Warning on Warming
The Green Party of Canada was very pleased to host a forum on the "Moral Obligations of Climate Change" on February 16, 2007 in Ottawa, featuring Green Party leader Elizabeth May and best-selling US author Bill McKibben, with Dr. Heather Eaton, professor of Theology at St. Pauls University.
This excellent article, which appears in the March 15, 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books was posted on a couple of US websites
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=167460
http://www.nybooks.com
The article is reprinted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.
By Bill McKibben When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report in early February, it was greeted with shock: "World Wakes to Climate Catastrophe," reported an Australian paper. But global warming is by now a scientific field with a fairly extensive history, and that history helps set the new findings in context -- a context that makes the new report no less terrifying but much more telling for its unstated political implications. Although atmospheric scientists had studied the problem for decades, global warming first emerged as a public issue in 1988 when James Hansen, a NASA scientist, told Congress that his research, and the work of a handful of other scientists, indicated that human beings were dangerously heating the planet, particularly through the use of fossil fuels. This bold announcement set off a scientific and political furor: many physicists and chemists played down the possibility of serious harm, and many governments, though feeling pressure to react, did little to restrain the use of fossil fuel. "More research" was the mantra everyone adopted, and funding for it flowed freely from governments and foundations. Under the auspices of the United Nations, scientists and governments set up a curious hybrid, the IPCC, to track and report on the progress of that research. From roughly 1988 to 1995, the hypothesis that burning coal and gas and oil in large quantities was releasing carbon dioxide and other gases that would trap the sun's radiation on Earth and disastrously heat the planet remained just that: a hypothesis. Scientists used every means at their disposal to reconstruct the history of the earth's climate and to track current changes. For example, they studied the concentration of greenhouse gases in ancient air trapped in glacial cores, sampled the atmosphere with weather balloons, examined the relative thickness of tree rings, and observed the frequency of volcanic eruptions. Most of all, they refined the supercomputer models of the earth's atmosphere in an effort to predict the future of the world's weather. By 1995, the central Herculean tasks of both research and synthesis were largely complete. The report the IPCC issued that year was able to assert that "the balance of evidence suggests" that human activity was increasing the planet's temperature and that it would be a serious problem. This was perhaps the most significant warning our species, as a whole, has yet been given. The report declared (in the pinched language of international science) that humans had grown so large in numbers and especially in appetite for energy that they were now damaging the most basic of the earth's systems -- the balance between incoming and outgoing solar energy. Although huge amounts of impressive scientific research have continued over the twelve years since then, their findings have essentially been complementary to the 1995 report -- a constant strengthening of the simple basic truth that humans were burning too much fossil fuel. The 1995 consensus was convincing enough for Europe and Japan: the report's scientific findings were the basis for the Kyoto negotiations and the treaty they produced; those same findings also led most of the developed world to produce ambitious plans for reductions in carbon emissions. But the consensus didn't extend to Washington, and hence everyone else's efforts were deeply compromised by the American unwillingness to increase the price of energy. Our emissions continued to soar, and the plans of many of the Kyoto countries in Western Europe to reduce emissions sputtered. (At the same time, most tragically of all, China and India had just begun their rapid industrial takeoffs using precisely the technologies we then knew were wreaking havoc; they did not seek or find much aid from the Western countries that could have encouraged them to take a more benign path.) In 2001, the IPCC issued its Third Assessment Report (TAR), but it coincided with the start of the Bush administration, which refused even to consider a serious policy for climate. The IPCC's new Fourth Assessment of this February (known as AR4) arrives at a more congenial moment, as the new Democratic Congress takes up a wide variety of legislation designed, finally, to curb emissions. The finding of the new report that attracted the most attention in the press was that scientists were now more confident than ever that the warming we've seen so far (about one degree Fahrenheit in the average global temperature) was caused by human beings. Instead of being merely "likely," the conclusion was now "very likely," which in the IPCC's lexicon means better than a 90% chance. But it's been years since any reputable scientist specializing in climate research doubted that conclusion. More important findings were ignored in accounts of the report and in some cases were obscured by the document's very poor prose, which is much more opaque than its predecessors. Those findings include:
By Bill McKibben When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report in early February, it was greeted with shock: "World Wakes to Climate Catastrophe," reported an Australian paper. But global warming is by now a scientific field with a fairly extensive history, and that history helps set the new findings in context -- a context that makes the new report no less terrifying but much more telling for its unstated political implications. Although atmospheric scientists had studied the problem for decades, global warming first emerged as a public issue in 1988 when James Hansen, a NASA scientist, told Congress that his research, and the work of a handful of other scientists, indicated that human beings were dangerously heating the planet, particularly through the use of fossil fuels. This bold announcement set off a scientific and political furor: many physicists and chemists played down the possibility of serious harm, and many governments, though feeling pressure to react, did little to restrain the use of fossil fuel. "More research" was the mantra everyone adopted, and funding for it flowed freely from governments and foundations. Under the auspices of the United Nations, scientists and governments set up a curious hybrid, the IPCC, to track and report on the progress of that research. From roughly 1988 to 1995, the hypothesis that burning coal and gas and oil in large quantities was releasing carbon dioxide and other gases that would trap the sun's radiation on Earth and disastrously heat the planet remained just that: a hypothesis. Scientists used every means at their disposal to reconstruct the history of the earth's climate and to track current changes. For example, they studied the concentration of greenhouse gases in ancient air trapped in glacial cores, sampled the atmosphere with weather balloons, examined the relative thickness of tree rings, and observed the frequency of volcanic eruptions. Most of all, they refined the supercomputer models of the earth's atmosphere in an effort to predict the future of the world's weather. By 1995, the central Herculean tasks of both research and synthesis were largely complete. The report the IPCC issued that year was able to assert that "the balance of evidence suggests" that human activity was increasing the planet's temperature and that it would be a serious problem. This was perhaps the most significant warning our species, as a whole, has yet been given. The report declared (in the pinched language of international science) that humans had grown so large in numbers and especially in appetite for energy that they were now damaging the most basic of the earth's systems -- the balance between incoming and outgoing solar energy. Although huge amounts of impressive scientific research have continued over the twelve years since then, their findings have essentially been complementary to the 1995 report -- a constant strengthening of the simple basic truth that humans were burning too much fossil fuel. The 1995 consensus was convincing enough for Europe and Japan: the report's scientific findings were the basis for the Kyoto negotiations and the treaty they produced; those same findings also led most of the developed world to produce ambitious plans for reductions in carbon emissions. But the consensus didn't extend to Washington, and hence everyone else's efforts were deeply compromised by the American unwillingness to increase the price of energy. Our emissions continued to soar, and the plans of many of the Kyoto countries in Western Europe to reduce emissions sputtered. (At the same time, most tragically of all, China and India had just begun their rapid industrial takeoffs using precisely the technologies we then knew were wreaking havoc; they did not seek or find much aid from the Western countries that could have encouraged them to take a more benign path.) In 2001, the IPCC issued its Third Assessment Report (TAR), but it coincided with the start of the Bush administration, which refused even to consider a serious policy for climate. The IPCC's new Fourth Assessment of this February (known as AR4) arrives at a more congenial moment, as the new Democratic Congress takes up a wide variety of legislation designed, finally, to curb emissions. The finding of the new report that attracted the most attention in the press was that scientists were now more confident than ever that the warming we've seen so far (about one degree Fahrenheit in the average global temperature) was caused by human beings. Instead of being merely "likely," the conclusion was now "very likely," which in the IPCC's lexicon means better than a 90% chance. But it's been years since any reputable scientist specializing in climate research doubted that conclusion. More important findings were ignored in accounts of the report and in some cases were obscured by the document's very poor prose, which is much more opaque than its predecessors. Those findings include:
- The amount of carbon in the atmosphere is now increasing at a faster rate even than before.
- Temperature increases would be considerably higher than they have been so far were it not for the blanket of soot and other pollution that is temporarily helping to cool the planet.
- Alternative explanations for some of the warming (for example, sunspot activity and the "urban heat island effect," the raising of temperatures in cities caused by high building densities and the use of heat-retaining materials such as concrete and asphalt) are now known to be relatively negligible.
- Almost everything frozen on earth is melting. Heavy rainfalls are becoming more common since the air is warmer and therefore holds more water than cold air, and "cold days, cold nights and frost have become less frequent, while hot days, hot nights, and heat waves have become more frequent."
