[lit-ideas] Re: global luke-warming
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 19:02:50 -0700
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060320ta_talk_kolbert
CHILLING
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Issue of 2006-03-20
Posted 2006-03-13
In March, 2002, NASA and the Deutsches Zentrum für Luftund Raumfahrt,
the German aerospace agency, launched a pair of satellites from the
Plesetsk Cosmodrome, a former intercontinental-ballistic-missile site in
northern Russia, to map changes in the earth’s surface. The satellites,
nicknamed Tom and Jerry, have been chasing each other around the globe
ever since. Separated by a gap of approximately a hundred and
thirty-seven miles, they sometimes pull apart, only to draw closer
again. By monitoring their relative positions to the fantastic
exactitude of one micron—less than one-fiftieth the width of a human
hair—scientists can detect tiny variations in the earth’s gravitational
field.
Now, almost four years to the day after they were launched, Tom and
Jerry have yielded a scarily significant result: Antarctica is losing
ice. The rate of loss, according to researchers at the University of
Colorado, in Boulder, who analyzed changes in the continent’s
gravitational pull, is around thirty-six cubic miles per year. (For
comparison’s sake, the city of Los Angeles uses about one-fifth of a
cubic mile of water annually.) The finding, which was reported two weeks
ago in the online version of Science, is particularly ominous, because
climatologists had expected that even as the ice sheet lost mass at its
edges, its over-all mass would increase, since rising temperatures would
lead to more snowfall over the continent’s midsection. If the loss
continues, it will mean that predictions for the rise in the sea level
for the coming century are seriously understated.
The news from Antarctica follows a string of similarly grim discoveries.
In September, satellite measurements showed that the extent of the
Arctic ice cap had shrunk to the smallest area ever recorded, prompting
a prediction that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer “well
before the end of this century.” Around the same time, a group of
British scientists reported that soils in England and Wales have been
losing carbon at the rate of four million metric tons a year, a loss
that is at once a symptom of warming and—as much of that carbon is
released into the atmosphere—a likely cause of more. In January,
researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies concluded that
2005 had been the hottest year on record, and, in February, a team of
scientists from NASA and the University of Kansas announced that the
flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland had more than doubled over the
past decade. Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that the
mountain pine beetle, a pest once kept in check by winter cold, has
decimated huge swaths of forest in western Canada. Officials with the
Canadian Forest Service say that the beetle has crossed the Rockies and
they fear that it will soon start eating its way east. “People say
climate change is something for our kids to worry about,” one official
told the Post. “No. It’s now.”
In the face of such news, how does a country, i.e. the United States,
justify further inaction? Certainly, there isn’t much tread left in the
argument that global warming is, to use Senator James Inhofe’s famous
formulation, a “hoax.” In January, six former heads of the Environmental
Protection Agency, five of whom had served under Republican
Administrations, met with the current administrator, Stephen Johnson,
for a panel discussion in Washington. Panelists were asked to hold up
their hands if they believed global warming to be a real problem, for
which human activity was responsible. Every one of them, Johnson
included, raised a hand.
But where there’s a will there is, indeed, always a way. The new
argument making the rounds of conservative think tanks, like the
National Center for Policy Analysis, and circulating through assorted
sympathetic publications goes something like this: Yes, the planet may
be warming up, but no one can be sure of why, and, in any case, it
doesn’t matter—let’s stop quibbling about the causes of climate change
and concentrate on dealing with the consequences. A recent column in the
Wall Street Journal laid out the logic as follows: “The problems
associated with climate change (whether man-made or natural) are the
same old problems of poverty, disease, and natural hazards like floods,
storms, and droughts.” Therefore “money spent directly on these problems
is a much surer bet than money spent trying to control a climate change
process that we don’t understand.” Sounding an eerily similar note, a
column published a few days later in the National Review Online stated,
“We can do more to help the poor by combating these problems now than we
would by reducing carbon dioxide emissions.”
The beauty of this argument is its apparent high-mindedness, and this,
of course, is also its danger. Carbon dioxide is a persistent gas—it
lasts for about a century—and once released into the atmosphere it is,
for all practical purposes, irrecoverable. Since every extra increment
of CO2 leads to extra warming, addressing the effects of climate change
without dealing with the cause is a bit like trying to treat diabetes
with doughnuts. The climate isn’t going to change just once, and then
settle down; unless CO2 concentrations are stabilized, it will keep on
changing, producing, in addition to the “same old problems,” an
ever-growing array of new ones. The head of the Goddard Institute, James
Hansen, who first warned about the dangers of global warming back in the
nineteen-seventies and recently made headlines by accusing the Bush
Administration of censorship, has said that following the path of
business-as-usual for the remainder of this century will lead to an
earth so warm as to be “practically a different planet.” In a world thus
transformed, the only sure bet is that there will be no sure bets.
A project like Tom and Jerry demonstrates all the strengths of American
science: technological sophistication, restless curiosity, and
monumental budgets. But, at the same time, it points to the fundamental
disconnect in our culture. Why spend tens of millions of dollars to
produce such an elegant set of measurements only to ignore them? With
knowledge comes responsibility, and so it is that we turn from the
knowledge we have gone to such lengths to acquire.
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Forwarded for scholarly purposes by
Robert Paul
The Reed Institute
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