NHNE News List
Current Members: 1362
Subscribe/unsubscribe/archive info at the bottom of this message.

NHNE Climate Change Reference Page:
http://www.nhne.com/climatechange/

------------

AFTER KATRINA, THE CLIMATE JUST GETS WORSE AND WORSE
By Bill McKibben
Sunday, September 11, 2005

http://tinyurl.com/c4kbn

If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end of one
story -- the United States safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil
of the world -- then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling
roof marks the beginning of the next story, the one that will dominate our
politics in the coming decades of this century: an America befuddled about
how to cope with a planet suddenly unstable and unpredictable.

Over and over, people said that the scenes from the convention center, the
highway overpasses and the other suddenly infamous Crescent City venues
didn't "look like America," that they seemed instead to be straight from the
Third World.

That was almost literally accurate, for poor, black New Orleans (whose life
had never previously been of any interest to the larger public) is not so
different from other poor and black parts of the world: its infant mortality
and life expectancy rates, its educational achievement statistics mirroring
scores of African and Latin American enclaves.

But it was accurate in another way, too, one full of portent for the future.

A decade ago, environmental researcher Norman Myers began trying to add up
the number of humans at risk of losing their homes from global warming.

He looked at all the obvious places -- coastal China, India, Bangladesh, the
tiny island states of the Pacific and Indian oceans, the Nile delta,
Mozambique, on and on -- and predicted that by 2050, it was entirely
possible that 150 million people could be "environmental refugees," forced
from their homes by rising waters. That's more than the number of political
refugees sent scurrying by the bloody century we've just endured.

Try to imagine, that is, the chaos that attends busing 15,000 people from
one football stadium to another in the richest nation on Earth, and then
multiply it by four orders of magnitude and resituate your thoughts in the
poorest nations on Earth.

And then try to imagine doing it over and over again -- probably without the
buses.

Because so far, even as blogs and Web sites all over the Internet fill with
accusations about the scandalous lack of planning that led to the collapse
of the levees in New Orleans, almost no one is addressing the much larger
problems: the scandalous lack of planning that has kept us from even
beginning to deal with climate change, and the sad fact that global warming
means the future will be full of just this kind of horror.

Consider the first problem for just a minute. No single hurricane is "the
result" of global warming. But a month before Katrina hit, MIT hurricane
specialist Kerry Emmanuel published a landmark paper in the British science
magazine Nature showing that tropical storms are now lasting half again as
long and spinning winds 50 percent more powerful than just a few decades
before.

The only plausible cause: the ever-warmer tropical seas on which these
storms thrive. Katrina, a Category 1 storm when it crossed Florida, roared
to full life in the abnormally hot water of the Gulf of Mexico.

It then punched its way into Louisiana and Mississippi -- the latter now
governed by Haley Barbour, who in an earlier incarnation as a GOP power
broker and energy lobbyist helped persuade President Bush to renege on his
promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

So far, the United States has done exactly nothing even to try to slow the
progress of climate change. We're emitting far more carbon than we were in
1988, when scientists issued their first prescient global-warming warnings.

Even if, at that moment, we'd started doing all we could to overhaul our
energy economy, we'd probably still be stuck with the 1 degree Fahrenheit
increase in global average temperature that's already driving our
disruptions.

Now, scientists predict that without truly dramatic change in the very near
future, we're likely to see the planet's mercury rise 5 degrees before this
century is out. That is, five times more than we've seen so far.

Which leads us to the second problem: For the 10 thousand years of human
civilization, we've relied on the planet's basic physical stability.

Sure, there have been hurricanes and droughts and volcanoes and tsunamis,
but averaged out across the Earth, it has been a remarkably stable run.

If your grandparents inhabited an island, chances were that you could too.
If you could grow corn in your field, you could pretty much count on your
grandkids being able to do likewise. Those are now sucker's bets -- that's
what those predictions about environmental refugees really mean.

Here's another way of saying it: In the past century, we've seen change in
human societies speed up to an almost unimaginable level, one that has
stressed every part of our civilization.

In this century, we're going to see the natural world change at the same
rate. That's what happens when you increase the amount of heat trapped in
the atmosphere.

That extra energy expresses itself in every way you can imagine: more wind,
more evaporation, more rain, more melt. ...

And there is no reason to think we can cope. Take New Orleans as an example.
It is currently pro forma for politicians to announce that it will be
rebuilt, and doubtless it will be. Once. But if hurricanes like Katrina go
from once-in-a-century storms to once-in-a-decade-or-two storms, how many
times are you going to rebuild it?

Even in the United States, there's not that kind of money -- especially if
you're also having to cope with, say, the effects on agriculture of more
frequent and severe heat waves, and the effects on human health of the
spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria.

Not to mention the costs of converting our energy system to something less
suicidal than fossil fuel, a task that becomes more expensive with every
year that passes.

Our rulers have insisted in both word and deed that the laws of physics and
chemistry do not apply to us. That delusion will now start to vanish.
Katrina marks Year One of our new calendar, the start of an age in which the
physical world has flipped from sure and secure to volatile and unhinged.

New Orleans doesn't look like the America we've lived in. But it very much
resembles the planet we will inhabit the rest of our lives.

..........

Bill McKibben is the author of "The End of Nature" and "Wandering Home, A
Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape." This article appeared on
<http://www.tomdispatch.com>.

------------

NHNE News List:

To subscribe, send a message to:
nhnenews-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

To unsubscribe, send a message to:
nhnenews-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

To review current posts:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nhnenews/messages

Published by David Sunfellow
NewHeavenNewEarth (NHNE)
eMail: nhne@...
NHNE Website: http://www.nhne.com/
Phone: (928) 282-6120
Fax: (815) 642-0117

Appreciate what we are doing?
You can say so with a tax-deductible donation:
http://www.nhne.com/main/donations.html

P.O. Box 2242
Sedona, AZ 86339