The Heat Death of American Dreams
By Ed Merta, AlterNet Posted on October 12, 2005, Printed on November 1, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/25351/
A number of news reports and commentary on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita
have linked the disasters to global warming. Almost nobody noticed a
crucial scientific finding, two weeks earlier, that foreshadows
disasters on a far greater scale in the decades to come. According to August 11 articles in the magazine New Scientist
and the British newspaper the Guardian, a pair of scientists, one
Russian and one British, report that global warming is melting the
permafrost in the West Siberian tundra. The news made a little blip in
the international media and the blogosphere, and then it disappeared. Why
should anyone care? Because melting of the Siberian permafrost will,
over the next few decades, release hundreds of millions of tons of
methane from formerly frozen peat bogs into the atmosphere. Methane
from those bogs is at least twenty times more potent as a greenhouse
gas than the carbon dioxide that currently drives global warming.
Dumping such a huge quantity of methane on top of already soaring CO2
levels will drive global temperatures to the upper range of increases
forecast for the remainder of this century. According to the most recent forecast by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), compiled in 2001, human industrial emissions are on course to
raise global temperatures between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius by the
year 2100. The IPCC models didn't account for methane releases from the
Arctic, nor did they consider other natural sources of greenhouse gases
that could be released by human activity. The agency judged Arctic
methane releases to be a real but remote possibility, not likely to
emerge for decades. Now we find that it could very well be happening
today. The news of melting Siberian permafrost means, in all
likelihood, that global warming is accelerating much faster than
climatologists had predicted. The finding from Siberia comes amidst
evidence, presented at Tony Blair's special climate change conference
last February, that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be in danger of
disintegrating -- another warming-induced event once thought to be
decades or centuries away. Meanwhile, according to a September
29, 2005 report in the Guardian, scientists at the University of
Colorado, Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center have measured a drastic shrinking of ice floes in the Arctic Ocean. Arctic waters are now expected to be ice-free well before the end of this century. How
many more milestones will there be? The prospects of a worst case
scenario, with a temperature increase approaching or exceeding 5.8
degrees Celsius, are increasing dramatically, with all the attending
disasters that would entail -- inundated coastlines, extreme storms and
drought, disease pandemics, collapsing agriculture, massive
environmental refugee flows. And how far will it go? Climate
forecasts have long noted that every increase in global temperature
heightens the odds of runaway global warming, beyond any human control.
Continued overheating could unlock more methane from Arctic regions
beyond Siberia. It could cripple the vital ability of plants and oceans
to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, turning them into gushing sources of
new CO2 that accelerate the superheating even further. The ice caps
that help cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight into space could
vanish. In the end, the relentless rise in temperature could induce a
cataclysmic venting of billions of tons of methane from the oceans. A paper by British scientists Michael J. Benton and Richard J. Twitchett, published in the July 2003 issue of Trends in Ecology & Evolution,
shows how this could happen. 251 million years ago, at the end of the
Permian era, a release of carbon dioxide from volcanic eruptions
apparently heated the Earth's atmosphere by about 6 degrees Celsius. This
initial increase in temperature triggered, in turn, a massive release
of methane from Arctic tundra and the oceans. Research by Jeffrey Kiehl
and others at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at
University of Colorado, Boulder, tells us what happened next. According
to their paper in the September 2005 issue of the journal Geology, the
Earth's annual mean surface temperature rose by an additional 10 to 30 degrees Celsius. The
result of this runaway global warming was the greatest mass extinction
since life emerged from the sea -- 95 percent of all species in
existence died. That from an initial temperature rise only 0.2 degrees
Celsius more than what the IPCC says could occur by the end of this
century. We now know that human industry is causing in our lifetimes
the same kind of methane release that triggered the Permian extinction. The
news from Siberia means that putting a brake on climate change in our
lifetimes, or our children's, is impossible. If the entire human race
miraculously slashed industrial carbon dioxide emissions today by the
most drastic feasible amount, the temperature would continue to
increase for decades, maybe centuries, according to IPCC forecasts. The
Arctic methane driving the atmosphere toward runaway warming would thus
continue to spew from the permafrost. In any case, the reality of human
behavior is that we will almost certainly not cut our carbon emissions
to zero, so long as current politics and paradigms endure. Unless
something changes in the global zeitgeist, nations will debate and
muddle along, and maybe eventually adopt some further showpiece
compromises like the Kyoto protocol, and we'll tell ourselves it's
enough. By the time political and economic elites realize the
ghastly scope of what's happening, the truly catastrophic changes in
our climate and biosphere will probably be unfolding already. It
seems likely that we are staring down the barrel of the full force,
worst-case scenarios studied by the IPCC and other research
organizations. The future foreseen in those scenarios is hidden amidst
a mind numbing tedium of graphs and scientific jargon. The language is
bland, almost routine. Implicit in the abstract language, though, are
real events and consequences that will devastate the lives of real
human beings, on a scale no one has ever seen. Katrina was a harbinger.
The future will be far worse. To imagine what it might be like is
to invite charges of fear mongering, because it violates the scientific
ethos of caution, restraint, and neutrality, the political and cultural
norms of can-do optimism. But we've reached the point now where we have
to start envisioning what we will face. We have to see the data and
projections in human terms, if we hope to be ready for what our
children and their children will have to endure. We have to start
thinking clearly about what the numbers might mean. For decades,
the right derided environmentalists as doom-sayers. Environmental
organizations themselves often hesitated, for fear of losing
credibility, to put their case in stark, apocalyptic terms. It may not
be politic to say so, but growing evidence suggests that the worst-case
forecasts are coming true. The ability of our planet to sustain life is
beginning to disintegrate. The collapse will accelerate and
intensify with each passing year. At some point, the cataclysm that
ended Earth's Permian era, 251 million years ago, will repeat itself.
During the decades or centuries of its recurrence, we will see the end
of technological progress, the destruction of our civilization, and
quite possibly the extinction of our species. Preventing that
outcome will, and should, override any other political and social
issue. Quite literally, nothing else matters now. Every policy, every
issue, must be viewed in terms of how it contributes to human survival.
The impractical and the impossible are now imperative, whether we know
it or not. We will have to eliminate carbon emissions. All of them.
Post-carbon energy sources will be crucial to the eventual recovery of
our climate, centuries or millennia from now. In the meantime,
the environmental collapse will continue regardless, over many human
generations. Human societies face the task of riding it out as best
they can, minimizing the death and misery their inhabitants must
endure. In the end, they will have to redefine civilization. It's
time for progressives to face what's coming. Normal politics isn't
enough anymore. Once, the left sought justice and plenty for everyone
in the world of material abundance created by the Industrial
Revolution. The task now is to save something decent and humane as the
former things pass away. What do we need to do, here and now? How can we do it? What comes next? Let the conversation begin here.
Ed Merta is a freelance writer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/25351/
|