News Like This Excites Me
Seldom do I read a news story and immediately have the urge to masturbate, but this story aroused me. It is a bit old now (maybe 6 weeks), but it just crossed my homogenized desk. Read on, gentle volunteer, read on.

Last week the British Government held an international conference, at the headquarters of the UK Met Office in Exeter, on climate change. It was called personally by Tony Blair, who is making the problem of global warming one of the central policies of his simultaneous leadership in 2005 of both the G8 group of rich nations and of the European Union. Its purpose was to update policy makers everywhere on climate change science, which is rapidly moving. General appraisals of it are carried out by the IPCC, which has produced three assessment reports, in 1990, 1995 and 2001. The third assessment report (known as TAR) is chapter and verse on what the international community of climate scientists think is happening now, and likely to happen in the future, with global warming.

The most important conclusion of TAR was that he earth's average surface temperature was likely to warm by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees centigrade between now and 2100, depending on how human societies controlled their emissions of carbon dioxide, the waste gas from industry and transport which is retaining more and more of the sun's heat in the atmosphere.

These are enormous rises (even at the lower end) and they are expected to have similarly enormous impacts, ranging from the widespread failure of agriculture and many more extreme weather events from droughts to flooding, to sea-level rise around the world. The fourth IPCC assessment is not due until 2007, and so last week's conference was in the nature of a mid-term report about where the science has got to. ...

(My colleagues and I) were taken aback. The opening day brought disclosure of two major new threats to the world. The first concerned Antarctica, with a warning from the British Antarctic Survey (the body whose scientists discovered the ozone hole) that, perhaps because of rising temperatures, the vast ice sheet covering the western side of the continent may be starting to break up. Were it to collapse into the sea, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise global sea levels by more than 16 feet. Goodbye London; goodbye Bangladesh.

Only four years ago the IPCC TAR said it was safe for probably 1,000 years, certainly until the end of this century; last week Professor Chris Rapley, the BAS director, said that judgement would now have to be revised.

The second alert concerned an issue many of the scientists present were only dimly aware of: the acidification of the oceans. The billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide human society is producing are not only causing the climate to change. When they dissolve in seawater they are combining with it, in a simple chemical reaction, to produce carbonic acid. But the world's seas are alkaline, and have been for many millions of years, and it is in this environment that thousands of species of small marine, organisms at the bottom of the food web, from plankton to shellfish, have evolved. They will not be able to live in an acid sea. The point about these two disclosures is that they were not based on predictions of future events by supercomputer models of the global climate, which is the origin of most scare stories - to use the term neutrally - about global warming. They were based on actual observation, in the real world, of things that are happening now.

But there were plenty of predictions as well at the conference, and they were grimmer than ever. For example, there was the most pessimistic assessment yet of global warming causing collapse of the Gulf Stream which perversely would bring a new ice age to Europe. A group of American scientists calculated that in the absence of major action to control emissions, the chance of this happening was now greater than 50 per cent.

And there was an assessment that the ice-sheet covering Greenland may start to melt - which would cause global sea levels to rise by 20 feet - with a temperature rise of only 1.5 degrees C. above pre-industrial levels. We are already 0.7 above pre-industrial levels; we are well on the way.

Perhaps the most vivid of a plethora of pessimistic papers was a review of studies on which ecosystems and species would be hit by which temperature rises. It was a long, dire litany of disappearances as the mercury moves up the world's thermometer:

Queensland's highland tropical forests very soon; at a one degree rise South Africa's unique fynbos flora and the rest of the Arctic sea ice; between one and two degrees the trout in the rivers of the Rockies; between two and three degrees the alpine flowers of Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the broadleaved forests of China, and the rainforests of the Amazon. One after another they will go, the special places of the earth, the glories of creation.

The overwhelming impression given by the conference, a meeting of entirely sober scientists with hardly a campaigning environmentalist in sight, was that these things will happen. Firstly, there was a strong sense that climate change was proceeding much more quickly than had been anticipated. The report of the conference steering committee said: "Compared with the TAR" - only four years ago, remember - "there is greater clarity and reduced uncertainty about the impacts of climate change across a wide range of systems, sectors and societies. In many cases the risks are more serious than previously thought." Secondly, big temperature rises are already "built into the system", as Margaret Beckett, the UK. Environment Secretary, acknowledged, because there is a time lag between the CO2 going into the atmosphere and the subsequent rise in temperatures. Even if all emissions were stopped dead tomorrow all over the world, enough CO; is up there to cause a further rise, according to a paper circulating at the conference (Hansen et al, 2005), of 0.6 degrees C.

But - and this is the third point - the emissions are by no means going to stop tomorrow. Under the Kyoto protocol, abandoned by the United States, the world's biggest CO; emitter, the industrialised countries are struggling to cut their emissions back to merely 5 per cent below 1990 levels; controlling climate change would require a cut of perhaps 60 per cent.

Yet, as the conference chairman, Dennis Tirpak, head of the climate change programme of the OECD, reminded delegates, the 2004 World Energy Outlook of the International Energy Agency calculates that the next 25 years global emissions of CO2 are likely to increase by 62 per cent, mainly from the developing world, as the Chinese and the Indians rush to build coal-fired power stations to service their exploding economies. The necessary cuts are a fantasy.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 11:32 AM | |