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Will we stop climate catastrophe or play political games to our
doom?
Foreign Policy January 5, 2009
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4585
Think
Again: Climate Change
Act now, we're told, if we want to save the planet
from a climate
catastrophe. Trouble is, it might be too late. The science is
settled, and the damage has already begun. The only question now is
whether we will stop playing political games and embrace the few
imperfect options we have left.
by Bill McKibben
"Scientists
Are Divided"
No, they're not. In the early years of the global warming
debate,
there was great controversy over whether the planet was warming,
whether humans were the cause, and whether it would be a significant
problem. That debate is long since over. Although the details of
future
forecasts remain unclear, there's no serious question about
the general
shape of what's to come.
Every national academy of science, long lists of
Nobel laureates, and
in recent years even the science advisors of President
George W. Bush
have agreed that we are heating the planet. Indeed, there is
a more
thorough scientific process here than on almost any other issue: Two
decades ago, the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) and charged its scientists with synthesizing
the
peer-reviewed science and developing broad-based conclusions. The
reports
have found since 1995 that warming is dangerous and caused by
humans. The
panel's most recent report, in November 2007, found it is
"very likely"
(defined as more than 90 percent certain, or about as
certain as science
gets) that heat-trapping emissions from human
activities have caused "most
of the observed increase in global
average temperatures since the mid-20th
century."
If anything, many scientists now think that the IPCC has been
too
conservative-both because member countries must sign off on the
conclusions and because there's a time lag. Its last report
synthesized
data from the early part of the decade, not the latest
scary results, such
as what we're now seeing in the Arctic.
In the summer of 2007, ice in the
Arctic Ocean melted. It melts a
little every summer, of course, but this
time was different-by late
September, there was 25 percent less ice than
ever measured before.
And it wasn't a one-time accident. By the end of the
summer season in
2008, so much ice had melted that both the Northwest and
Northeast
passages were open. In other words, you could circumnavigate the
Arctic on open water. The computer models, which are just a few years
old, said this shouldn't have happened until sometime late in the
21st
century. Even skeptics can't dispute such alarming events.
"We Have
Time"
Wrong. Time might be the toughest part of the equation. That
melting
Arctic ice is unsettling not only because it proves the planet is
warming rapidly, but also because it will help speed up the warming.
That old white ice reflected 80 percent of incoming solar radiation
back
to space; the new blue water left behind absorbs 80 percent of
that
sunshine. The process amps up. And there are many other such
feedback loops.
Another occurs as northern permafrost thaws. Huge
amounts of methane long
trapped below the ice begin to escape into
the atmosphere; methane is an
even more potent greenhouse gas than
carbon dioxide.
Such examples
are the biggest reason why many experts are now
fast-forwarding their
estimates of how quickly we must shift away
from fossil fuel. Indian
economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted
the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize
alongside Al Gore on behalf of the IPCC,
said recently that we must begin to
make fundamental reforms by 2012
or watch the climate system spin out of
control; NASA scientist James
Hansen, who was the first to blow the whistle
on climate change in
the late 1980s, has said that we must stop burning coal
by 2030.
Period.
All of which makes the Copenhagen climate change
talks that are set
to take place in December 2009 more urgent than they
appeared a few
years ago. At issue is a seemingly small number: the level of
carbon
dioxide in the air. Hansen argues that 350 parts per million is the
highest level we can maintain "if humanity wishes to preserve a
planet
similar to that on which civilization developed and to which
life on Earth
is adapted." But because we're already past that
mark-the air outside is
currently about 387 parts per million and
growing by about 2 parts
annually-global warming suddenly feels less
like a huge problem, and more
like an Oh-My-God Emergency.
"Climate Change Will Help as Many Places as
It Hurts"
Wishful thinking. For a long time, the winners-and-losers
calculus
was pretty standard: Though climate change will cause some parts of
the planet to flood or shrivel up, other frigid, rainy regions would
at
least get some warmer days every year. Or so the thinking went.
But more
recently, models have begun to show that after a certain
point almost
everyone on the planet will suffer. Crops might be
easier to grow in some
places for a few decades as the danger of
frost recedes, but over time the
threat of heat stress and drought
will almost certainly be
stronger.
A 2003 report commissioned by the Pentagon forecasts the
possibility
of violent storms across Europe, megadroughts across the
Southwest
United States and Mexico, and unpredictable monsoons causing food
shortages in China. "Envision Pakistan, India, and China-all armed
with
nuclear weapons-skirmishing at their borders over refugees,
access to shared
rivers, and arable land," the report warned. Or
Spain and Portugal "fighting
over fishing rights-leading to conflicts
at sea."
Of course, there
are a few places we used to think of as possible
winners-mostly the far
north, where Canada and Russia could
theoretically produce more grain with
longer growing seasons, or
perhaps explore for oil beneath the newly melted
Arctic ice cap. But
even those places will have to deal with expensive
consequences-a
real military race across the high Arctic, for
instance.
Want more bad news? Here's how that Pentagon report's scenario
played
out: As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern of
desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would
reemerge. The report refers to the work of Harvard archaeologist
Steven
LeBlanc, who notes that wars over resources were the norm
until about three
centuries ago. When such conflicts broke out, 25
percent of a population's
adult males usually died. As abrupt climate
change hits home, warfare may
again come to define human life. Set
against that bleak backdrop, the
potential upside of a few longer
growing seasons in Vladivostok doesn't seem
like an even trade.
"It's China's Fault"
Not so much. China is an
easy target to blame for the climate crisis.
In the midst of its industrial
revolution, China has overtaken the
United States as the world's biggest
carbon dioxide producer. And
everyone has read about the one-a-week pace of
power plant
construction there. But those numbers are misleading, and not
just
because a lot of that carbon dioxide was emitted to build products
for the West to consume. Rather, it's because China has four times
the
population of the United States, and per capita is really the
only way to
think about these emissions. And by that standard, each
Chinese person now
emits just over a quarter of the carbon dioxide
that each American does. Not
only that, but carbon dioxide lives in
the atmosphere for more than a
century. China has been at it in a big
way less than 20 years, so it will be
many, many years before the
Chinese are as responsible for global warming as
Americans.
What's more, unlike many of their counterparts in the United
States,
Chinese officials have begun a concerted effort to reduce emissions
in the midst of their country's staggering growth. China now leads
the
world in the deployment of renewable energy, and there's barely a
car made
in the United States that can meet China's much tougher
fuel-economy
standards.
For its part, the United States must develop a plan to cut
emissions-something that has eluded Americans for the entire
two-decade
history of the problem. Although the U.S. Senate voted
down the last such
attempt, Barack Obama has promised that it will be
a priority in his
administration. He favors some variation of a "cap
and trade" plan that
would limit the total amount of carbon dioxide
the United States could
release, thus putting a price on what has
until now been
free.
Despite the rapid industrialization of countries such as China and
India, and the careless neglect of rich ones such as the United
States,
climate change is neither any one country's fault, nor any
one country's
responsibility. It will require sacrifice from
everyone. Just as the Chinese
might have to use somewhat more
expensive power to protect the global
environment, Americans will
have to pay some of the difference in price,
even if just in
technology. Call it a Marshall Plan for the environment.
Such a plan
makes eminent moral and practical sense and could probably be
structured so as to bolster emerging green energy industries in the
West. But asking Americans to pay to put up windmills in China will
be a
hard political sell in a country that already thinks China is
prospering at
its expense. It could be the biggest test of the
country's political
maturity in many years.
"Climate Change Is an Environmental
Problem"
Not really. Environmentalists were the first to sound the alarm.
But
carbon dioxide is not like traditional pollution. There's no Clean
Air Act that can solve it. We must make a fundamental transformation
in
the most important part of our economies, shifting away from
fossil fuels
and on to something else. That means, for the United
States, it's at least
as much a problem for the Commerce and Treasury
departments as it is for the
Environmental Protection Agency.
And because every country on Earth will
have to coordinate, it's far
and away the biggest foreign-policy issue we
face. (You were thinking
terrorism? It's hard to figure out a scenario in
which Osama bin
Laden destroys Western civilization. It's easy to figure out
how it
happens with a rising sea level and a wrecked hydrological
cycle.)
Expecting the environmental movement to lead this fight is like
asking the USDA to wage the war in Iraq. It's not equipped for this
kind
of battle. It may be ready to save Alaska's Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge,
which is a noble undertaking but on a far smaller
scale. Unless climate
change is quickly de-ghettoized, the chances of
making a real difference are
small.
"Solving It Will Be Painful"
It depends. What's your
definition of painful? On the one hand,
you're talking about transforming
the backbone of the world's
industrial and consumer system. That's certainly
expensive. On the
other hand, say you manage to convert a lot of it to solar
or wind
power-think of the money you'd save on fuel.
And then there's
the growing realization that we don't have many
other possible sources for
the economic growth we'll need to pull
ourselves out of our current economic
crisis. Luckily, green energy
should be bigger than IT and biotech
combined.
Almost from the moment scientists began studying the problem of
climate change, people have been trying to estimate the costs of
solving
it. The real answer, though, is that it's such a huge
transformation that no
one really knows for sure. The bottom line is,
the growth rate in energy use
worldwide could be cut in half during
the next 15 years and the steps would,
net, save more money than they
cost. The IPCC included a cost estimate in
its latest five-year
update on climate change and looked a little further
into the future.
It found that an attempt to keep carbon levels below about
500 parts
per million would shave a little bit off the world's economic
growth-but only a little. As in, the world would have to wait until
Thanksgiving 2030 to be as rich as it would have been on January 1 of
that year. And in return, it would have a much-transformed energy
system.
Unfortunately though, those estimates are probably too
optimistic.
For one thing, in the years since they were published, the
science
has grown darker. Deeper and quicker cuts now seem
mandatory.
But so far we've just been counting the costs of fixing the
system.
What about the cost of doing nothing? Nicholas Stern, a renowned
economist commissioned by the British government to study the
question,
concluded that the costs of climate change could eventually
reach the
combined costs of both world wars and the Great Depression.
In 2003, Swiss
Re, the world's biggest reinsurance company, and
Harvard Medical School
explained why global warming would be so
expensive. It's not just the
infrastructure, such as sea walls
against rising oceans, for example. It's
also that the increased
costs of natural disasters begin to compound. The
diminishing time
between monster storms in places such as the U.S. Gulf
Coast could
eventually mean that parts of "developed countries would
experience
developing nation conditions for prolonged periods." Quite
simply,
we've already done too much damage and waited too long to have any
easy options left.
"We Can Reverse Climate Change"
If only.
Solving this crisis is no longer an option. Human beings
have already raised
the temperature of the planet about a degree
Fahrenheit. When people first
began to focus on global warming (which
is, remember, only 20 years ago),
the general consensus was that at
this point we'd just be standing on the
threshold of realizing its
consequences-that the big changes would be a
degree or two and hence
several decades down the road. But scientists seem
to have
systematically underestimated just how delicate the balance of the
planet's physical systems really is.
The warming is happening faster
than we expected, and the results are
more widespread and more disturbing.
Even that rise of 1 degree has
seriously perturbed hydrological cycles:
Because warm air holds more
water vapor than cold air does, both droughts
and floods are
increasing dramatically. Just look at the record levels of
insurance
payouts, for instance. Mosquitoes, able to survive in new places,
are
spreading more malaria and dengue. Coral reefs are dying, and so are
vast stretches of forest.
None of that is going to stop, even if we
do everything right from
here on out. Given the time lag between when we
emit carbon and when
the air heats up, we're already guaranteed at least
another degree of
warming.
The only question now is whether we're
going to hold off catastrophe.
It won't be easy, because the scientific
consensus calls for roughly
5 degrees more warming this century unless we do
just about
everything right. And if our behavior up until now is any
indication,
we won't.
- Bill McKibben is the author of many
books, including his latest:
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the
Durable Future.
McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College,
and
co-founder of <http://350.org>350.org.
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