ShareThisWhat Should We Know and Do About Climate Change?
“ What is a man alongside infinity? – To see a surprising prodigy of Nature, let him seek out the smallest thing he knows. Let a mite reveal the incomparable smallness of its body, its limbs, its veins, the smallest drops of its blood. He may think this perhaps the smallest thing in Nature. But inside it, I will show him a new abyss – an immense natural world conceivable inside the still smaller frame of an atom.” ~ Blaise Pascal, 1657.
“Ice matters. It’s the place where we can see and hear and feel climate change in action. When ice melts, everyone – regardless of age or ideological persuasion – can understand what it means.” ~ James Balog, 2012.
“Glaciers stabilize river flow between years. They absorb highly variable monsoon rains to provide a strong, regular flood pulse in the summer melting season. This is vital to people living downstream. The glaciers of the Himalayas and Tibet feed seven of the greatest rivers in Asia – the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Salween, Irrawaddy, Mekong and Yangtze – ensuring reliable water supply to two billion people. In half a century or so, the glacier flows in these rivers will dwindle. This is a serious threat to Asia’s future.” ~ Fred Pearce, 2006.
“Polar bears depend on ice as a platform for traveling and hunting seals. They favor coastal sea ice, that is most at risk. The implications are serious. The global polar bear population was less than 25,000 in 2007. It could drop by two-thirds by 2050, concentrated in High Arctic regions of Canada and Greenland. By 2080, it could be gone from there too.” ~ Alastair Fothergill and Vanessa Berlowitz, 2011.
“Progress will be measured by crises prevented and a Planet preserved.”
~ President Obama, 2013.
As I listened Tuesday to President Obama unveil his new plan of action to address global climate change, I wondered how much we really understand its impact and what the stakes are. After all, most of us – me included – live cosseted urban or suburban lives in a largely man-made environment. We are very far removed from direct contact with the wild, natural world on our Planet. But this is what is changing most dramatically and irrevocably due to climate change. There seems a dangerous disconnect between the magnitude of the potential changes that could all too realistically occur and our daily lives today. Equally, perilously, as the great French seventeenth century mathematician and religious thinker Blaise Pascal noted, we humans tend to over-estimate the power of our knowledge and technology over Nature.
Recent researches – by James Balog, and by Alastair Fothergill and Vanessa Berlowitz – on the rapidly increasing melting of ice in the world’s glaciers, and the increasing fragility of the Arctic and Ant-Arctic ice caps leave little doubt about the sheer power and awesome scope of what is occurring. In fifty to seventy-five years, most of the world’s 160,000 glaciers could largely disappear taking the polar bear to extinction with them. The polar bear is our time’s proverbial canary in the nineteenth century coal mine. In its travails of increasing starvation, declining birth rate, and drowning, it is calling out a warning about what potentially awaits us. For, other researches – by Fred Pearce and others – warn glacier loss due to climate change could dramatically reduce food supplies and drinking water. This will intensify as the world’s population rises from seven to nine billion by 2050.
The Challenges Ahead : After much controversy and strident debate, and seemingly inadequate progress, where are we today in addressing climate change? Are we, any of us, aware enough of what’s already happening and its potential impact on our world? How seriously would climate change affect basic aspects of human life, like food and water? Is President Obama’s worthy plan sufficient or still a compromise ? Does more need to be done?
Retreating Glaciers And Our Food and Water : In dramatic time-lapse photography over five years in the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), Balog has documented in the 2012 movie “Chasing Ice” how glaciers are disappearing in all the world’s regions. That’s everywhere from Alaska and Montana, to Greenland, South America, the Alps, the Himalayas, Russia and in Africa. Major glaciers have almost gone in the Andes and on Mt. Kilimanjaro. As Fred Pearce notes in his fascinating but grim book “When Rivers Run Dry”, glaciers act as gigantic reserves of water ensuring steady supply to the world’s important rivers that feed large irrigation schemes and major food production regions. Their loss will inevitably mean that melt water and therefore food supplies for our Planet will become scarcer, more erratic and costly. Loss of all the world’s glaciers would mean losing the equivalent of the entire US grains’ harvest – over 400 million tons – each year! Glaciers and aquifers are supplying each year a growing share of human water use. Un-replenished, they could dwindle greatly aggravating already existing water shortages. The world’s poor (2 billion people) live in regions that would be worst affected.
President Obama Tuesday highlighted how American technology can play a key role in developing clean energy of the future. And it should. But, to watch a glacier literally disappear is to realize – as Pascal said – how Nature’s power far surpasses our own. Over a mere seventy-five minutes – recorded on film by EIS – a block of ice as big as the lower half of Manhattan island and as tall as two Empire State buildings literally crashed into the sea! The biggest ever ice castle built by man – in China in 2008 – was a mere fifty feet high and took three weeks to make! Fothergill’s movie “Frozen Planet” shows how in the Arctic, each year, glacier melt water floods an area the size of Western Europe! Such power is truly awesome! It serves notice to us : Technologically we are out of our league here! In consequence, the downside risks are far too great – even if you remain a sceptic about climate change. These are not forces we can sensibly choose to ignore.
Action on Climate Change : Is It Going Far and Fast Enough?: Facing Congressional resistance to legislative action – such as on national carbon pricing – Pres. Obama put forward a plan Tuesday based entirely upon administrative actions he can take through executive order. These included enforcement of the 1970 Clean Air Act , which – as agree by the Supreme Court in 2011 – can consider greenhouse gases as harmful to human health. On this basis, new coal-fired power plants – as well as existing ones – will need adequate carbon capture and storage (CCS) to completely mitigate carbon emissions – or will be banned. Emissions of methane gas – a highly potent greenhouse gas – will be tightly regulated, by minimizing flare-offs at oil and gas fields. The Keystone Pipeline will only go ahead if it adds no carbon emissions. Federal Government agencies – notably also the Pentagon – will switch energy supplies substantially to renewables by 2017.
Obama’s 2015 Budget will include funding for development of renewables technologies in partnership with the US private sector. Obama also highlighted : ~ the progress made by many States in adopting carbon emission mitigation plans of differing kinds – including some involving carbon taxation like in California; ~ new investments approved in nuclear power plants; ~ new car and building efficiency standards adopted nationally and by States. He said the USA would take the lead in convening countries for agreement of a global climate change action plan to be adopted by 2020.
Overall, Obama’s was a strong forceful statement. His rhetoric rightly underscored climate change as a major challenge for our time, on which the prosperity and security of future generations of Americans and people around the world could depend. Nevertheless, it amounts more to a holding action, by putting off the future crucial decisions on key issues such as carbon pricing and adequate subsidies for renewables, while removing fossil fuel subsidies. By leaving actions in many areas to the States, it weakens the overall US energy strategy by allowing inconsistencies between different States’ approaches.
Where Do We Go From Here? : The International Energy Agency (IEA) has also issued proposals for addressing climate change in its May 2013 report “Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map” – unveiled recently in Washington D.C. It calls for a global strategy in two phases : (1) medium-term actions through 2020 just sufficient to keep the goal of maintaining global warming below 2? this century; and (2) a long term plan for 2021-35.
IEA’s medium-term proposals mirror those presented by Pres. Obama on Tuesday. They include mainly administrative actions by governments on : energy efficiency in transport and buildings, as well as greatly limiting inefficient coal-fired power plants and methane gas emissions; phasing out of fossil-fuel subsidies; adoption of new clean energy technologies – to expand renewables to almost one-third of total energy supply and 40% of electric power. Also IEA proposes national experiments with carbon pricing and taxation – as already underway in China and in the EU. The goal is to allow time for a broader international consensus to be reached on a long-term plan. But IEA says that time is running out.
The long-term plan for 2021-35 will now need to be a “revolutionary transformation” in energy use. Key elements would have to be a globally coordinated system of carbon pricing, as well as major new regulatory frameworks aimed at a major shift to renewables use – up to 80% of total power supply, for example – before 2035. it is only on this basis, that America and the world can hope to avoid long-term increases in global temperature in the 3-5? with potentially catastrophic outcomes for our children’s and grand-children’s generations around the world.
So, the actions underway – while positive steps forward – are very limited in scope and quite insufficient. I for one, hope that our political leaders will heed the warnings that the polar bears and glaciers are sending us. We need urgently now to face up to the challenge and develop consensus around a long-term action plan that is up to the task. Too much is at stake for us to do otherwise!
Have a Very Happy and Cool Fourth of July!