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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Global warming could devastate the poorest and most strife-ridden regions of the world -- leading to a violent uprising against the nation that uses the most resources.
Sep 5, 2002 | As the young century enters its second year, I find myself looking not at the front page, or the financial page, or even the Op-Ed page to see which way the political winds will blow.
Instead, I am drawn day after day to the weather page.
In my region, the metropolitan Northeast, water virtually stopped falling from the sky in summer 2001. August into autumn we awoke to a magnificent unbroken string of sunny, cloudless, unnaturally warm blue-sky days. Everyone I know rejoiced in our short-sleeve weather and our good luck. And the weathermen on the nightly newscasts kept smiling.
As we neared the winter solstice it stayed sunny and 70. Asters bloomed inappropriately outside my door. Our mountain lake, usually frozen by then, was ice-free. We were also eight inches short of rain.
By New Year's 2002, streams from North Carolina to New York were at their lowest ebb on record. Reservoirs resembled stony deserts. Wells ran dry. Still the drought hadn't moved to Page 1 -- Osama and Enron saw to that.
In February, the heat wave and drought finally got noticed. The New York Times reported that the winter of 2001-2002 was the warmest on U.S. record. By March, the drought extended from Maine to Georgia, with much of the New York metropolitan area a foot below normal rainfall levels -- a winter drought not seen since the 1890s. One meteorologist mused that without exceptional rains soon "we would be in a world of hurt."
Of course, his was a provincial pessimism. The Northeast and Appalachian Mountains are a tiny part of the world and have seen dry times before, seen empty reservoirs and a seared, tinder-dry landscape.
What is more troublesome is that our exceptional drought fits into a broader pattern. Around the globe, climate trends have been freakish for a decade -- enough so to make a thinking weatherman's grin twist into a worried frown.
The 1990s were the warmest decade on record in the hottest century for 1,000 years. The decade saw record destructive windstorms and floods in Europe, record droughts that scorched Africa, and record droughts and hurricanes that did multibillion-dollar damage in the Americas. The hottest year on record, 1998, was also the costliest ever for weather-related disasters. A one-year price tag on economic losses hit $92.9 billion, compared to the $78.4 billion total for all such losses over the entire decade of the 1980s.
"Hundred year" storms and droughts now come with increasing regularity -- in some places every 50 years, in others, even more often. In 1998, a freakish ice storm that hit the northeastern U.S. and Canada was the worst in recorded history; in Europe, a 1997 flood on the Oder River was caused by a 1,000-year storm. In 1999, record downpours in Venezuela killed 30,000 people.
Scientists point to global warming as the likely culprit. With both the atmosphere and the oceans heating up, adding energy to climate systems, altering wind currents and precipitation patterns, extreme weather will become more and more common.
But like TV's AccuWeather guy, the United States is ignoring the deepening storm that is global warming. Although it has just 4 percent of the planet's population, the U.S. is responsible for 23 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions -- a fact that makes it both practically and morally incumbent on the the U.S. to address the problem. But at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, backstage arm-twisting by the Bush administration kept the world's greatest looming environmental disaster off the agenda, while the president himself pointedly declined to attend.
America's refusal to address global warming may be good news for industries that dread possibly expensive reforms and consumers who imagine their lifestyles will be affected. But avoidance will only make the problem worse. And as global climate change makes life harsher for millions worldwide, the fallout for the U.S. in particular could be unforeseen and devastating, in ways that go far beyond water rationing or the loss of beachfront property.
A three-year drought, the worst on earth, now besieges central and south Asia, threatening 60 million people. In Iran last fall, Lake Hamoun, the country's biggest body of water and one of the largest lakes in the world, turned to desert.
In this poor, strife-ridden region, a deepening drought could be dangerously destabilizing. Imagine this scenario: A disenfranchised group, made desperate by terrible poverty and relentless drought, wields the destructive power of smallpox or nuclear weapons, seeking vengeance on the nation that consumes the most natural resources.
This may sound like fear mongering, but maybe not in light of what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says. The panel's more than 2,000 scientists tell us that our recent wildly erratic weather may be the mere prelude to extreme weather borne out of severe global warming in the 21st century. Near future climate change could be greater than anything civilization has ever experienced.
A 2001 National Research Council report says that as humankind pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we may be doing more than making a lot of hot air. We may be "forcing the climate," putting tension on an exquisitely balanced hair-trigger mechanism that once released, could send us careening into a radically new climate paradigm with new extremes of temperature and precipitation for which governments are unprepared and that would cause the world's poorest billions to suffer most.
Average global temperatures are up by 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century, almost certainly as a result of fossil-fuel burning. The result: Drought and deluge are unprecedented; glaciers are melting, seas rising, coral reefs dying and heat-sensitive animals migrating. In Antarctica, icebergs the size of Rhode Island fall into the sea.
What is apparent to those watching the skies or the Weather Channel (and possessing immunity from the deep denial that accompanies U.S. fossil-fuel addiction), is that things are changing far too rapidly. Transformations that are supposed to happen in geological time are taking place in human time, and the consequences can only be guessed at.
