Re: Evidence of warming:
Now Or Never
What�s an environmentalist to do?
by Bill McKibben
Global Warning: A Special Report
In These Times
April 30, 2001
When global warming first emerged as a potential crisis in the late
'80s, one academic analyst called it "the public policy problem from
hell." The years since have only proven him more astute--15 years into
our understanding of climate change, we have yet to figure out how we're
going to tackle it. And environmentalists are just as clueless as anyone
else: Do we need to work on lifestyles or on lobbying, on politics or on
photovoltaics? And is there a difference? How well we handle global
warming will determine what kind of century we inhabit-- and indeed what
kind of planet we leave behind to everyone and everything that follows
us down into geologic time. It is the environmental question, the one
that cuts closest to home and also floats off most easily into the
abstract. So far it has been the ultimate "can't get there from here"
problem, but the time has come to draw a roadmap--one that may help us
deal with the handful of other issues on the list of real,
world-shattering problems.
The first thing to know about global warming is this: The science is
sound. In 1988, when scientists first testified before Congress about
the potential for rapid and destabilizing climate change, they were
still describing a hypothesis. It went like this: Every time human
beings burn coal, gas, oil, wood or any other carbon-based fuel, they
emit large quantities of carbon dioxide. (A car emits its own weight in
carbon annually if you drive it the average American distance.) This
carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere. It's not a normal
pollutant--it doesn't poison you, or change the color of the sunset. But
it does have one interesting property: Its molecular structure traps
heat near the surface of the planet that would otherwise radiate back
out to space. It acts like the panes of glass on a greenhouse.
The hypothesis was that we were putting enough carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere
to make a difference. The doubters said no--that the earth would
compensate for any extra carbon by forming extra clouds and cooling the
planet, or through some other feedback mechanism. And so, as scientists
will, they went at it. For five years--lavishly funded by governments
that wanted to fund research instead of making politically unpopular
changes--scientists produced paper after paper. They studied glacial
cores and tree rings and old pollen sediments in lake beds to understand
past climates; they took temperature measurements on the surface and
from space; they refined their computer models and ran them backward in
time to see if they worked. By 1995 they had reached a conclusion. That
year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of
all the world's climatologists assembled under the auspices of the
United Nations, announced that human beings were indeed heating up the
planet.
The scientists kept up the pace of their research for the next five
years, and in the past five months have published a series of massive
updates to their findings. These results are uniformly grimmer than even
five years before. They include:
� The prediction that humans will likely heat the planet 4 to 6 degrees
Fahrenheit in this century, twice as much as earlier forecast, taking
global temperatures to a level not seen in millions of years, and never
before in human history.
� The worst-case possibility that we will raise the temperature by as
much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit, a true science-fiction scenario that no
one had seriously envisaged before.
� The near certainty that these temperature increases will lead to rises
in sea level of at least a couple of feet
� The well-documented fear that disease will spread quickly as vectors
like mosquitoes expand their range to places that used to be too cool
for ! their survival.
But it isn't just the scientists who are hard at work on this issue. For
the past five years, it's almost as if the planet itself has been
peer-reviewing their work. We've had the warmest years on
record--including 1998, which was warmer than any year for which records
exist. And those hot years have shown what even small changes in
temperature--barely a degree Fahrenheit averaged globally--can do to the
earth's systems.
Consider hydrology, for instance. Warm air holds more water vapor than
cold air, so there is an increase in evaporation in dry areas, and hence
more drought--something that has been documented on every continent.
Once that water is in the atmosphere, it's going to come down
somewhere--and indeed we have seen the most dramatic flooding ever
recorded in recent years. In 1998, 300 million humans, one in 20 of us,
had to leave their homes for a week, a month, a year, forever because of
rising waters.
Or look at the planet's cryosphere, its frozen places. Every alpine
glacier is in retreat; the snows of Kilimanjaro will have vanished by
2015; and the Arctic ice cap is thinning fast--data collected by U.S.
and Soviet nuclear submarines show that it is almost half gone compared
with just four decades ago.
In other words, human beings are changing the planet more fundamentally
in the course of a couple of decades than in all the time since we
climbed down from the trees and began making clever use of our opposable
thumbs. There's never been anything like this.
Yet to judge from the political response, this issue ranks well below,
say, the estate tax as a cause for alarm and worry. In 1988, there was
enough public outcry that George Bush the Elder promised to combat "the
greenhouse effect with the White House effect." In 1992, Bill Clinton
promised that Americans would emit no more carbon dioxide by 2000 than
they had in 1990--and that his administration would do the work of
starting to turn around! our ocean liner of an economy, laying the
foundation for the transition to a world of renewable energy.
That didn't happen, of course. Fixated on the economy, Clinton and Gore
presided over a decade when Americans, who already emitted a quarter of
the world's carbon dioxide, actually managed to increase their total
output by 12 percent. Now we have a president who seems unsure whether
global warming is real, and far more concerned with increasing power
production than with worrying about trifles like the collapse of the
globe's terrestrial systems. In November, the hope of global controls on
carbon dioxide production essentially collapsed at an international
conference in the Hague, when the United States refused to make even
modest concessions on its use of fossil fuels, and the rest of the world
finally walked away from the table in disgust.
In the face of all this, what is an environmentalist to do? The normal
answer, when you're mounting a campaign, is to look! for self-interest,
to scare people by saying what will happen to us if we don't do
something: all the birds will die, the canyon will disappear beneath a
reservoir, we will choke to death on smog.
But in the case of global warming, those kind of answers don't exactly
do the trick, at least in the timeframe we're discussing. At this
latitude, climate change will creep up on us. Severe storms have already
grown more frequent and more damaging. The seasons are less steady in
their progression. Some agriculture is less reliable. But face it: Our
economy is so enormous that it handles those kinds of changes in stride.
Economists who work on this stuff talk about how it will shave a
percentage or two off GNP over the next few decades--not enough to
notice in the kind of generalized economic boom they describe. And most
of us live lives so divorced from the natural world that we hardly
notice the changes anyway. Hotter? Turn up the air conditioning.
Stormier? Well, an enormous percentage of Americans commute from
remote-controlled garage to office parking garage--they may have gone
the last year without getting good and wet in a rainstorm. By the time
the magnitude of the change is truly in our faces, it will be too late
to do much about it: There's such a lag time with carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere that we need to be making the switch to solar and wind and
hydrogen right about now. Yesterday, in fact.
So maybe we should think of global warming in a different way, as the
great moral crisis of our moment, the equivalent in our time of the
civil rights movement of the '60s.
Why a moral question? In the first place, because we've never figured
out a more effective way to screw the marginalized and poor of this
planet. Having taken their dignity, their resources and their freedom
under a variety of other schemes, we now are taking the very physical
stability on which they depend for the most bottom-line of existences.
Our economy can absorb these changes for a while, but for a moment
consider Bangladesh. A river delta that houses 130 million souls in an
area the size of Wisconsin, Bangladesh actually manages food
self-sufficiency most years. But in 1998, the sea level in the Bay of
Bengal was higher than normal, just the sort of thing we can expect to
become more frequent and severe. The waters sweeping down the Ganges and
the Brahmaputra from the Himalayas could not drain easily into the
ocean--they backed up across the country, forcing most of its
inhabitants to spend three months in thigh-deep water. The fall rice
crop didn't get planted. We've seen this same kind of disaster in the
last few years in Mozambique or Honduras or Venezuela or any of a dozen
other wretched spots.
And a moral crisis, too, if you place any value on the rest of creation.
Coral reef researchers indicate that these spectacularly intricate
ecosystems are also spectacularly vulnerable--rising water temperatures
will like! ly bleach them to extinction by mid-century. In the Arctic,
polar bears are 20 percent scrawnier than they were a decade ago: As
pack ice melts, so does the opportunity for hunting seals. All in all,
this century seems poised to see extinctions at a rate not observed
since the last big asteroid slammed into the planet. But this time the
asteroid is us.
A moral question, finally, if you think we owe any debt to the future.
No one ever has figured out a more thorough-going way to stripmine the
present and degrade what comes after. Forget the seventh
generation--we're talking 70th generation, and 700th. All the people
that will ever be related to you. Ever. No generation yet to come will
ever forget us--we are the ones present at the moment when the
temperature starts to spike, and so far we have not reacted. If it had
been done to us, we would loathe the generation that did it, precisely
as we will one day be loathed.
But trying to make a moral campaign is no easy task. In most moral
crises, there is a villain--some person or class or institution that
must be overcome. Once they're identified, the battle can commence. But
you can't really get angry at carbon dioxide, and the people responsible
for its production are, well, us. So perhaps we need some symbols to get
us started, some places to sharpen the debate and rally ourselves to
action. There are plenty to choose from: our taste for ever bigger
houses and the heating and cooling bills that come with them; our
penchant for jumping on airplanes at the drop of a hat; and so on. But
if you wanted one glaring example of our lack of balance, you could do
worse than point the finger at sport utility vehicles.
SUVs are more than mere symbol. They are a major part of the
problem--one reason we emit so much more carbon dioxide now than we did
a decade ago is because our fleet of cars and trucks actually has gotten
steadily less fuel efficient for the past 10 years. If you switched
today from the average American car to a big SUV, and drove it for just
one year, the difference in carbon dioxide that you produced would be
the equivalent of opening your refrigerator door and then forgetting to
close it for six years. SUVs essentially are machines for burning fossil
fuel that just happen to also move you and your stuff around.
But what makes them such a perfect symbol is the brute fact that they
are simply unnecessary. Go to the parking lot of the nearest suburban
supermarket and look around: the only conclusion you can draw is that to
reach the grocery, people must drive through three or four raging rivers
and up the side of a trackless canyon. These are semi-military machines
(some, like the Hummer, are not semi at all), Brinks trucks on a slight
diet. They don't keep their occupants safer, they do wreck whatever they
plow into--they are the perfect metaphor for a heedless, supersized
society. And a gullible one, which has been sold on these vast vehicles
partly by the promise that they somehow allow us to commune with nature.
That's why we need a much broader politics than the White House-lobbying
that's occupied the big enviros for the past decade, or the mass-market
mailing that has been their stock in trade for the past quarter century.
We need to take all the brilliant and energetic strategies of local
grassroots groups fighting dumps and cleaning up rivers, and we need to
make those tactics national and international. So that's why some
pastors are starting to talk with their congregations about what car
they're going to buy, and why some college seniors are passing around
petitions pledging to stay away from the Ford Explorers and Excursions
and Extraneouses, and why some few auto dealers have begun to notice
informational picketers outside on Saturday mornings urging their
customers to think about gas mileage when they go inside.
The point is not that by themselves such actions--any individual
actions--will make any real dent in the production of carbon dioxide
pouring into our atmosphere. Even if you got 10 percent of Americans
really committed to changing energy use, their solar homes wouldn't make
much of a dent in our national totals. But 10 percent would be enough to
change the politics of the issue, to insure the passage of the laws that
would cause us all to shift our habits. And so we need to begin to take
an issue that is now the province of technicians and turn it into a
political issue--just as bus boycotts began to take the issue of race
and make it public, forcing the system to respond. That response is
likely to be ugly--there are huge companies with a lot to lose, and many
people so tied in to their current ways of life that advocating change
smacks of subversion. But this has to become a political issue--and
fast. The only way that may happen, short of a hideous drought or
monster flood, is if it becomes a personal issue first.
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Bill McKibben is an environmentalist and former staff writer for The New
Yorker whose work has appeared in Outside, Rolling Stone, Harper's and
many other publications. He is the author of The End of Nature and Long
Distance.
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