[Mb-civic] Molly Ivins and Time Magazine on Global Warming: Worry? Worry!

Fri Apr 7 21:18:52 PDT 2006

The Molly Ivins article is very short.  The Time Mag cover story is long 
but certainly worth reading...

Published on Tuesday, April 4, 2006 by TruthDig
Global Warming: What, Me Worry?
by Molly Ivins
 http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0404-32.htm

On the premise that spring is too beautiful for a depressing topic like 
Iraq, I thought I’d take up a fun subject—global warming.

Time magazine warns us to “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.” On the 
other hand, my sister is on the Global Warming Committee of the 
Unitarian Church in Albuquerque, N.M. They go around replacing old 
light bulbs with more energy-efficient models. My money’s on my sis.

It’s a good thing the phrase “the tipping point” became a cliche just in 
time to help us describe global warming. Just a few years ago, we 
were more or less cruising along on global warming, with maybe 50 
years or so to Do Something about it. Suddenly, the only question is 
how soon to push the panic button, and 10 minutes ago appears to be 
the right answer.

People in journalism are the worst criers of “Wolf!” imaginable. We are 
always setting off alarms about Ebola, or avian flu, or the impending 
water shortage, or the Social Security crisis, or killer bees, or the pine 
bark beetle, or anorexia among teenagers (surpassed only by obesity 
among teenagers). Boy, if we can’t sell you a scare with a few 
headlines and some mashed facts, no one can.

Naturally, having listened to the media set off endless alarms, the 
public is inclined to discount them, not to mention that global climate 
catastrophe is not an inviting topic. We’re somewhere between “Don’t 
Panic Yet” and “Panic Now!”—edging toward “Now!”

What is happening is not just what climatologists told us would 
happen, but global warming turns out to reinforce itself by a number of 
feedback mechanisms. For example, when the polar icecaps start 
melting, there’s less blinding bright ice to reflect heat back into the 
atmosphere—over 90 percent of sunlight simply bounces off ice and 
back into space. Whereas the dark water left behind by melted ice 
does the opposite, pulling in more warmth and accelerating the 
process.

The political fight over global warming is over, except for the Bush 
administration, which has some weird problem with science in general. 
I’m still not sure what’s behind that: I recall Rush Limbaugh and the 
radio right taking great glee in pooh-poohing the Kyoto treaty and the 
whole idea of global warming. Maybe they associated global warming 
with Canadians or something equally awful.

You might think some premise like, “The whole world is getting hotter, 
and disastrous consequences will ensue,” would be more persuasive 
than, “I don’t like Canadians, they’re wusses,” but I suspect part of the 
fun of being Rush Limbaugh is never having to say the word 
“responsible.”

The shame for journalism is that it has always been so easy to expose 
those few “scientific” voices claiming there is nothing to global 
warming. When the money for “scientific research” on such a subject 
comes from oil companies, skepticism is required.

Instead, many “journalists” let the bullies on the right cow us with the 
“liberal media” nonsense and reported there was “a debate” over 
global warming. There was no debate. The only question is how fast 
it’s happening. And the answer that keeps coming up is “faster than we 
thought. And still faster.”

Time magazine, in its warm and fuzzy way, proposes that capitalism 
can solve much of the problem of global warming—Henry Luce would 
be so proud. Can’t you see it now? Boy, I’ll bet those titans can hardly 
wait to cut into next quarter’s profits. The insurance industry, for 
obvious reasons of its own, has long taken global warming seriously. 
By simply refusing to insure housing or enterprises near low shores, 
insurance can make quite a difference.

It’s true the United States could make a good thing out of specializing 
in green energy and green technology—but we are still living with an 
administration that subsidizes the oil industry. The question is where 
the political leadership is going to come from before we reach the 
Panic Point, before Miami Beach sinks underwater, before Wall Street 
needs a seawall.

Al Gore is all we’ve got, and the right wing is still prepared to dismiss 
him with contempt and ridicule, not because he’s wrong but because 
they’d rather talk about the time he was supposedly advised to wear 
earth tones.

As the Earth drifts toward crisis, our president does not yet seem 
capable of grasping even the First Rule of Holes. We’re in one, and it 
is time to quit digging.

At the very least, it is time to replace those old light bulbs. Get busy, 
team.

Molly Ivins writes in this space every month. Her latest book is “Who 
Let the Dogs In?”

© 2006 TruthDig.com, LLC

###

Time Magazine Cover Story     26 March 2006

Global Warming: Be Worried, Be Very Worried

Polar Ice Caps Are Melting Faster Than Ever ...
More and More Land Is Being Devastated By Drought ...
Rising Waters Are Drowning Low-Lying Communities ...
By Any Measure, Earth Is At ... The Tipping Point
By Jeffrey Kluger - Time

The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame. Why the crisis
hit so soon - and what we can do about it.

No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it
probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global
warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.

It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was
Cyclone Larry - a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180
m.p.h. - exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that
way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia
orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It
certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve
from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that
way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the
waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just
two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will
be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast - when the emergency
becomes commonplace - something has gone grievously wrong. That 
something
is global warming.

The image of Earth as organism - famously dubbed Gaia by environmentalist
James Lovelock - has probably been overworked, but that's not to say the
planet can't behave like a living thing, and these days, it's a living
thing fighting a fever. From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to
massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us.
Scientists have been calling this shot for decades. This is precisely what
they have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows in from the sun
and raising global temperatures.

Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about
whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so,
the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics
have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it.
If there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would
give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.

But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can
nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are
booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past
which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and
self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last
part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree
Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam.
Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not
simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one
recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of
slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting
that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an
eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Nature, it seems, has
finally got a bellyful of us.

"Things are happening a lot faster than anyone predicted," says Bill
Chameides, chief scientist for the advocacy group Environmental Defense
and a former professor of atmospheric chemistry. "The last 12 months have
been alarming." Adds Ruth Curry of the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution in Massachusetts: "The ripple through the scientific community
is palpable."

And it's not just scientists who are taking notice. Even as nature crosses
its tipping points, the public seems to have reached its own. For years,
popular skepticism about climatological science stood in the way of
addressing the problem, but the naysayers - many of whom were on the
payroll of energy companies - have become an increasingly marginalized
breed. In a new TIME/ ABC News/ Stanford University poll, 85% of
respondents agree that global warming probably is happening. Moreover,
most respondents say they want some action taken. Of those polled, 87%
believe the government should either encourage or require lowering of
power-plant emissions, and 85% think something should be done to get cars
to use less gasoline. Even Evangelical Christians, once one of the most
reliable columns in the conservative base, are demanding action, most
notably in February, when 86 Christian leaders formed the Evangelical
Climate Initiative, demanding that Congress regulate greenhouse gases.

A collection of new global-warming books is hitting the shelves in
response to that awakening interest, followed closely by TV and theatrical
documentaries. The most notable of them is An Inconvenient Truth, due out
in May, a profile of former Vice President Al Gore and his climate-change
work, which is generating a lot of prerelease buzz over an unlikely topic
and an equally unlikely star. For all its lack of Hollywood flash, the
film compensates by conveying both the hard science of global warming and
Gore's particular passion.

Such public stirrings are at last getting the attention of politicians and
business leaders, who may not always respond to science but have a keen
nose for where votes and profits lie. State and local lawmakers have
started taking action to curb emissions, and major corporations are doing
the same. Wal-Mart has begun installing wind turbines on its stores to
generate electricity and is talking about putting solar reflectors over
its parking lots. HSBC, the world's second largest bank, has pledged to
neutralize its carbon output by investing in wind farms and other green
projects. Even President Bush, hardly a favorite of greens, now
acknowledges climate change and boasts of the steps he is taking to fight
it. Most of those steps, however, involve research and voluntary emissions
controls, not exactly the laws with teeth scientists are calling for.

Is it too late to reverse the changes global warming has wrought? That's
still not clear. Reducing our emissions output year to year is hard
enough. Getting it low enough so that the atmosphere can heal is a
multigenerational commitment. "Ecosystems are usually able to maintain
themselves," says Terry Chapin, a biologist and professor of ecology at
the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "But eventually they get pushed to
the limit of tolerance."

CO2 and the Poles

As a tiny component of our atmosphere, carbon dioxide helped warm Earth to
comfort levels we are all used to. But too much of it does an awful lot of
damage. The gas represents just a few hundred parts per million (p.p.m.)
in the overall air blanket, but they're powerful parts because they allow
sunlight to stream in but prevent much of the heat from radiating back
out. During the last ice age, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was just
180 p.p.m., putting Earth into a deep freeze. After the glaciers retreated
but before the dawn of the modern era, the total had risen to a
comfortable 280 p.p.m. In just the past century and a half, we have pushed
the level to 381 p.p.m., and we're feeling the effects. Of the 20 hottest
years on record, 19 occurred in the 1980s or later. According to NASA
scientists, 2005 was one of the hottest years in more than a century.

It's at the North and South poles that those steambath conditions are felt
particularly acutely, with glaciers and ice caps crumbling to slush. Once
the thaw begins, a number of mechanisms kick in to keep it going.
Greenland is a vivid example. Late last year, glaciologist Eric Rignot of
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Pannir
Kanagaratnam, a research assistant professor at the University of Kansas,
analyzed data from Canadian and European satellites and found that
Greenland ice is not just melting but doing so more than twice as fast,
with 53 cu. mi. draining away into the sea last year alone, compared with
22 cu. mi. in 1996. A cubic mile of water is about five times the amount
Los Angeles uses in a year.

Dumping that much water into the ocean is a very dangerous thing. Icebergs
don't raise sea levels when they melt because they're floating, which
means they have displaced all the water they're ever going to. But ice on
land, like Greenland's, is a different matter. Pour that into oceans that
are already rising (because warm water expands), and you deluge
shorelines. By some estimates, the entire Greenland ice sheet would be
enough to raise global sea levels 23 ft., swallowing up large parts of
coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh. The Antarctic holds enough ice to
raise sea levels more than 215 ft.

Feedback Loops

One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating is
that as the poles' bright white surface shrinks, it changes the
relationship of Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that 90% of
the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking much
of its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90%
of the energy it receives. The more energy it retains, the warmer it gets,
with the result that each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the
mile that preceded it.

That is what scientists call a feedback loop, and it's a nasty one, since
once you uncap the Arctic Ocean, you unleash another beast: the
comparatively warm layer of water about 600 ft. deep that circulates in
and out of the Atlantic. "Remove the ice," says Woods Hole's Curry, "and
the water starts talking to the atmosphere, releasing its heat. This is
not a good thing."

A similar feedback loop is melting permafrost, usually defined as land
that has been continuously frozen for two years or more. There's a lot of
earthly real estate that qualifies, and much of it has been frozen much
longer than two years - since the end of the last ice age, or at least
8,000 years ago. Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of
partially decayed organic matter, rich in carbon. In high-altitude regions
of Alaska, Canada and Siberia, the soil is warming and decomposing,
releasing gases that will turn into methane and CO2. That, in turn, could
lead to more warming and permafrost thaw, says research scientist David
Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in
Boulder, Colo. And how much carbon is socked away in Arctic soils?
Lawrence puts the figure at 200 gigatons to 800 gigatons. The total human
carbon output is only 7 gigatons a year.

One result of all that is warmer oceans, and a result of warmer oceans can
be, paradoxically, colder continents within a hotter globe. Ocean currents
running between warm and cold regions serve as natural thermoregulators,
distributing heat from the equator toward the poles. The Gulf Stream,
carrying warmth up from the tropics, is what keeps Europe's climate
relatively mild. Whenever Europe is cut off from the Gulf Stream,
temperatures plummet. At the end of the last ice age, the warm current was
temporarily blocked, and temperatures in Europe fell as much as 10 degrees
F, locking the continent in glaciers.

What usually keeps the Gulf Stream running is that warm water is lighter
than cold water, so it floats on the surface. As it reaches Europe and
releases its heat, the current grows denser and sinks, flowing back to the
south and crossing under the northbound Gulf Stream until it reaches the
tropics and starts to warm again. The cycle works splendidly, provided the
water remains salty enough. But if it becomes diluted by freshwater, the
salt concentration drops, and the water gets lighter, idling on top and
stalling the current. Last December, researchers associated with Britain's
National Oceanography Center reported that one component of the system
that drives the Gulf Stream has slowed about 30% since 1957. It's the
increased release of Arctic and Greenland meltwater that appears to be
causing the problem, introducing a gush of freshwater that's overwhelming
the natural cycle. In a global-warming world, it's unlikely that any
amount of cooling that resulted from this would be sufficient to support
glaciers, but it could make things awfully uncomfortable.

"The big worry is that the whole climate of Europe will change," says
Adrian Luckman, senior lecturer in geography at the University of Wales,
Swansea. "We in the U.K. are on the same latitude as Alaska. The reason we
can live here is the Gulf Stream."

Drought

As fast as global warming is transforming the oceans and the ice caps,
it's having an even more immediate effect on land. People, animals and
plants living in dry, mountainous regions like the western US make it
through summer thanks to snowpack that collects on peaks all winter and
slowly melts off in warm months. Lately the early arrival of spring and
the unusually blistering summers have caused the snowpack to melt too
early, so that by the time it's needed, it's largely gone. Climatologist
Philip Mote of the University of Washington has compared decades of
snowpack levels in Washington, Oregon and California and found that they
are a fraction of what they were in the 1940s, and some snowpacks have
vanished entirely.

Global warming is tipping other regions of the world into drought in
different ways. Higher temperatures bake moisture out of soil faster,
causing dry regions that live at the margins to cross the line into
full-blown crisis. Meanwhile, El Nino events - the warm pooling of Pacific
waters that periodically drives worldwide climate patterns and has been
occurring more frequently in global-warming years - further inhibit
precipitation in dry areas of Africa and East Asia. According to a recent
study by NCAR, the percentage of Earth's surface suffering drought has
more than doubled since the 1970s.

Flora and Fauna

Hot, dry land can be murder on flora and fauna, and both are taking a bad
hit. Wildfires in such regions as Indonesia, the western US and even
inland Alaska have been increasing as timberlands and forest floors grow
more parched. The blazes create a feedback loop of their own, pouring more
carbon into the atmosphere and reducing the number of trees, which inhale
CO2 and release oxygen.

Those forests that don't succumb to fire die in other, slower ways. Connie
Millar, a paleoecologist for the US Forest Service, studies the history of
vegetation in the Sierra Nevada. Over the past 100 years, she has found,
the forests have shifted their tree lines as much as 100 ft. upslope,
trying to escape the heat and drought of the lowlands. Such slow-motion
evacuation may seem like a sensible strategy, but when you're on a
mountain, you can go only so far before you run out of room. "Sometimes we
say the trees are going to heaven because they're walking off the
mountaintops," Millar says.

Across North America, warming-related changes are mowing down other 
flora
too. Manzanita bushes in the West are dying back; some prickly pear cacti
have lost their signature green and are instead a sickly pink; pine
beetles in western Canada and the US are chewing their way through tens of
millions of acres of forest, thanks to warmer winters. The beetles may
even breach the once insurmountable Rocky Mountain divide, opening up a
path into the rich timbering lands of the American Southeast.

With habitats crashing, animals that live there are succumbing too.
Environmental groups can tick off scores of species that have been
determined to be at risk as a result of global warming. Last year,
researchers in Costa Rica announced that two-thirds of 110 species of
colorful harlequin frogs have vanished in the past 30 years, with the
severity of each season's die-off following in lockstep with the severity
of that year's warming.

In Alaska, salmon populations are at risk as melting permafrost pours mud
into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning. Small animals
such as bushy-tailed wood rats, alpine chipmunks and pinon mice are being
chased upslope by rising temperatures, following the path of the fleeing
trees. And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears - prodigious swimmers but
not inexhaustible ones - are starting to turn up drowned. "There will be
no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National
Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops
out."

What About Us?

It is fitting, perhaps, that as the species causing all the problems,
we're suffering the destruction of our habitat too, and we have
experienced that loss in terrible ways. Ocean waters have warmed by a full
degree Fahrenheit since 1970, and warmer water is like rocket fuel for
typhoons and hurricanes. Two studies last year found that in the past 35
years the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has doubled
while the wind speed and duration of all hurricanes has jumped 50%. Since
atmospheric heat is not choosy about the water it warms, tropical storms
could start turning up in some decidedly nontropical places. "There's a
school of thought that sea surface temperatures are warming up toward
Canada," says Greg Holland, senior scientist for NCAR in Boulder. "If so,
you're likely to get tropical cyclones there, but we honestly don't know."

What We Can Do

So much for environmental collapse happening in so many places at once has
at last awakened much of the world, particularly the 141 nations that have
ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions - an imperfect accord, to be
sure, but an accord all the same. The US, however, which is home to less
than 5% of Earth's population but produces 25% of CO2 emissions, remains
intransigent. Many environmentalists declared the Bush Administration
hopeless from the start, and while that may have been premature, it's
undeniable that the White House's environmental record - from the
abandonment of Kyoto to the President's broken campaign pledge to control
carbon output to the relaxation of emission standards - has been dismal.
George W. Bush's recent rhetorical nods to America's oil addiction and his
praise of such alternative fuel sources as switchgrass have yet to be
followed by real initiatives.

The anger surrounding all that exploded recently when NASA researcher Jim
Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a longtime
leader in climate-change research, complained that he had been harassed by
White House appointees as he tried to sound the global-warming alarm. "The
way democracy is supposed to work, the presumption is that the public is
well informed," he told TIME. "They're trying to deny the science." Up
against such resistance, many environmental groups have resolved simply to
wait out this Administration and hope for something better in 2009.

The Republican-dominated Congress has not been much more encouraging.
Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice been unable to get
through the Senate even mild measures to limit carbon. Senators Pete
Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, both of New Mexico and both ranking 
members of
the chamber's Energy Committee, have made global warming a high-profile
matter. A white paper issued in February will be the subject of an
investigatory Senate conference next week. A House delegation recently
traveled to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand to visit researchers
studying climate change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were believers,"
says Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York. "Every one of the
others said this opened their eyes."

Boehlert himself has long fought the environmental fight, but if the best
that can be said for most lawmakers is that they are finally recognizing
the global-warming problem, there's reason to wonder whether they will
have the courage to reverse it. Increasingly, state and local governments
are filling the void. The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the
US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that
they will meet the Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in
their cities to 1990 levels by 2012. Nine eastern states have established
the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of developing a
cap-and-trade program that would set ceilings on industrial emissions and
allow companies that overperform to sell pollution credits to those that
underperform - the same smart, incentive-based strategy that got sulfur
dioxide under control and reduced acid rain. And California passed the
nation's toughest automobile-emissions law last summer.

"There are a whole series of things that demonstrate that people want to
act and want their government to act," says Fred Krupp, president of
Environmental Defense. Krupp and others believe that we should probably
accept that it's too late to prevent CO2 concentrations from climbing to
450 p.p.m. (or 70 p.p.m. higher than where they are now). From there,
however, we should be able to stabilize them and start to dial them back
down.

That goal should be attainable. Curbing global warming may be an order of
magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the
moon. But is it moral not to try? We did not so much march toward the
environmental precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the
scientific scolds who told us we had a problem.

The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system
crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and
Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we're finally coming to appreciate the
knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century
we've been monkeying with those margins. It's long past time we set them
right.

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