Nature Features
Making peace with global warming - a tough sell
By Tony Czuczka Apr 4, 2007, 10:05 GMT
Washington - Start talking about global warming and the mood typically turns to doom, gloom and alarm about greenhouse gases. But the focus may be shifting to a new reality: learning to live with a warmer world.
Two decades of UN reports on threats such as rising sea levels, vanishing coastlines and stronger tropical storms have pushed industrial nations into action against emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, which scientists believe are warming Earth.
As politicians, celebrities and environmentalists rallied against emissions, less attention was paid to how countries could cope with warming. That is changing as scientists converge on the notion that climate change will affect us for centuries, whatever anti-pollution steps we take now.
'It's just within the last year that it's crept into the discussion,' Gregg Marland, a climate expert at the US government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said in a telephone interview. 'I think it's a concession that we've gotten far enough down the line that some change is inevitable.'
The debate played out at talks in Brussels ahead of Friday's upcoming release of a UN report on the human impact of climate change, part of a 2007 trilogy that peaks in May with recommendations to policymakers.
Striking a balance between making peace with climate change and taking further steps to curb greenhouse-gas emissions was a key topic in the Brussels talks, said Thomas Wilbanks, a US government scientist and one of the report's authors.
More provocatively, four US- and British-based scientists recently argued that while 'enormous intellectual, political, diplomatic and fiscal resources' were devoted to reducing emissions in the last 15 years or so, talk of adapting to climate change had been 'taboo' as a signal of defeat.
They cite two factors - ferment among scientists, including the UN's global panel of climate experts, and worry among developing countries expected to be hardest hit - as elements that are pushing the 'adaptation' discussion higher on the agenda.
'Historical emissions dictate that climate change is unavoidable,' the four experts said in a commentary in the February edition of the journal Nature. 'And even the most optimistic emissions projections show global greenhouse-gas concentrations rising for the forseeable future.'
The trick is to protect people against the impact of climate change as part of a broader development strategy that is in tune with the environment, the scientists argued. Americans needed look no further than the 2005 hurricane that flooded New Orleans and drove out most residents.
'As Hurricane Katrina made devastatingly clear, climate vulnerability is caused by unsustainable patterns of development combined with socioeconomic inequality,' said the experts.
Building cleaner cars, power plants and 'green' houses helps cut down emissions. In contrast, adaptation can range from improving a low-lying nation's flood defences to chopping down trees that might fall on your house in a storm.
The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) says governments need to move now to protect people and nature against storms, drought and rising seas, which can trigger forest fires, damage to coral reefs and crop failure.
But pinpointing what regions might be hit by destructive climate change in the future is notoriously difficult. Still, speculation has already begun about who wins and loses in a warming world.
Melting polar ice could open up new shipping and oil exploration opportunities in places like Canada and Russia, American writer Gregg Easterbrook predicted in The Atlantic monthly. Be ready to sell coastal real estate and, for Europe, possibly to grow colder - a development that could undermine its powerful economy, he says.
Despite the tantalizing prospects, Easterbrook said he opposes 'just letting climate turmoil happen and seeing who profits.'
'The history of antipollution programmes shows that it is always cheaper to prevent emissions than to reverse any damage they cause,' he said.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-AgenturCOMMENT
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Older Talkback
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Very well put - drought conditions will certainly put great strain upon delivery of water to communities.
There is, however, a further knock-on effect - that of food production. Once drought sets in, the production level of crops will certainly fall, and probably fail completely in many areas. One only has to look at Africa to see how devastating this can be
On top of this, many agricultural areas rely heavily on irrigation - there will be a very hard choice to make between using dwindling water supplies for maintaining food supplies or direct use as water.
There is one more nasty little catch to go with it--fires. Not only will there be an increase in wildfires, there will be a shortage of water to fight them.
Should global warming turn out to be a fact, human being are quite capable of adjusting to the changes. We've been adjusting to climate changes for tens of thousands of years and there's no reason to think that we cannot continue to cope so long as governments stay out of our way.
John W. Bales, Waverly, AL USA
John,
We do indeed have global warming. I withheld judgment for a long time on this one because I suspected all along that there was too much politics mixed in with the science on these issues. The retreat of Earth's glaciers at almost the same time that the Martian polar caps have receded finally decided the matter for me. That is evidence that can only be explained one way. The sun is brighter now than it was thirty years ago.
Now we have large populations exactly where we need them the least. In arid-to-desert regions and along the coastlines. This problem is not unique to the United States; its global.
In the wetter regions of the US we are already drawing so heavily on groundwater supplies that the aquifers are heavily stressed and ground subsidence has become a major problem in many areas, Houston and New Orleans just to name two.
It the time for addressing these problems has come and gone, but instead of addressing them, we are arguing over carbon dioxide emissions and the 'greenhouse effect'.
Humans have indeed been adjusting to climate change for thousands of years, but there are two different problems (perhaps insurmountable) today -
In the past we adjusted by -
A. Moving away from the worst areas. That was easy when the world was sparsely populated, but how will the US cope with (for instance) millions of Mexicans coming over the border to escape drought in Mexico ?
B. The changes in the past were relatively slow - the current sun warming cycle is perhaps sufficiently slow to be coped with, but if it is boosted by man-made effects - for example, CO2/Water vapour creating the Greenhouse Effect, and the sheer amount of energy being pumped into Earth's environment in the form of heat* - then the rate of change may be too rapid for the majority of humans to survive.
*This aspect is often overlooked - as we heat our homes, drive our cars, run our technological systems, energy is being used from various fuels and turned into heat. Not just in the production of energy such as electricity, but further down the line when your computer gets warm, your car brakes heat up and in millions of other uses of energy. This heat has to dissipate somewhere, and it accumulates in the Earth's total heat capacity. Some will be radiated into space as part of the Earth's general dissipation of heat energy through the atmosphere into space but there is a net gain which further adds to the temperature rise of Earth
A further thought on heating - even sitting quietly in an office environment, a human produces around 350 Btu/hr. With activity this can rise to over 1000 Btu/hr. This heat is produced by food processing and chemical changes in the body to power its activity
Not very much, I agree. However, multiply it by getting on for 7 billion total population of the world, and that is an awful lot of heat going into the environment to be absorbed by the Earth's heat sink and adding to global warming - increasing it at a rate not previously experienced
Good point, Peter. Our 'waste heat' is enormous. All that fuel we burn eventually ends up as heat in the atmosphere. Another argument against the GHG theory, in my opinion. Were the atmosphere able to slow our heat output by any significant degree we would be cooked to a turn by now.
I've done a few calculations, and I think it would take a long time for the heat of humans to make much difference -
Even with everybody russing about and producing 1000 Btu, and with 7 billion people, this is a total energy output of 293 x 7 billion Watts.
The energy from the sun over the Earth's surface is 1.740 x 10 to the 17th
So, by my calculations, the heat output of the entire human race is about 1/8000 of a percent of that of the sun. I don't thank that is going to cook us very quickly !
Try going to www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm for very comprehensive facts
page: 1
NoharnessApr 13th, 2007 - 00:05:42
Oh, never mind the blooming hurricanes! Katrina the storm did not do that much damage in of itself. It was rain from Katrina dumped on the Mississippi Basin coupled with truly stupid politico-engineering that caused the disaster in New Orleans. The storm damage itself was far greater in Mississippi.
The truly scary thing about global warming is the damned droughts! When will these thick-headed boobs stop watching television for long enough to actually think the problem through?
Mind you, in this regard the cause of global warming is COMPLETELY irrelevant. We have global warming already. We WILL have prolonged droughts, often in areas that have seldom suffered from them. We in the United States are already drawing entirely too much water from our aquifers and other underground sources. Those sources, even though underground, are fed by rainfall. When the rains cease for prolonged periods, there will be even less water in those underground sources to draw from. Traditional surface sources of water will disappear or be greatly diminished as an immediate consequences of these coming droughts
UNDERSTAND! We are going to suffer some prolonged droughts. What are we doing now to deal with the problem of getting water to our very large urban populations? For that matter, rural populations may suffer even more!
Get you heads in gear, guys! It's time to wake up and smell the dust!
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