Global Warming's Impact on Everywhere

 Global Warming's Impact on Everywhere

A Companion to Modern Problems: Global Warming by Mark Lynas Publishing by Shasta Gaughen of Greenhaven

Point of view

Almost no one notices, yet the climate change discussion has ended. Global scientific consensus has reached an incontestable point: our planet is warming, and the main culprit is the emissions of greenhouse gases from the combustion of fossil fuels.

In their last stand, the climate "sceptics"—a mishmash of former academics, semi-mad obsessed individuals, and shills for the oil and coal industries—are now trying to deflect attacks. While names like Fred Singer, Philip Stott, and Bjorn Lomborg do make occasional appearances in the popular press [in England] and the US, their opinions stand out due to their non-appearance in the expert literature.

At the same time, all that we once knew is starting to fall apart. Even in Britain, you can see the indications. More than twenty years ago, the first signs of spring were seen more than a week earlier in the horse chestnut, oak, and ash tree seasons. In 2000, there were just 39 designated days of winter, but today, the growing season last nearly all year.

As a result of this warming trend, destructive winter floods are becoming more common, and snow has virtually disappeared from lowland England. In the thirty years between 1960 and 1990, there was only one snowstorm in my hometown of Oxford. However, six of the last ten winters have been entirely snowless. The current pace of warming is comparable to your garden relocating southward by 20 meters daily.

Transformation on Five Different Coasts

The effects of climate change are more noticeable in some regions than others.... As I've been researching this topic for a book, I've seen firsthand how five continents are experiencing massive climate-driven shifts that are putting millions of people in danger, without homes, and without food or water.

On the far western shore of Alaska, some 70 miles from Russia's eastern coast, lies the Eskimo settlement of Shishmaref, where I stayed for a week. Outside, under the light of the midnight sun, I listened to Clifford Weyiouanna, an elder of the community, explain that the sea, which had previously frozen in October, would not freeze again until Christmas. According to him, it is risky to walk or hunt on the sea ice even when it forms; it is too thin. Also impacted by the shifting seasons are the animals: walruses and seals, which are still essential to the Eskimo diet, are moving earlier and are becoming nearly impossible to capture. In 2002, after traveling thousands of kilometers by boat, the entire village managed to capture just one walrus.

Insomnia is a constant companion for Shishmaref. The 600-strong village is perched on thawing cliffs; after the most recent major storm, 50 feet of earth was lost in a single night. As the waves crashed against their homes, people fought against the 90 mph winds to protect them.

As the coordinator of the Shishmaref Erosion Coalition, Robert Iyatunguk, and I stood on the coastline in 2002, we gazed up at a house that dangled precariously from the clifftop. "The wind is getting stronger, the water is getting higher, and it's noticeable to everybody in town," he stated. "It just kind of scares you inside your body and makes you wonder exactly when the big one is going to hit." The Eskimos have lived on this small barrier island continuously for millennia, but in July 2002 they decided to leave.

Everyone in the inner Alaskan town of Fairbanks is talking about warming. The manager of the hostel where I stayed, who was an avid hunter, informed me that the river should freeze over in the fall, that bears were so confused about whether to hibernate or stay awake, and that winter temperatures, which used to drop to 40 degrees below zero, now barely reach 25 below. He also mentioned that ducks were swimming on the river in December.

As the permafrost beneath dwellings thaws, roads around town buckle and houses droop. The cleaning lady and her daughter showed me around one house, where I learned things like how to walk uphill in the kitchen because the house was leaning sideways and how to keep shelves from sliding off by balancing them with bits of wood. Some houses have been left for dead. Modern ones rest on movable stilts.

Chinese droughts

Extreme drought and flooding will be more common in certain regions as a result of global warming, according to scientists. During my April 2002 visit to China, the northern provinces were experiencing the most severe drought the nation had seen in over a hundred years. Whole lakes had evaporated, and sand dunes were quickly moving over farmers' crops in several areas.

After the water receded from a lakeside hamlet in Gansu Province, close to the ancient Silk Road, no one remained save for a single woman who now makes her home among the rubble with her flock of chickens and her cow. She passionately exclaimed, "Of course I'm lonely!" in response to my callous inquiry. "Just think about how dull this life is. There is nothing I can do; I am immobile. I am bereft of family, acquaintances, and financial resources. The haunting recollections of the past, when the town's residents still lingered late into the night, chatting and exchanging tales, haunted her.

I departed just minutes before a dust storm arrived. These storms are becoming increasingly common; in fact, Beijing is now battered many times per spring. An even more intense storm occurred during my previous excursion to a secluded hamlet in eastern Inner Mongolia, not far from the remains of Kubla Khan's legendary Xanadu. The mud-brick structures were swept away by a sand and dust blizzard, turning day into night. Huddled together with a family of Mongolian peasants, I drank rice wine and listened to legends of a time when the grass on the plains was waist-high. Persistent drought and overgrazing have reduced the terrain to barren desert. Hours passed while the storm raged. The villagers' cockerels began to crow when the clouds parted in the late afternoon, leading them to believe that morning had arrived early.

Dangerous Water Sources

Reduced run-off from neighboring mountains, which are seeing decreased snow and ice cover due to increasing temperatures, is contributing to the drought in northwest China. Standing lightheaded from altitude sickness in the high Andes 5,200 meters above Lima, the capital of Peru, I witnessed firsthand how one of the main water-supplying glaciers had shrunk by more than a kilometer in the last century. This phenomenon is repeated across the world's mountain ranges.

After speaking with a senior manager of Lima's water authority, I learned that the melting ice caps pose a serious danger to the city's future access to potable water. With a population of seven million, Lima is the second-largest desert metropolis in the world, behind Cairo; the city gets all of its water from coastal rivers that flow down from distant ice fields. Glaciers are responsible for the year-round flow of rivers; without them, river flow is dependent on the wet season. Similar issues will be faced by the Indian subcontinent in the next century when the glaciers that feed the Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra rivers dwindle in size. Hundreds of millions of people living there would be at risk of water scarcity due to this.

Lima will be deserted and its inhabitants dispersed as ecological refugees unless other water sources can be found. Tulau, a cluster of nine coral atolls in the central Pacific, is no stranger to this type of classification. Along with Kiribati, the Maldives, and a host of other island nations, Tuvalu has brought its predicament to the attention of the international community. A plan to evacuate 75 people to New Zealand annually is already in motion.

During the spring tides of 2002, I witnessed firsthand how the islands are already being impacted by the increasing sea level as I paddled through knee-deep floodwaters. These floods nearly encircled the airfield and flooded most of Funafuti. That same evening, Toaripi Lauti, the first prime minister of the country after independence, shared with me his dismay at discovering the death of his own crop of pulaka, a root vegetable similar to taro, which had been planted in sunken pits, due to the entry of saltwater. He remembered how, a few years ago, when everyone woke up in the morning, they discovered that one of the islets on the atoll's rim had vanished from view, swept away by the waves, its coconut trees shattered and wiped out by the rising water.

Preventing a Global Warming Disaster

No matter how bad these climate change effects are becoming, they are only the canary in the coal mine—the earliest warning signs of the impending Holocaust that will occur unless we take action to lower emissions of greenhouse gases. Global warming of up to six degrees Celsius, according to scientists gathering under the auspices of the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), would plunge the planet into perilous, unexplored territory in only this century. Due to the intricacies of the carbon cycle, researchers from the UK's Hadley Centre warned in June 2003 that the warming may be considerably worse.

Six degrees, the IPCC's worst-case scenario, might have disastrous consequences. Six degrees of warming was all it took to trigger the end-Permian mass extinction 251 million years ago, the worst catastrophe in Earth's history, killing 95 percent of the species that were alive at the time.

Worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases must be reduced by 60 to 80 percent below their present levels if humanity is to escape a comparable fate. This is in stark contrast to the latest emissions predictions made by the International Energy Agency. For starters, we should ratify and swiftly implement the Kyoto Protocol. Then, in the next decade, we should replace it with the "contraction and convergence" model that the Global Commons Institute in London proposed. This model would ensure that all nations have equal per-person emissions rights.

While this is going on, a coalition of campaigning groups is organising under the slogan "No new oil," which means "stop digging for fossil fuels." Their reasoning is that the world's current reserves of oil, coal, and gas are more than enough to completely destabilize the climate. Seeking more is not only inefficient, but also irrational.

Society must evolve with the overarching goal of preventing catastrophic climate change and other widespread environmental catastrophes. It appears that very few in authority are aware of this, especially the present US government, which has vowed to engage in a destructive program centered on the control and exploitation of oil resources.

For the sake of all life on Earth, we must reject the outdated ideology that calls for an economy dependent on oil. This is true not just because it promotes terrorism and wars, but also because it is essential to our survival.

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