Has Wall Street been reading our blog, eyeonemiami? Never mind. Better measure our response to what we see in the world through the lens of a microscope, not a stochaic chart.
1 billion people around the world watched the Oscars on TV and saw that the United States is not totally out to lunch on global warming. But we think too many people are missing the point about the metric to measure our response.
On the grand canvas of carbon emissions measured by millions of tons, we are chattering about sea level rise and stronger hurricanes.
Right now, the changes are happening to the smallest creatures. Worry about acidic oceans, the loss of plankton and shallow water coral reefs. Other conditions due to global warming gases may be responsible for the disappearance of frogs throughout the world.
Some people say, who cares if there is one less frog in the world? Even for many people who agree global warming is a problem, for the most part, they are still talking about climate change in the language of adaptation.
We’ll grow corn in northern Canada, some people say, to substitute for losses in traditional farm belts. But everything we know and are learning about the sequencing of life in its various forms is that playing with evolution, whether intentionally or not, has unintended consequences.
For hurricanes, we’ll adapt by asking Congress to support a national catastrophe fund that will make a national responsibility for coastal property values.
For sea level rise, we’ll stop salt water intrusion by injecting vast quantities of treated wastewater underground to form an invisible barrier.
On the theme of adaptation, we seem to like it so long as there’s profit somewhere.
But if global warming is the greatest market failure in world history, its symbol could be, well, the simple honey bee.
Unseen and undirected by human hand, bees provide a unique service to human health and welfare, pollinating a variety of crops that are invaluable to civilization. And the bees are disappearing.
Like their counterparts around the nation, Florida beekeepers have seen losses of 40 percent to 60 percent of their recent hives, without explanation.
Is climate variability—a direct consequence of global warming—providing advantages for mites, funguses, or viruses to proliferate that would otherwise remain in an evolutionary or geographically confined lockbox?
We may never know the answer to that question and it may be irrelevant by the time we do.
Gradually, the United States is tip-toeing away from the hubris that industrial chemical and energy producing processes can “voluntarily” adapt to climate change.
But the need for stringent rules to compel rapid reduction of the carbon load on our planet is going to become more and more urgent.
The scientists say the debate is over: we agree, so let's gets on with the next act.
4 comments:
It is important to note that the current President and administration for almost six years edited and manipilated scientific research to deminish the issue of global warming.
where do they find the time?
You should also note that in the 4.5 billion years the earth has existed, that the climate has changed thousands of times and literally millions of species have come and gone. Who are we humans to expect, no, demand that everything be frozen exactly as it is right now in 2007 for all of perpetuity.
Hey I have some news for you. Regardless of global warming, the human race and all life on earth is eventually doomed. That's a scientific FACT that is not up for debate. The sun will eventually change so much (either by burning out or blowing up) that our planet will not be inhabitable.
By the way the scientists that have that consensus are revising their projections for sea level rises for this century from 36 to something 18 inches. Oops! Nowhere near the several feet Al Gore claims in his mockumentary.
The Long Consensus On Climate Change
By Naomi Oreskes
Thursday, February 1, 2007; Page A15
Washington Post
With the release of the new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tomorrow, the fourth since the organization's founding in 1988, many will be looking for what's new. How have estimates of sea-level rise changed? How soon will we achieve a doubling of carbon dioxide levels?
Scientists and journalists focus on novelty, because both are largely about discovery. But from a policy perspective, what matters is not what's new but what's old. What matters are not the details that may have shifted since the last report, or that may shift again in the next one, but that the broad framework is established beyond a reasonable doubt. Although few people realize it, this framework has been in place for nearly half a century, and scientists have been trying to alert us to its importance for almost that long.
Scientific research on carbon dioxide and climate dates to the 19th century, when Irish scientist John Tyndall established that CO2is a greenhouse gas -- meaning that it traps heat and keeps it from escaping to outer space. In the 19th century, this was understood as a fact about our planet, one that made it hospitable to life, but did not have any political implications.
That began to change in the early 20th century, when Swedish geochemist Svante Arrhenius deduced from Tyndall's work that CO2released to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels could alter Earth's climate. By the 1930s British engineer Guy Callendar had compiled empirical evidence that this effect was already discernible.
Callendar's concern was pursued in the 1950s by numerous American scientists, including oceanographer Roger Revelle, a one-time commander in the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office, who helped his colleague Charles David Keeling find funds to implement a systematic monitoring program. By the 1960s, Keeling's assiduous measurements at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii demonstrated conclusively that atmospheric carbon dioxide was, indeed, steadily rising. (For this work, President Bush awarded Keeling the National Medal of Science in 2002.) Although these scientists may not be household names, they are well known in the scientific community. However, even most scientists don't know that they -- and others -- have been communicating concerns about global warming to presidents of both parties since the 1960s.
One early warning that we "will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate . . . could occur" came in 1965 from the Environmental Pollution Board of the President's Science Advisory Committee. While the Bush administration has been loath to accept this reality, an earlier administration accepted it as a statement of scientific fact. In a special message to Congress in February 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson noted: "This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels."
A second warning came in 1966 from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Panel on Weather and Climate Modification, headed by geophysicist Gordon MacDonald, who later served on President Richard Nixon's Council on Environmental Quality. While examining the question of deliberate weather modification, MacDonald's committee concluded that increased carbon dioxide might also lead to "inadvertent weather modification."
In 1974, in the wake of the Arab oil embargo, Alvin Weinberg, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, realized that climatological impacts might limit oil production before geology did. In 1978, Robert M. White, the first administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and later president of the National Academy of Engineering, put it this way:
"We now understand that industrial wastes, such as carbon dioxide released during the burning of fossil fuels, can have consequences for climate that pose a considerable threat to future society."
In 1979 the subject was addressed by the JASON Committee, the reclusive group of scientists with high-level security clearances who gather annually to advise the U.S. government; its members have included some of the most brilliant scientists of our era.
The JASON scientists predicted that atmospheric carbon dioxide might double by 2035, resulting in mean global temperature increases of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius and polar warming of as much as 10 to 12 degrees. This report reached the Carter White House, where science adviser Frank Press asked the National Academy of Sciences for a second opinion. An academy committee, headed by MIT meteorologist Jule Charney, affirmed the JASON conclusion: "If carbon dioxide continues to increase, [we] find no reason to doubt that climate changes will result, and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible."
It was these concerns that led to the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and, in 1992, to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which called for immediate action to reverse the trend of mounting greenhouse gas emissions. One early signatory was President George H.W. Bush, who called on world leaders to translate the written document into "concrete action to protect the planet." Three months later, the treaty was unanimously ratified by the Senate.
Since then, scientists around the world have worked assiduously to flesh out the details of this broadly affirmed picture. Many details have been adjusted, but the basic parameters have not changed. Well, one thing has. In 1965, the concern that greenhouse gases would lead to global warming was a prediction. Today, it is an established scientific fact.
The writer is a professor of science history at the University of California at San Diego.
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