Climate Change: Indifferent to a Planet in Pain

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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Forest Networking a Project of forests.org

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9/15/99

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by EE

Climate and forest change are intimately related. For this reason,

this list will occasionally pass on information related to climate

change and related issues. Amongst scientists, there is

"increasingly ironclad consensus that we are heating the planet."

The implications are just beginning to be realized, and will be for

the conceivable future. Forest conservation and regeneration is an

important component of addressing climate change. Additionally, a

project of the scale of the "Manhattan Project" is required, where

the best minds and abundant resources are provided to find

alternative energy sources.

g.b.

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Title: Indifferent to a Planet in Pain

Source: New York Times

Date: September 4, 1999

Byline: Bill McKibben

As the hot sun sets on this long, odd summer, you might try staring

into the nighttime sky. Several times in the last few months,

observers in the lower 48 have seen ''noctilucent clouds,'' which

develop about 50 miles above the earth's surface -- clouds so high

that they reflect the sun's rays long after nightfall.

They're spectacular -- and they're also out of place. These odd

clouds belong in far northern and southern latitudes, but global

warming seems to be driving them toward the Equator. The same carbon

dioxide that warms the lower atmosphere cools the next layer -- the

mesosphere -- causing the clouds to form.

Sightings as far south as Colorado are a big event, according to Gary

Thomas, a professor at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for

Atmospheric and Space Physics. ''While they are a beautiful

phenomenon,'' Professor Thomas told National Geographic's on-line

magazine, ''these clouds may be a message from Mother Nature that we

are upsetting the equilibrium of the atmosphere.''

Ten years ago, global warming was a strong hypothesis. Now, after a

decade of intensive research, scientists around the world have formed

an ironclad consensus that we are heating the planet. Almost daily

some new piece of evidence appears; the weekly editions of the

journals Science and Nature make ''The Blair Witch Project'' look

like ''The Baby-Sitters Club.'' Forget the piddling drought and heat

wave that withered lawns and fields across the Northeast this summer.

Consider the real news:

Spring comes a week earlier across the Northern Hemisphere than it

did just 30 years ago. Severe rainstorms have grown by almost 20

percent, precisely what you'd expect on a planet where warmer air can

carry more water vapor. A Navy sonar survey conducted this summer

shows that the Arctic ice sheet is in many places 40 inches thinner

than its normal 10 feet. Warmer waters have bleached coral reefs

around the globe. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising.

The question is not what we should do. Though it's far too late to

prevent global warming, it takes no special insight to deduce the

policies that would slow it down. Stiff increases in the price of

fossil fuels would quickly bring a new generation of renewable energy

technologies to the fore. Raising fuel-economy standards for cars and

trucks would end the trend to ever-bigger sport utility vehicles. And

focused diplomacy and foreign aid could keep developing nations from

sliding into our bad habits.

No, the question is why we've done so little. In 1992, President

George Bush promised the world that the United States would emit no

more carbon dioxide in 2000 than it had in 1990. The Clinton

Administration instead watched with little apparent concern as our

emissions surged more than 10 percent. Congress refuses even to

consider the baby step represented by the 1997 Kyoto accords, which

would return us to 1990 levels by 2010. The issue barely even crops

up in the Presidential campaigns.

The reason, I think, is that we don't yet feel viscerally the

wrongness of what we're doing -- not just the very rational fears

about what it will be like to live in a superheated world but, even

more, the simple shock that we've grown so large we can dominate

everything. Earthquakes and volcanoes are the only ''natural

disasters'' left. Everything that happens above the surface comes at

least in part from us, from our appetites and our economies.

I used to wonder why my parents' generation had been so blind to the

wrongness of segregation; they were people of good conscience, so why

had inertia ruled for so long? Now I think I understand better. It

took the emotional shock of seeing police dogs rip the flesh of

protesters for white people to really understand the day-to-day

corrosiveness of Jim Crow.

We need that same gut understanding of our environmental situation if

we are to take the giant steps we must take soon. Go outside: try to

understand that the sun beating down, the rain pouring down, the wind

blowing by are all now human artifacts. We don't live on the planet

we were born on. We live on a new, poorer, simpler planet, and we

continue to impoverish it with every ounce of oil and pound of coal

that we burn.

In retrospect it will be clear. A hundred years from now, people may

well remember the 1990's not as the decade of the Internet's spread

or the Dow's ascension but as the years when global temperatures

began spiking upward -- as the years when rain and wind and ice and

sea water began irrefutably to reflect the power and heedlessness of

our species. But how bad it will get depends on how deeply and how

quickly we can feel.

It depends on whether we're still capable of shock.

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