Posted by Cockney Robin | And the human race needs a wake-up call
in the worst way. While you're fretting over your Christmas list, your credit card balance, your sex life, or your child's poor grades at school, the world you inhabit is going through its own sort of crisis. Sadly, once the self-absorbed children of the Turn of the Millennium begin to notice the environment is affecting their ability to concentrate on their own problems, it will already be too late.
The news on the climate change front is actually worse than you think. The International Panel on Climate Change's final, or "synthesis" report, though much more alarming than the preceding ones to anyone who is paying attention still may not go far enough. (NYT) "“The world is already at or above the worst case scenarios in terms of emissions,” said Gernot Klepper, of the Kiel Institute for World Economy in Kiel, Germany. “In terms of emissions, we are moving past the most pessimistic estimates of the I.P.C.C., and by some estimates we are above that red line.”" (NYT)
A certain charming lady who scoffed in a recent blog post about the "Chicken Littles" who "overhype" climate change might want to take note of the following, particularly if they have children or grandchildren on the verge of inheriting the earth:
[A] recent International Energy Agency report looking at the unexpectedly rapid emissions growth in China and India estimated that if current policies were not changed the world would warm six degrees by 2030, a disastrous increase far higher than the panel’s estimates of one to four degrees by the end of the century. (NYT)
It seems that many people want ironclad proof that climate change is going to affect them personally and that they can actually do something about it before they can bring themselves to commit to taking any action with respect to it. I wonder how much proof will be enough?
It's true that the worst consequences are perhaps less likely than some which would be bad, but not "worst. There are consequences and consequences. The trouble is that some of the consequences which the aforementioned blogging ladies would perhaps consider fall in Chicken Little Territory are dire indeed. As Dr Hans Verolme (director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Climate Change Program) so colorfully framed it, if the worst consequences do occur, ""[W]e are fried.”" (NYT)
The climate change deniers who would have you believe that global warming is not currently really as bad as Al Gore wants you to think---because global warming is Al Gore's property---have got their facts backarsewards, it seems. While it's true that the IPCC's computer models of the future melting of the ice in Greenland and Antarctica were poor at predicting the rate of the melting, this is because the ice is melting much faster than predicted. If they melt much faster, the seas will rise forty feet over the next few centuries. Said one of the scientists:
“In my view that would make it not just difficult, but impossible to adapt successfully, some of my colleagues would say catastrophic....If they say that it’s possible that melting could occur in centuries leading to meters of change, that’s a headline.” (NYT)
Yes, I know. You don't really care about the effects of climate change over the centuries. If it's not going to affect anyone you know, that's not a headline.
But climate change itself is not the only thing we have to worry about. Its so-called "ripple effects" are even now leading to species extinction, a threat to biodiversity, and arguably an even more imminent threat to the continuation of our own species. Will human beings have to learn through the death or near death experience of their own species how incredibly intertwined our lives are with those of other species? According to this article, about half of animal and plant species may be extinct by the end of this century, and the rapid death of so many (largely due to environmental factors).
Today we're living through the sixth great extinction, sometimes known as the Holocene extinction event. We carried its seeds with us 50,000 years ago as we migrated beyond Africa with Stone Age blades, darts, and harpoons, entering pristine Ice Age ecosystems and changing them forever by wiping out at least some of the unique megafauna of the times, including, perhaps, the sabre-toothed cats and woolly mammoths. When the ice retreated, we terminated the long and biologically rich epoch sometimes called the Edenic period with assaults from our newest weapons: hoes, scythes, cattle, goats, and pigs.
But, as harmful as our forebears may have been, nothing compares to what's under way today. Throughout the 20th century the causes of extinction - habitat degradation, overexploitation, agricultural monocultures, human-borne invasive species, human-induced climate-change - increased exponentially, until now in the 21st century the rate is nothing short of explosive. The World Conservation Union's Red List - a database measuring the global status of Earth's 1.5 million scientifically named species - tells a haunting tale of unchecked, unaddressed, and accelerating biocide....
A poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that seven in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming; and that the dangers of mass extinction are woefully underestimated by almost everyone outside science. In the 200 years since French naturalist Georges Cuvier first floated the concept of extinction, after examining fossil bones and concluding "the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some sort of catastrophe", we have only slowly recognised and attempted to correct our own catastrophic behaviour.
Some nations move more slowly than others. In 1992, an international summit produced a treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity that was subsequently ratified by 190 nations - all except the unlikely coalition of the United States, Iraq, the Vatican, Somalia, Andorra and Brunei. The European Union later called on the world to arrest the decline of species and ecosystems by 2010. Last year, worried biodiversity experts called for the establishment of a scientific body akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to provide a united voice on the extinction crisis and urge governments to action.
Yet, despite these efforts, the Red List [of dying species], updated every two years, continues to show metastatic growth....All these disappearing species are part of a fragile membrane of organisms wrapped around the Earth so thinly, writes Wilson, that it "cannot be seen edgewise from a space shuttle, yet so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered". We owe everything to this membrane of life. Literally everything. The air we breathe. The food we eat. The materials of our homes, clothes, books, computers, medicines. Goods and services that we can't even imagine we'll someday need will come from species we have yet to identify. The proverbial cure for cancer. The genetic fountain of youth. Immortality. Mortality. The living membrane we so recklessly destroy is existence itself.. (The Independent; emphasis added)
Here in the west, we've grown up cocooned in our little individual fates. For several generations, our lives---or the lives of those sufficiently well off to afford it--- have been directed in every respect toward separating ourselves intellectually, spiritually, and materially from the earth that sustains us. So indifferent as we are to the suffering of others of our own species, could we really be expected to care much what harm we inflicted on others? We've behaved like viruses within the ecosystem: consuming recklessly, without putting back any of what we take, and dumping our wastes into the air and water which we share in common with other species on which we rely. So perverse have we become that we've organized whole societies around the notion of consumption---successful consumption---as the highest attainable good and the greatest glory.
And the antidote to a virus that can't be controlled any other way is the death of the host. Is that what it will take?
Will today's video-gaming generations take their hands off their joysticks and their keypads long enough to look outside their own fantasies at the world that's quickly passing us all by? Will the elder generations who know the power of collective action lead the way? Or will we just sit back and say, "Let Al do it----it's his issue"?
Speaking of whom, I was pleased to learn via Memeorandum that he's had a lovely invitation to visit the White House by George W. Bush himself. The President regularly invites Nobel Laureates to the White House and graciously decided that this year would be no exception, even if he had to ask Al Gore.(WaPo)
A Gore adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged the awkward nature of the event. "It's unusual, that's for sure," he said. "But the conversations were good, and the White House has been very gracious about it."....
Bush and Gore, while together at events such as the opening of Clinton's library in 2004 and Gerald R. Ford's funeral last year, have never reconciled the bitterness from their showdown, and the adviser believes that Gore has not been back to the White House since leaving as vice president. Gore has been a vocal critic of Bush's policies, while the president has been dismissive of his former opponent's work against global warming. Asked once whether he would see Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," Bush had a curt response: "Doubt it.".(WaPo)
Sadly, the event is limited to five American Nobel winners. I should have liked Bush to invite the entire IPCC (with whom Gore shared his prize) and Doris Lessing as well. That would have been quite The Feast of Nemesis....
As WaPo's Peter Baker says, maybe Gore will bring his slide show. .(WaPo)
For discussion of the IPCC report at Memeorandum. Weighing in so far:
Guardian, Washington Post, TigerHawk, The Carpetbagger Report and Daily Kos
RELATED BN-POLITICS POSTINGS
Global Warming "Over-Hyped"? And How Much Hype Would be Just Right?
British Nobel Laureates: Stripping the Gilt off Gore's Win? (Updated)
More on Gore and Media Memes: Did "A Gaggle of Journalists" Misreport the "9 Errors" Case?
A Response to the Critics Acid Raining on Gore's Parade (UPDATED)
Vehicle Greenhouse-Gas Emissions Progress
A New and Different Alarming Threat from Climate Change
Meanwhile, in the UK: That Rainy Day Feeling.
What are These People Doing?What, No Love for the Greener, Environmentally Friendly, Friend-of the-Earth Bush?
LINKED
Inconvenient Truth: Gore Won a Nobel, and Bush Will Host the Winners (WaPo)
U.N. Report Describes Risks of Inaction on Climate Change (New York Times)
Animal Extinction: The Greatest Threat to Mankind (The Independent)
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