Climate Change: Read More
If Al Gore’s environmental truth was inconvenient before, now it’s outright uncomfortable.
Last year was the earth’s hottest on record. Ever.
That triggered extremes: A drought-generated dust storm reached 50
miles wide and 6,000 feet tall, engulfing Phoenix, Ariz. Tropical Storm
Irene hit Killington, Vt., which has a ski mountain tall enough to see
Canada – and it’s not too often you see the words “tropical” and
“Canada” in the same sentence. Typhoon Megi dumped 45 inches of rain on
Taiwan in 48 hours, forcing more than 350,000 people to evacuate.
And this year has scorched 2011. Over a recent month-and-a-half
stretch, the U.S. Department of Agriculture designated 1,692 counties
disaster areas due to drought, with about 80 percent of the country’s
agricultural land affected. This comes after Russia stopped exporting
food due to weather-related crop failures and resulting shortages. The
worst drought in more than 100 years hit both North Korea and South
Korea. On July 15, Kuwait hit an all-time high of 128.5 degrees
Fahrenheit.
National Geographic reports that between 1998 and 2011,
there have been 87 severe weather events in the U.S., and each caused at
least $1 billion in damages, though they were comparatively modest
economically compared to Hurricane Katrina, which topped out at $146
billion. The total disaster price tag nearly doubled the cost of the
previous 16-year period.
Severe weather events, like stronger hurricanes, harsher droughts,
wilder floods and fiercer firestorms, are happening with greater
frequency. Scientists have been warning us that this – the wallop of
planet warming hitting harder and more frequently – was coming.
Only leaders and policymakers have failed to put up a fight. In the
presidential dialogue ahead of November’s election, the environment is
most conspicuous by its absence.
Last month former vice president and
Inconvenient Truth creator
Al
Gore spoke in San Francisco to a select group of Climate Reality
Project volunteers about that pattern of disaster and silence. The
private event – designed to train people how to debunk environmental
myths, educate communities on the current crisis and share solutions –
drew participants from 46 states and 47 countries.
“Down in Tennessee we have an old saying: ‘If you see a turtle on top
of a fence post, you can be pretty sure it didn’t get there by
itself,’” Gore said. “‘If you see a turtle on top of every 10 fence
posts, something’s going on.’
“These are turtles on the fence posts. These are the
once-in-a-thousand-year events which come along every two years now.
These are the kinds of conditions that are associated with the droughts
and the big floods and the fires and stronger storms. This is reality.
This is happening now.”
Seven years have passed since Gore’s
Truth shared a reality
about climate change, aka global warming, that most of the public knew
very little about. There was shock, outcry, and… fizzle. Gore’s message
seemed to evaporate, like boiling water forgotten on a stove, even as
the crisis gets worse and urgency grows.
Just this week,
Grist energy and politics reporter David
Roberts paraphrased the results of a study by the United Kingdom’s
National Weather Service, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and
the Grantham Institute.
“The most extreme climate ‘alarmists’ in U.S. politics are not nearly
alarmed enough,” he writes. “The chances of avoiding catastrophic
global temperature rise are not nil, exactly, but they are slim-to-nil,
according to a new analysis prepared for the U.K. government.”
So the question for Gore seems self-evident: What now?
“Even beginning the conversation about climate change can be
challenging,” he says. “With blogs, social media, 24-hour cable news and
well-funded denial campaigns promoted by the fossil fuel industry, it’s
difficult to know what to believe or how to begin to solve the crisis.
“Because of this, one of the most important things you can do as an
individual is to learn the facts about how the climate crisis is
impacting your community. Then reach out to family, friends, and
neighbors to tell
your story, and together, demand that your local leaders take action.”
•••
Coming to the world of freelance writing from a background in science
and engineering, I understood the real and factual threat of global
warming early on. But I still wanted to see its effects for myself.
I left my Monterey home on a 2006-07 expedition to Antarctica led by
an ecological safari company filled with naturalists, a Honolulu Zoo
veterinarian, hardcore birders and nature photographers who contribute
to publications like
Time and
National Geographic.
That December, the month before I arrived in Antarctica, a king
penguin was spotted on the Antarctic Peninsula very near Palmer Station,
one of three U.S. research bases in Antarctic bases.
This was strange. King penguins live in warmer waters and islands
hundreds of miles north of Antarctica. They are nothing like the emperor
penguins we all know from
March of the Penguins, which thrive
in the abominable temperatures at the South Pole. Antarctica was opening
its freezer door, becoming warm enough for some warmer-weather animals
to step inside.
Before arriving at Palmer, we island-hopped by Zodiac, observing
skuas, Weddell seals and blue-eyed shags. But it was the little chicks
of another species of small penguin – a typical inhabitant of the area,
the gentoo – that made my heart drop.
It was so hot they panted like dogs. Their little wings stretched and
trembled at their sides. Their beaks sagged open, exposing their
normally hidden red tongues. Each miserable short breath they took
seemed a rush.
Born with thick down feathers, the chicks couldn’t even dip in the
ice-cold water because they would drown. They were left to wait as many
as seven weeks in the heat until their swimming feathers matured.
After the trip, I got word from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories
adjunct professor David Ainley – a penguin expert who has logged time in
Antarctica since the early ’70s and helps run penguinscience.com – that
“panting” is normal for penguins when temps rise. Gentoos are adaptable
enough to adverse conditions, he added, that they won’t be on the front
lines of species lost to the radically changing world.
But the good news was short-lived.
Warmer air over the cold, mountainous continent holds more moisture,
which means more precipitation. This can wet gentoo chicks’ down
feathers and – followed by a frost – prove fatal. Antarctic Peninsula
winter temps have increased by 16 degrees Fahrenheit since Ainley
started visiting, and mid-ocean Antarctic temperatures have ticked up.
“For that to happen,” he says quietly, “even less than a degree
centigrade, that requires a mind-boggling amount of heat. That’s the
most scary thing.”
•••
This summer, I interviewed activist, author and climate-change
scholar Bill McKibben, the man credited with first bringing global
warming from the scientific community to wider audiences with the book
The End of Nature.
When asked why so little progress has been made by governments and
citizens to stop global warming, his response was blunt: “Because the
fossil-fuel industry is more powerful… They’re the richest industry the
planet has ever seen, and they like things the way they are.”
A couple of weeks later, McKibben published an article in
Rolling Stone about three numbers that tell a terrifying story about global warming: 2; 565; and 2,795.
“The official position of Planet Earth at the moment is that we can’t
raise the [average global] temperature more than 2 degrees Celsius,” he
wrote. That number came from a under-attended 2009 Copenhagen climate
conference in which global leaders estimated this temperature rise was
safe enough.
Scientists, however, were dubious of the limit. McKibben quoted NASA
climatologist James Hansen: “The target that has been talked about in
international negotiations for 2 degrees of warming is actually a
prescription for long-term disaster.”
To stay below this limit of 2 degrees Celsius – and average global
temperature is up about 0.8 degrees in the industrialization era, so our
cup of manageable global warming pollution is already nearly half full –
the total mass of global warming pollution in the atmosphere would need
to stay below 565 gigatons.
The fossil fuel industry has an existing reserve with enough coal,
oil, and natural gas that, if burned, would produce 2,795 gigatons of
pollution. That’s enough to fill up five cups.
“This number is the scariest of all,” McKibben writes.
Gore understands that this news is hard to hear.
“We are all vulnerable to denial,” he says. “If something is
unpleasant to think about – and the potential end of future civilization
qualifies as an unpleasant thought – then people don’t want to think
about. And if somebody will throw them a little lifeline and say, ‘Hey,
you don’t have think about it. It’s not real, or it probably isn’t
real,’ then people grab hold of that thing. ‘Thank goodness I don’t have
to think about it. Thank goodness I don’t have to do anything about
it.’ So, in other words, these deniers don’t have to win the argument;
all they have to do is to create enough doubt in order to convince
people that it is premature to come to a realization that it is real.”
(See sidebar, this page.)
Right now, Gore adds, there are four lobbyists trying to suppress climate – change solutions
for each member of Congress. That’s a lot of firepower: 2,795 gigatons of fossil fuels can buy a lot of allegiance.
“The Koch brothers have a combined wealth of $50 billion, meaning
they trail only Bill Gates on the list of richest Americans,” McKibben
says. “They’ve made most of their money in hydrocarbons, they know any
system to regulate carbon would cut those profits, and they reportedly
plan to lavish as much as $200 million on this year’s elections.”
It is not negligence that’s preventing solutions to climate change; it is greed.
“We need to view the fossil fuel industry in a new light,” McKibben
says. “It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on
earth. It is public enemy number one to the survival of our planetary
civilization.”
Forget Occupy Wall Street. It’s time for Occupy Exxon.
•••
The day after my Palmer Station visit, I took a hike at Neko Harbour.
I was sweating like a melting glacier, even without a jacket. The
expedition leader was shirtless.
When my companions returned to the landing site, I stayed back on top
of bare rock where the ice had long since melted away from the glacier.
I couldn’t stop thinking,
This was Antarctica. It was supposed to be the coldest place on Earth.
I watched the glaciers around me tumble in the sea. When ice breaks
apart like that and comes crashing down, it sounds like cannon during
battle.
The freshly revealed faces of ice behind the falling chunks glowed
electric blue, the natural color of ice after pockets of air in glaciers
are pressed out over the eons it takes glaciers to form.
I felt the air being pressed out of me. It was the loneliest and most
helpless I’ve felt. But unlike those gentoo penguin chicks stuck in
their down coats, I was able to take off my jacket. And I was able to
raise my voice.
•••
Telley Madina knows the feeling of helplessness.
For an hour he didn’t know if his sister had been claimed by
Hurricane Katrina’s unflinching flood waters. For an hour there was
nothing he could do. Then two. Then the hours stretched into a day, then
another. And another.
He didn’t sleep. He didn’t eat. But he did pray.
“It was the longest four days of my life,” he says. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
His sister was rescued and packed into the New Orleans Convention
center. But the deaths and anarchy that accumulated meant the rescue
didn’t make him feel
that much better. Work as the coastal
communities program officer for Oxfam America in New Orleans hasn’t done
much to ease a frustration that sent him to the Climate Reality
conference.
“It feels like it is out of sight, out of mind,” he says. “And I
don’t know why that is the case, because every storm season, we get our
butts kicked.”
He’s scared to lose his home and his city, and thinks it might be irresponsible to raise his 4-year-old son there.
“If you’re gonna live here, and not do anything, I don’t know how
long we can have a reasonable expectation to stay and be safe,” he says.
The Louisiana governor’s office reports that a football-field-sized
piece of wetland is inundated every 38 minutes, which means weaker
storms have stronger impacts. This year’s Hurricane Isaac, though only a
category 1, still flooded places Katrina couldn’t. “Any given day, the
severity of any hurricane can increase,” Madina says. “We need to be
very, very clear on how climate change is affecting environment.”
Susan Beckett of Boulder, Colo., and Jim Poyser of Indianapolis,
Ind., didn’t need to travel to hear Gore say, “We’ve broken more records
this year just in the first eight months [than] last year. The hottest
month ever measured in the U.S. was last month. Globally, this is 327
months in a row, I believe, that have been hotter than the 20th century
average.” They had already felt it.
Beckett, energy program manager at the Environmental Center of the
University of Colorado, has repeatedly offered her house to those
threatened by drought-fueled firestorms statewide. Experts estimate
these fires are seven times as likely in the western states now that
their average temperature has gone up 3 degrees Fahrenheit, extending
fire season by 75 days since the 1970s.
In Poyser’s state, crop failures and water rationing have overtaken
farmlands. He fears life in America’s heartland will be irreparably
changed. As an editor for two independent newspapers,
Indiana Living Green and
Nuvo, he has written headlines like “Extreme Heat: the New Normal” amid a maelstrom of similar news around his state.
As Gore says: “There’s been no year like this year.”
Climate Reality Project President Maggie Fox gets it. After working
on climate change for more than two decades, it came home to her in
Colorado.
“To see a fire coming over the top of a mountain less than a mile
from your house that you can look directly at from your porch… ” she
says, choking up.
But she finds hope in the 1,000 newly minted leaders who came from as
far away as Argentina and Australia to attend the Gore-led training –
and committed to giving at least 10 of their own talks.
“People exhibit leadership in a magical myriad of ways,” she says.
Fox and Gore are hoping it’s those citizen stories – told
person-to-person by those who have felt them personally – that will
affect audiences in ways photographs of distant polar bears and
impassioned speeches by environmental activists cannot.
Or the truth goes from inconvenient to uncomfortable to irreversible.
Mark C. Anderson contributed to this report.
Request a free Climate Reality Project talk by visiting www.climaterealityproject.org
end quote from:
The human race doesn't tend to be a unified whole yet in it's decisions or actions. We are still tied to country rather than to the world which gives everyone of us life. And without which we might be trying to breathe in space somewhere or having to live underground and air condition or manufacture our own air and food somehow. So, not having a habitable planet will really reduce populations of every type of living thing as this thing goes on longer and longer.
I think my favorite fact is that the average temperature at one time at the north pole was 76 degrees Fahrenheit average temperature. Then listen to the next part, "It took 1 million years of ferns absorbing the CO2 that lived from the North pole to the equator to get back to a climate like we knew it to be during the 1900s in the 20th century once again. This is at the macro level that we actually are dealing with.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that once we get to a certain stage the human race might go extinct before we ever get back to anything like the 1900s ever again in regard to glaciers on mountains, ice caps and snow being something that is normal anywhere on earth. In that world Hawaii would be at the north pole in climate and the rest likely would be pretty unbearable.
IT is difficult to say when the tipping point in regard to people worldwide mobilizing themselves in regard to trying to make real changes. Likely that time will be reached when instead of thousands dying in weather disasters it moves to millions at a time in a weather disaster. And when we reach a number like 100 million dying in a year from the weather which is about how many died in World War II maybe then people will take this more seriously. But I hope the actual tipping point is much lower. Because who wants to see 100 million people die in a year from awful weather events? However, the way things are going it is eventually inevitable over time if nothing serious is done. However, even if things are done it could happen anyway because we might have had to start this a century ago to actually stop it in time.
I wonder if other space faring civilizations like ours ended this way from the weather and were driven back to the stone age before this in our prehistory?
Editor's Note: Stephen Prothero, a Boston University religion scholar and author of 
In this Sept. 19, 2012 photo, a costumer picks copies of
newly-published maps of disputed islands, called Diaoyu in China and
Senkaku in Japan, at a state-owned book store in Beijing, China. China
hastily published the map to help maintain public outrage over the
Japanese government’s purchase of some of the islands from their private
Japanese owners. Beijing also has engaged in another type of mapmaking
that may end up escalating the conflict. (AP Photo) CHINA OUT
