Be worried, be very worried
The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame
Sunday, March 26, 2006; Posted: 11:27 a.m. EST (16:27 GMT)
Editor's note: The following is a summary of this week's Time magazine
cover story.
And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears are starting to turn up
drowned.
(Time.com) -- No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet
takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth.
Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion
emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and
unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts,
the global climate seems to be crashing around us.
The problem -- as scientists suspected but few others appreciated --
is that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points
and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of
environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating
collapse. That's just what's happening now.
It's at the north and south poles -- where ice cover is crumbling to
slush -- that the crisis is being felt the most acutely.
Late last year, for example, researchers analyzed data from Canadian
and European satellites and found that the Greenland ice sheet is not
only melting, but doing so faster and faster, with 53 cubic miles
draining away into the sea last year alone, compared to 23 cubic miles
in 1996.
One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating
is that as the poles' bright white surface disappears it changes the
relationship of the Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that
90 percent of the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into
space, taking its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite,
absorbing 90 percent of the light and heat it receives, meaning that
each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that
preceded it.
This is what scientists call a feedback loop, and a similar one is
also melting the frozen land called permafrost, much of which has been
frozen -- since the end of last ice age in fact, or at least 8,000
years ago.
Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of decaying organic
matter, thick with carbon, which itself can transform into CO2. In
places like the southern boundary of Alaska the soil is now melting
and softening.
As fast as global warming is changing the oceans and ice caps, it's
having an even more immediate effect on land. Droughts are
increasingly common as higher temperatures also bake moisture out of
soil faster, causing dry regions that live at the margins to tip into
full-blown crisis.
Wildfires in such sensitive regions as Indonesia, the western U.S. and
even inland Alaska have been occurring with increased frequency as
timberlands grow more parched. Those forests that don't succumb to
fire can simply die from thirst.
With habitats crashing, the animals that call them home are succumbing
too. In Alaska, salmon populations are faltering as melting permafrost
pours mud into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning.
Small animals such as bushy tailed rats, chipmunks and pinion mice are
being chased upslope by rising temperatures, until they at last have
no place to run.
And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears are starting to turn up
drowned. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger,
president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that
path, the polar bear drops out."
So much environmental collapse has at last awakened much of the world,
particularly the 141 nations that have ratified the Kyoto treaty to
reduce emissions. The Bush administration, however, has shown no
willingness to address the warming crisis in a serious way and
Congress has not been much more encouraging.
Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice been unable to get even
mild measures to limit carbon emissions through a recalcitrant Senate.
A 10-member House delegation did recently travel to Antarctica,
Australia and New Zealand to meet with scientists studying climate
change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were believers to begin with,"
says Rep. Sherman Boehlert of New York. "Every one of the others said
this opened their eyes."
But lawmakers who still applaud themselves for recognizing global
warming are hardly the same as lawmakers with the courage to reverse
it, and increasingly, state and local governments are stepping
forward.
The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate
Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that they will
meet the Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse emissions in their own
cities to 1990 levels by 2012. Nine northeastern states have
established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of
developing a program to cap greenhouse gasses
--
"There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to
whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is
impossible." -- Jack Vance
"Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages." -- Will Durant.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" -- Ambrose Bierce
"Long term commitment in relationships is only necessary because it takes
so damn long to raise children. Marriage may well be some kind of trick
to keep the males around beyond sexual satiation." -- Captain Compassion
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMverizon.net
.
|
