[Mb-civic] MUST READ: Is It Warm in Here? - David Ignatius -
Washington Post Op-Ed
William Swiggard
swiggard at comcast.net
Wed Jan 18 02:52:54 PST 2006
Is It Warm in Here?
We Could Be Ignoring the Biggest Story in Our History
By David Ignatius
Wednesday, January 18, 2006; A17
One of the puzzles if you're in the news business is figuring out what's
"news." The fate of your local football team certainly fits the
definition. So does a plane crash or a brutal murder. But how about
changes in the migratory patterns of butterflies?
Scientists believe that new habitats for butterflies are early effects
of global climate change -- but that isn't news, by most people's
measure. Neither is declining rainfall in the Amazon, or thinner ice in
the Arctic. We can't see these changes in our personal lives, and in
that sense, they are abstractions. So they don't grab us the way a plane
crash would -- even though they may be harbingers of a catastrophe that
could, quite literally, alter the fundamentals of life on the planet.
And because they're not "news," the environmental changes don't prompt
action, at least not in the United States.
What got me thinking about the recondite life rhythms of the planet, and
not the 24-hour news cycle, was a recent conversation with a scientist
named Thomas E. Lovejoy, who heads the H. John Heinz III Center for
Science, Economics and the Environment. When I first met Lovejoy nearly
20 years ago, he was trying to get journalists like me to pay attention
to the changes in the climate and biological diversity of the Amazon. He
is still trying, but he's beginning to wonder if it's too late.
Lovejoy fears that changes in the Amazon's ecosystem may be
irreversible. Scientists reported last month that there is an Amazonian
drought apparently caused by new patterns in Atlantic currents that, in
turn, are similar to projected climate change. With less rainfall, the
tropical forests are beginning to dry out. They burn more easily, and,
in the continuous feedback loops of their ecosystem, these drier forests
return less moisture to the atmosphere, which means even less rain. When
the forest trees are deprived of rain, their mortality can increase by a
factor of six, and similar devastation affects other species, too.
"When do you wreck it as a system?" Lovejoy wonders. "It's like going up
to the edge of a cliff, not really knowing where it is. Common sense
says you shouldn't discover where the edge is by passing over it, but
that's what we're doing with deforestation and climate change."
Lovejoy first went to the Amazon 40 years ago as a young scientist of
23. It was a boundless wilderness, the size of the continental United
States, but at that time it had just 2 million people and one main road.
He has returned more than a hundred times, assembling over the years a
mental time-lapse photograph of how this forest primeval has been
affected by man. The population has increased tenfold, and the
wilderness is now laced with roads, new settlements and economic
progress. The forest itself, impossibly rich and lush when Lovejoy first
saw it, is changing.
For Lovejoy, who co-edited a pioneering 1992 book, "Global Warming and
Biological Diversity," there is a deep sense of frustration. A crisis he
and other scientists first sensed more than two decades ago is drifting
toward us in what seems like slow motion, but fast enough that it may be
impossible to mitigate the damage.
The best reporting of the non-news of climate change has come from
Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker. Her three-part series last spring
lucidly explained the harbingers of potential disaster: a shrinking of
Arctic sea ice by 250 million acres since 1979; a thawing of the
permafrost for what appears to be the first time in 120,000 years; a
steady warming of Earth's surface temperature; changes in rainfall
patterns that could presage severe droughts of the sort that destroyed
ancient civilizations. This month she published a new piece, "Butterfly
Lessons," that looked at how these delicate creatures are moving into
new habitats as the planet warms. Her real point was that all life, from
microorganisms to human beings, will have to adapt, and in ways that
could be dangerous and destabilizing.
So many of the things that pass for news don't matter in any ultimate
sense. But if people such as Lovejoy and Kolbert are right, we are all
but ignoring the biggest story in the history of humankind. Kolbert
concluded her series last year with this shattering thought: "It may
seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could
choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in
the process of doing." She's right. The failure of the United States to
get serious about climate change is unforgivable, a human folly beyond
imagining.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/17/AR2006011700895.html?nav=hcmodule
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