Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Disasters spawned by global warming are no longer science fiction, Ross Gelbspan argues in "Boiling Point" -- they're already here.
Aug 5, 2004 | In Scotland, hundreds of thousands of arctic terns, kittiwakes, guillemots and great skuas suddenly aren't having any babies. The culprit? Global warming has disrupted their food supply, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
The seabirds feed primarily on sandeels, a small silvery fish that once teemed along the northern Scotland seashore. But changes in sea temperature and currents caused by the heating up of the earth's atmosphere are causing the plankton that the sandeels eat to move north, leaving no fish for the birds to eat. One bird monitor who has spent some three decades counting breeding pairs and chicks at the Scottish nesting site called the sudden failure of the seabirds to reproduce simply "unprecedented in Europe."
You don't have to be a classicist or a binocular-toting member of the National Audubon Society to read ominous portents into the sorry fate of hundreds of thousands of seabirds. As journalist Ross Gelbspan voluminously documents in his new book "Boiling Point," the first catastrophes of global warming are not something to anticipate with dread in the distant future. They're here now.
In a fast-paced, well-sourced screed, Gelbspan argues that while Americans fret about terrorism, a much worse nightmare is accelerating. Gelbspan even suggests that if the government of the United States continues to dodge and subvert the international consensus on global warming the tremendous impact of the phenomenon on the world's poor will serve to stimulate terrorism and anti-Americanism around the globe.
"The continuing indifference by the United States to atmospheric warming -- since this country generates one-fourth of the world's emissions with 5 percent of its people -- will almost guarantee more anti-U.S. attacks from people whose crops are destroyed by weather extremes, whose populations are afflicted by epidemics of infectious disease, and whose borders are overrun by environmental refugees," he writes.
If this all sounds like so much alarmist hysteria, tell that to residents of the tiny island nation of Tuvalu in the southwest Pacific Ocean, all of whom have been offered sanctuary by New Zealand, since their homes will likely soon be watery to point of uninhabitable. They are global warming's first human diaspora, climate change refugees with absolutely no power to address their plight.
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