing a famine which
produced a record death toll-- it was alleged that 4.5 million died [over half
the population]." (A History of Korea, Henthorn, page 221)
In its 2003 report, the Pentagon-- which, like so many environmental warnings
exaggerates only in the sense it rushes events into being a few generations or a
century or two too fast-- visualizes shutdown of the Atlantic Conveyor,
resulting in this picture:
"Each of the years from 2010 to 2020 sees temperature drops throughout
northern Europe. Average annual rainfall in this region decreases by nearly 30
percent. Lakes dry up, river flow decreases, and the freshwater supply is
squeezed...By the second half of this decade, the harsher conditions spread
deeper into southern Europe, North America, and beyond....By the end of the
decade, Europe's climate is more like Siberia's...By 2015 conflicts within the
E.U. over food and water supplies lead to skirmishes....China, with its high
need for food supply, is hit hard...Widespread famine causes chaos and internal
struggles....Once again warfare defines human life."
All so a pittance of the human race can drive its SUVs.
This is the true craziness global warming will bring. If not in that exact form,
in some form.
Now the shutdown of the Atlantic Conveyor, which appears to be scientifically
inevitable, will not take us all the way back to the Glacial Period. It's felt
by most climatologists that to get the massive fresh water infusion needed to
make the Conveyor collapse will require a temperature rise of 4-6C. (Though
there are others who say 2-3C will do it.). That will take..50 years? 175
years? Since we'd be starting from a warmer climate base than in 10,800 BC, and
the world's ice caps are smaller, we would return to Little Ice Age or more than
Little Ice Age conditions, but less than full Glacial Period, and not even
worldwide in this case. There would still be a warm Conveyor system, but based
in the south, say around Bermuda. The heat that once reached north would stay in
the tropics and lower temperate areas. Even as near-Glacial Period cold
brutalized Europe, and very severe cold hit northeast North America, much of the
rest of the world, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, could start heating up
even faster. The seas would continue rising, even as some regions were locked in
ice. It could be even crazier than that. The north might hallucinatingly
fluctuate between Ice Age winters and unreal tropical summers. You could be
living in the Second Little Ice Age while 1,000 miles away your cousin was
headed toward dinosaur heat. Or maybe you'll experience both wherever you
are within a period of a few months. Things are further complicated by the fact
the the Younger Dryas and the Mini Ice Age seem to have had relatively
straightforward causes-- enormous influxes of fresh water moving east into the
Labrador Sea. In our situation Greenland will be melting to the west, but also
to the north, east and south-- and in the Southern Hemisphere Antarctica will be
melting too. Far away as it is, Antarctica's melting will affect the North
Atlantic. And affect air currents as well. What is going to happen to us is too
complex to predict exactly-- it can only be lived through. To say the weather
will be hot, cold, getting hotter, getting colder-- it is beyond that. Our
climate is about to be driven insane.
How long does a Conveyor shutdown take? It took the Earth about 45 years to move
into the Younger Dryas. Some scientists think it took 40-50 years, as natural
climatic fluctuations restored the Conveyor 1,200-1,300 years later, to get out
of it. (But in Earth, 4/96, 11, we read that in a computer simulation of
a possible future event "the conveyor began to grind to a halt, taking several hundred years to
shut down completely." However, contrarily, see my next paragraph for a
scarier view of climate change speed.) How long the Conveyor would stay shut
down is really unpredictable. "Ocean modelers have shown that the oceanic
conveyor would come back to life, but only after hundreds or thousands of years
had passed." (Scientific American, 11/95, 63) Others say maybe in
just decades. (Scientific American, 11/04, 67) Thank you, experts all, as
usual. But perhaps we're going to go in and out in and out, harder and harder
and faster and faster. Perhaps the old rules of climate simply no longer apply.
"Welcome to the Anthropocene. It's a new geological era, so take a good
look around. A single species is in charge of the planet, altering its surface
features almost at will." (eces[Earth Crash Earth Spirit].org, 11/22/03) In
an article in Atlantic Monthly, 1/98, "The Great Climate
Flip-flop", William H. Calvin warned against hope in gradualism, or in hope
itself: "I hope never to see a failure of the northernmost loop of the
North Atlantic Current, because the result would be a population crash that
would take much of civilization with it, all within a decade."
Some scientists studying the past have come to the conclusion Nature can change
climate in a virtual eye-blink. In truth, in climate Nature doesn't seem to do
gradualism. It's here-- then suddenly's a new reality. That's why I wrote
earlier of "sudden catastrophic lurches, nightmarishly quick changes, sick
surprises." A team of paleoclimatologists reported to the American
Geophysical Union that in their opinion the Younger Dryas ended in just 3 years,
or maybe even 1. That means that in Greenland the temperature would have soared
1F a month, to a 12F rise in a year. As for the end of the Glacial Period
10,000 years ago-- a suspiciously round number, but in fact it did end exactly
or almost exactly then, and the time's been officially certified by the
International Quarternary Union, the deciding body on such matters--
"Greenland's [and the world's] climate see-sawed from glacial to
inter-glacial conditions in just three years as the last ice age hiccupped to a
close." (Earth, 1/94, 28) In the same 3-year period Greenland's snow
doubled as the warmth of modern conditions-- the new Holocene Epoch, ours--
increased water vapor in the air, and the extremely windy and dusty conditions
of the Glacial Period also ended in those same 36 months. (Yet some scientists
go even further, and say the doubling took place in just 12 months.) If the
human race thinks it will simply be eased nicely and gradually into a new world
over centuries, the shock of change will be even greater, and humanity's
capacity to respond with any effectiveness and intelligence-- and courage--
surely less.
So.
If I have now done my job, many readers must be shaken by a dark vision. Yet I
know that even as you intellectually accept it, emotionally you push it away,
into science fiction. I have trouble accepting it too, because it means the end
of so much. Yet it strikes me that both our attitudes are like our attitudes
toward our inevitable coming deaths, which intellectually we understand, how can
we possibly deny, but which the atoms of our emotions scream against. So now I
must feel like a doctor who's given you the horrible news that you have AIDS,
hepatitis C and tuberculosis and, as you stand up to go, shaken, has to shout
"Sit down! I haven't told you the worst."
The most frightening possibility of all is what's called the "runaway
greenhouse".
250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period, life faced its greatest
crisis, as over 90 % of Earth's species died. In the seas, perhaps no more than
4 % of animal species survived. Even the insects, who laughed at the dinosaurs
as whatever did them in did them in, suffered their single catastrophic
extinction in over 400 million years. 30 % of the insect orders were wiped out.
Scientists have argued, and will probably argue forever, about the cause of the
Permian catastrophe. But a consensus seems to be building that it involved
methane.
For several million years Earth had suffered the greatest volcanic eruptions in
its history-- the so-called "Siberian Traps". Over 200,000 square
kilometers (77,200 square miles) were covered by lava up to 2.3 miles high.
Initially, the volcanic activity had its usual effect of cooling the Earth. But
what happened then may well have been this: Eruptions this long and this
powerful eventually heated both lands and seas, releasing the methane of
permafrost and ocean floor (as well as pouring vast amounts of carbon dioxide
and water vapor into the atmosphere directly, and also resulting in the
production of life-poisons such as carbonic acid and sulfuric acid in titanic
amounts). So much methane combined with the oxygen in the seas to form CO2 that
much of marine life was asphyxiated. Other methane entered the atmosphere,
reducing oxygen there too and suffocating the animals, and killing plants with
acid rain. Other organisms died of carbon dioxide poisoning. Yet other species
died of heat, or the burial of their lands under the rising seas. Heat
evaporation turned habitats into desert.
Immense storms swept the world. The heat loosened the ocean floor, resulting in
colossal undersea landslides on the continental slopes, freeing more methane. I
simplify and contract possible events. Geologist Gregory Retallack of the
University of Oregon says the methane rising from the seas produced a "postapocalyptic
greenhouse". Gregory Ryskin, a chemical engineer at Northwestern
University, goes even further: "So much methane accumulated in stagnant
seas at the end of the Permian, he argues, that when it finally erupted, it
ignited, setting most of the planet on fire." (Discover, 3/04, 39)
How much methane was in the Permian ocean? Perhaps enough to liberate energy
10,000 times greater than in all of Man's nuclear arsenal.
Could such events sere our world, ending civilization of course, even wiping us
from existence?
Some 8,000 to 8,200 years ago one of the greatest landslides in Earth's history
took place off the coast of Norway, quite possibly triggered by the
eruption of methane freed from its hydrates by the warming of the world. Blocks
of mud maybe 20 miles long rushed 500 miles in perhaps only a couple of hours,
wiping out all life over 35,000 square miles, and Scotland was struck with tidal
waves as high as 50 feet, Norway hit with tidal waves as high as 65 feet. (Discover,
ibid.)
Euan Nisbet, geologist at the University of London, says that under global
warming methane "would probably take some decades or centuries to come
out...But once it started, it would be essentially unstoppable." (Ibid.,
page 40)
Of course, another way to liberate methane is for an energy-crazed world to
drill for it.
If it is any comfort, the fact that our world is much cooler than it was at the
end of the Permian Period (even before the catastrophe struck) will apparently
ameliorate the effect of the methane greenhouse somewhat, and it looks like the
planet won't catch on fire. And even some scientists who agree that a methane
crisis is inevitable would put it off till later centuries, even to 1,000 years
from now (though at the latest). But as Dan Dorite, Geology Department,
University of California at Davis, puts it in his dramatically-titled but
superbly detailed and scientific website, killerinourmidst.com-- if nothing else
on it read "Part II: Now", killerinourmidst.com/now.html--: "A
methane catastrophe, therefore, is an abrupt surge of greenhouse gas that could
make mere carbon dioxide warming of the planet pale to insignificance. It can
utterly overwhelm the natural heat regulating system of the Earth, which
operates in a much more gradual way, and on a much more protracted time scale.
Its quantity is so massive that there is no remedial action that people will be
able to take to mitigate it except in the most superficial way. Once a methane
catastrophe begins, its consequences for the planet and its inhabitants, human
and other, will be appalling, and we will be able to do nothing except wait it
out...a 'rapid' recovery could take many centuries, perhaps millennia."
There are other tremendous changes to come. This list will no doubt include an
immense extinction spasm among animals and plants, which was coming anyway, just
through Man's environmental destruction and killing. Perhaps the insects will
multiply even more quickly as the birds and other animals that eat them fade
out. Not just agricultural and forest pests but disease-bringers like mosquitoes
will flourish in the warmth. Already we are seeing malaria moving into highlands
once too cold for it. Even just the arrival in our home towns of hordes of
disgusting but otherwise harmless insects may dent human morale. And good for
mold and vermin too.
And what if, adding to these climate changes, the horrible unexpecteds should
happen too? A string of enormous volcanic explosions at the worst possible time?
Several of the key surviving cities suddenly destroyed by earthquakes? Or entire
regions falling, as has just happened in the horrible South Asia tsunami tragedy
(which was not related to global warming)? Or by hurricanes made more ferocious,
if not more frequent, by the heated atmosphere? The coming of new plagues, or
the deepening of current ones like AIDS or the flu? Or the greatest horror-- the
use of nuclear weapons, finally, as desperate nations fight amongst themselves
over fossil fuel or diminishing water resources or just for food or simply
because conditions are driving the world mad?
Human morale.
I have never seen a discussion of it in relation to global warming. It is not
scientific? No, but it's key. Let me end the essay on this subject.
The story of the human race, for all the horrors of its history, has been a
triumph. But is it just the triumph of a raging cancer or life-curdling virus
which has so far had its way, or is it something more, the work of Nature's true
masterpiece, not its greatest mistake?
Up till recently, Man has had no doubt about the answer. The swagger and brio
and joyfulness of his art, before the 20th Century, tell us that. The ambitious
reach of his religions, the height of his towers, the names he gives himself,
all tell us that. Look at the example of the artist many consider the greatest
of all, William Shakespeare. You would never know, reading his works, or seeing
them on stage, that he lived in a world of darkness and death, so filled is he
with the joy-- and pride-- of being alive, of being human-- the vitality that
overcomes everything.
"What a piece of work is man!
...how like an angel!
...how like a god!"
He lived in the Little Ice Age, under conditions that would defeat us, without
modern heating, modern plumbing, poorly clothed, poorly fed, with nothing we'd
consider modern medicine. The decade of the 1590's-- Romeo and Juliet,
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Taming of the Shrew, Henry V
("We few, we happy few")-- was the 16th Century's coldest decade. The
harvests between 1591 and 1597 were terrible, and famine swept the country.
"Whole villages in England, especially in East Anglia, were depopulated and
ceased to exist, not because of the Black Death, as historians used to think,
but because of the crop failures and starvation caused by climatic
changes." (Future Weather, Gribbin, page 46) Even into the early
18th Century in England, between 1/4 and 1/3 of peasant children died before 15.
Death was ever near. You could smell it. People were perpetually assaulted and
taken away by smallpox, typhus, dysentery, leprosy, syphilis (remember, no
antibiotics), measles-- choose your plague. Queen Elizabeth, when young, was
lucky to survive smallpox with only light scarring. Lady Mary Sidney, who cared
for her, "recovered, but was so disfigured that she never appeared at court
again without wearing a mask." (Princes And Peasants, Hopkins, page
3) A possible husband for Elizabeth, Alencon, brother of France's King Charles
IX, was eliminated after smallpox savaged him. When Alencon "emerged from
his chamber after a dangerous bout with smallpox, there was little left of the
promising young prince. His appearance was totally changed: His face was deeply
pitted, his eyes bloodshot, and rheumy, his voice thin and reedy, and his nose
almost doubled in size....His spirit too had undergone a profound change....he
found he no longer had a part to play in that world in which handsome faces and
virile bodies were given first prize..." (Ibid., page 31) Medicine?
Elizabeth's doctor wrapped her in a "scarlet cloth" (the so-called
"red treatment"). Other medical treatments offered to victims: being
cut and bled, emptying your bowels with purgatives, or, to follow up on the
excremental theme, drinking a concoction made from sheep dung. (For measles the
recommendation was: goat shit.) And bubonic plague struck-- not lightly-- as
does West Nile Virus or even AIDS with us-- but with the force of nuclear war.
Yet there is nothing about this in Shakespeare. 17,000 of the 150,000 people of
London and its suburbs died of the plague in 1593, and of course others died
throughout England. Treatments suggested included pressing the ass of a plucked
chicken against your black swellings. 22 % of the city died in the Plague of
1603-- similar casualties in New York City today would mean 1,800,000 deaths.
Including London the city plus its suburbs the death rate in 1603 was 14 %,
about 3,120,000 in the New York Metropolitan Area. Why would that defeat us, yet
it couldn't defeat him or them? His mood darkened: Othello (1604), King
Lear (1606), Macbeth (1606), but the music remained immense, even his
villains and victims speak so boldly and gloriously and act with such power that
they too seem to celebrate our very existence. A dark play about human decay and
confusion (King Lear) tells its tale with such huge music that in the end
it too is celebration. Throughout his work men and women joust but in a glorious
tournament, not our sullen war. Vices are embraced with gusto (Falstaff), virtue
hunted for through the darkness with a Crusader's zeal (Hamlet), war and the
warrior are deified and deify themselves (Henry V). And all around him a
younger, more optimistic Western civilization joyed in being alive. His
colleague Marlowe could write:
"Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every planet's wandering course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest"
And George Herbert could celebrate prayer and faith flush with meaning and
reality:
"Softness and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise,
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood."
We think what made Shakespeare a titan was that he was a genius, that is, he did
what we do, he just did it better, when in fact, genius that he was, it was the
energy and optimism of his world, the fact he lived in a world that was being
born and not one about to die, the fact indeed he lived on the other side of the
mirror from us, that put him over the top. We have technology and prosperity he
never dreamt of, but it's made us sullen and small because we now see where it's
lead, he had none of it, was, in a way, ecstatic like Herbert, in the joy of
early bliss. Bach and Handel lived and died in the Little Ice Age, without a
scrap of hydrocarbon between them, unless they burned a little coal to keep
warm, without a single electric bulb for their poor overworked eyes, so both
went blind, and both endured useless eye operations (2 of them for Bach) without
anesthesia at the hands of the same quack doctor (redundant, really, when
describing 18th Century medicine) John Taylor whom Samuel Johnson called
"an instance of how far impudence can carry ignorance" and the music
of both, from youth to old age, soared to the heavens. On New Year's Day, 1772,
Thomas Jefferson and Martha Wayles Skelton married, and on January 18th they
left her father's estate for Monticello, in the face of one of those fierce
snowstorms of the Little Ice Age, with no SUV to see them through: "Snow
was falling heavily as they pushed on toward Monticello. The light phaeton was
making little headway through chest-high drifts...The next day, ignoring the
worst blizzard in Virginia in decades [today, 1 inch of snow shuts down
Washington D.C.], they left their phaeton and plowed on toward Monticello on
horseback, finding the barely visible road up Monticello's slope at midnight.
There was no sound from the mountain wind howling over three feet of snow. The
slaves and white workmen had long since gone to bed. Jefferson led Martha
through the pitch-black gloom to the one-room cottage." (Thomas
Jefferson, Randall, page 160) That night, unless they were too exhausted, in
a place devoid of electricity, or even a flush toilet, without a scrap of
hydrocarbon, unless they burned a little coal to keep warm, the two, let us
imagine, made love under many covers, beginning their married life. The men and
women of the past, down to the meanest serf, the black slave in deepest mourning
for his lost continent on the worst plantation in America, still, fundamentally,
had more spirit than we now will.
We are older, and we are shocked where all the vitality has led, and we are
shocked by ourselves. After slavery and Auschwitz and World War I and Rwanda and
the Khmer Rouge-- how much more can we take of ourselves? The people of the
past, whatever their travails, were always going forward. But global
warming will result in a turn in human history, a move backwards, back towards
material impoverishment, and to an impoverishment of the spirit. And it is our
own fault. How much more can we take of ourselves before we hate ourselves, and
lose our interest in being alive? You can see the dimming of the human spirit in
our art, in the increasingly vile failure of relations between men and women, in
the increasing unwillingness of men and women to marry or breed, in the
coarsening of manners, the craziness of our children, the increasing reliance on
drugs to get by, in the way we beg sex to do more than it can. We're like a
person who's worked out and now is built like a god, whose face (a little
aided?) is beautiful, who's bathed and put on cologne and pulled on the finest
clothing, expecting "a magic night", and, just before walking out the
door to his waiting black shiny Hummer (10-13 mph according to G.M., 8-10
according to the dealer) stops to admire himself in the mirror-- and there is a
monster, shrunken and misshapen, covered with rags, his face and body dripping
pus-- and as he runs through the mansion every mirror shows him the same, and
even his reflection in the Hummer's window when he finally staggers outside
shows him the same nightmarish being, and finally he realizes that is him.
And yet the worst is coming.
This time has the feel of an era ending. This is how it must have felt at the
very end of the Classical world, with Rome over, and something new and dark
coming, whatever it was. Yet can we even have confidence in 1,000 years from
now, or 2,000 years from now? Why?
The left, the environmentalists, I know, console themselves with one of science
fiction's classic visions, that as we falter materially we will at least return
to a simpler, wiser, less materially-obsessed, more communitarian civilization.
But as we've seen, the next 2 or 3 centuries will actually be filled with
political struggle that will keep that from happening. And then it's too late. I
can see artists, environmentalists, sophisticates, idealists, romantics and
dreamers-- who, whatever their faults, have created much of what is wonderful
and beautiful in human existence-- simply giving up in this world, going into
some kind of internal exile in their heads, not caring if they live or die, or
if anything does.
And the right, the powermen, the Capitalists, the Christians, the optimists, the
libertarians, the conservatives, the technology worshippers and the market
worshippers, they too, all but the blindest, will eventually confront the
demoralizing failure of their existence. Their morale too will shiver and
shrivel.
The time has the feel of an era ending. For democracy, that freakish and amazing
experiment of a quarter-millennium, the system that says it's all right to,
etc., if 51 %-- who knows if it will survive. For Capitalism, which cheered the
way to, goaded us into, the Warm World-- what price will be paid? In fact, to
the extent any system of human endeavor and organization only really has life
when it is cherished in the majority of human hearts, Capitalism has already
died. But, like the French aristocrats of the 18th Century, Capitalism's lords,
and our overlords, haven't an inkling. Just as the first nobility shielded
themselves from reality with their silks and carriages and their gold and jewels
and palaces and minuets and the obsequious, grudging and merely tactical
allegiance of those under, so the powermen of Predator Capitalism, the leaders
of our world, still have their $1,000 suits, the $100 haircuts, their young
trophy wives and waiting limos and helicopters and private jets, their access to
Presidents and Prime Ministers and dictators, their fawning business press,
their insane salaries topped by even more magnificent stock options, their joy
and pride at having smashed unions and smashed forests and smashed pensions and
smashed borders, their tall and shiny sterile and energy-inefficient towers in
the cities where they don't even deign to live, their country mansions,
even as the world they created starts to boil. What price to be paid? It
isn't just the plankton; sharks die too when their time comes. The Warm World
will melt. But I write with little optimism of what comes from chaos.
Wherefrom the energy now, I mean the human energy and not that other material
crap, to keep going, continue caring and creating? The survivor, the victor,
perhaps, will be Islamic, fundamentalistic, with its iron faith, its total
commitment to family, its puritanism, its ferocity and otherworldliness that
cannot be defeated by that which defeats a more advanced and material-dependent
and individualistic West. Perhaps, as I suggested in my second Extended
Political Essay, "How Al-Qaeda Can Win", they will find
allies-of-the-moment in an environmental left angry enough to simply want to
"take it all down". If so, then all our victories or half-victories in
Afghanistan and Iraq are irrelevant, the political future like the
climatological foreordained.
All that is modern, like all that was once Medieval and Classical, after a
500-year run, may be coming to an end. Perhaps art, at least of its
individualistic kind, shall falter with the rest. Perhaps there will be a
worldwide reaction against science and technology, a luddite spasm. The lives of
women, rescued from quasi-slavery by modernism, may fall back. People abused and
left behind, left for dead by a contemptuous West in its hour of triumph, may
emerge from the chaos for their revenge-- the Amerindians (especially the heirs
of the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas), the Africans, the Aborigines. And what of
Christianity? The chaos we are headed to opens the book of religious creation
wide open again, and not Christianity but something reactive seems written
there-- neo-pagan, Earth-worshipping, pantheistic, determined on new moralities,
perhaps with as little desire for compromise as Islam, or Christianity in its
youth.
What is especially disheartening is that we were essentially lent magic powers
by Nature for several centuries and we still couldn't abolish poverty or
slavery or conquer that devil within us that leads to violence and folly, or,
really, find honest happiness as beings. If we couldn't do it in the best of
times, what comes now?
Almost 100 years ago, William Graham Sumner, when coal resources seemed
infinite, wrote: "When the coal is used up will slavery once more begin?
One thing only can be affirmed with confidence; that is, that as no
philosophical dogmas caused slavery to be abolished, so no philosophical dogmas
can prevent its reintroduction if economic changes should make it fit and
suitable again."
To which we even add: It's a measure of our capacity, which we're relying on now
to see us through, that slavery never ended, even with the gifts. Did we choose
a wrong basis for our entire civilization? Do we need a new kind of
civilization? Do we need new religions? Enough will answer yes, even as others
thunder no, to ensure the tumultuous, chaotic violence of the coming centuries.
It is not enough that Nature will wage war against us, we will be at such war
with each other as a result, and against ourselves in our own heads, that maybe
the first will overcome us. Or, perhaps, in a greater term, over timespans
unimaginable, this is how we will be forced to work things out, and at the other
end of a tunnel too long to measure we will emerge into a distant light, and
stand amazed.
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