Global warming: Between a rock and no place at all
There are still many who deny that there is no such thing as global warming, and they’re right. For the wrong reasons. The grandfather of environmentalism, James Lovelock, points out what we face is not global warming but global heating.
Despite the prevailing message we are being sold, this will not be a gentle journey into a warmer climate, but something far more fickle, malevolent and destructive. Climate change will be bad enough, but the likely political, economic and social consequences of that change mean that what we may face is global chaos.
Sustainable development, too, is being peddled as the means by which we deal with climate change and environmental impact upon the planet.
The idea that we manage this problem by turning air conditioning off and catching the bus instead of using our SUVs is arrant nonsense. Sustainable development is a far larger challenge than this, and the solutions to it, are more deeply radical than most of us are ready for. How we live today is not sustainable, and never will be with present technologies.
Let’s be clear, even if we were to reduce our carbon-intensive energy systems to zero now, we would still be living with the consequences of what we have already done for hundreds of years to come.
When we factor in the rest of the environmental damage we have inflicted on the planet, both the scale and complexity of the problems we face go through the roof. The model we have of global warming is at best partial, but mostly wrong; and its solution — sustainable development — an oxymoron.
The information coming in about climate change in the past shows we are going to have to radically rethink our agenda here. We’re finding many instances of rapid, chaotic changes to our climate, as the weather systems of the planet “flip”, from one steady state to another (warm to glacial, hot, to very hot, and so on).
For “flips” also read “huge jumps”. For the period of the last four Great Ice Ages, the climate pattern is not only one of slow change from warmer to cooler conditions and back, but that the whole time period is peppered with times where the climate became chaotic.
Much like how an earthquake only happens when the tension between two tectonic plates in the earth’s crust suddenly release huge amounts of trapped energy, the climate trips convulsively into a chaotic pattern until it settles into a new steady state. This is where the idea of a “tipping point” came from.
The big problem for Bermuda, and for the Northern Hemisphere, is that much of this abrupt climate change is due to the North Atlantic Conveyor — the heat engine that runs the Gulf Stream and keeps the climate of the island sub-tropical. The possible time scales we are talking about here are five years to move into a mini-age which lasts a 100 years (8,200 years ago), or 1,000 years (12,000 ago).
At the end of the last Ice age, when Bermuda was taking its present shape, sea level rose 20 metres in 400 years. At one point temperatures rose 16 degrees C, in less than a decade. This happened with a fraction of the amount of energy we are presently pumping into our weather systems.
The event 8,200 years ago saw average temp rise by 5-6 degrees F across the planet, desert and drought conditions across every major continent, and major increase in numbers and severity of both hurricanes and winter storms in both the hemispheres. Just try to consider what this scenario would mean to how we live our lives today?
Just last month, Global Deserts Outlook, a United Nations programme aimed at raising environmental awareness, has such a scenario happening over the next 100 years. IN<$> this projection of present trends, it’s likely that vast areas of the world would no longer support human life. Islands such as Bermuda and the Caribbean are very vulnerable, not only because of direct climate change, but because of political and economic uncertainty in its wake. These impacts aren’t going to happen at the end of the 100-year cycle, but in ten, 20 or 30 years — that is, any time soon. A worst-case scenario could see the total evacuation of the island communities.
There’s a scientific consensus on this new model of what climate change may mean. The rest of us are just beginning to get it. There’s also agreement on the two main indicators of climate change — carbon dioxide (CO2) and global temperature.
Go above 450 parts per million CO2 or a further two-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature, and all bets are off. Not only are both increasing, but also the rates of increase are increasing. We move into a point of no return, or rather many points of no return, which will begin to feed on each other creating a runaway climate effect. This is a real danger.
We don’t know if we have already passed these two points (it depends how you measure these things). We may have ten years before we lose control of the situation. But, in fact, we simply do not know whether it’s already too late. This is not an issue for future generations, but ours.
Furthermore, as it begins to unfold, we start to see that it’s far more complex than we’d understood so far. Its effects are universal, but not equal. Some parts of the planet are far more vulnerable to its effects than others.
Paradoxical things can happen, like the Northern Atlantic freezing as the rest of the planet warms. It’s also clear that economic and political outcomes of climate change won’t equally spread either.
Let’s take one example of how inter-connected things are, and how feedback between them works. The temperature increase in the Arctic, Antarctic and the semi-frozen tundras is far higher than the planetary average. They are melting. Much faster than even our worst-case models suggested.
As the tundra defrosts, it’s releasing ever-increasing amounts of methane into the atmosphere. In, total, the equivalent of the burning of all the fossil fuels on the planet. Methane, which is 20 times a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. The less snow and ice on the land and sea, the less heat is reflected back into the atmosphere, and feeds the heating effect further.GLACIERS<$> are sliding off the polar caps and mountain systems, on beds of meltwater at rates which are simply terrifying. Together with melting sea ice, they’re adding huge quantities of freshwater into the North Atlantic, and the Gulf Stream is 30 per cent less warm and 40 per cent less salty than it was 40 years ago. Major river systems across the planet are threatened as their source waters disappear, landslides and catastrophic floods threaten mountain and coastal populations as mountains themselves disintegrate and glacial floodwaters burst their natural dams.
The basis of the ocean’s food systems — plankton — are threatened by the rising acidity of seawater as it tries to absorb the CO2 in the atmosphere. Nitrates from fertilisers and sewage create algal blooms, poisoning everything in their presence.
Every major river system in the world has a large and growing dead zone at its mouth. Corals are bleaching, and these gardens of ocean plenty and replenishment grow grey, dark and unforgiving to life.
Higher animal species from whales to fish are plummeting from “over-exploitation” (sic), habitat destruction and pollution, and jellyfish and bloodworms fill the dead space.
Whole ecologies are degrading, deplenishing and disappearing right across the planet. The rise in average ocean temperature further raises sea levels and fuels growing numbers of more powerful hurricanes. Rainfall patterns alter, creating drought conditions in some of the most populated areas of the planet, starving millions, whilst floods drown major cities.
Meanwhile, deep in the oceans, inconceivable amounts of methane lie semi-frozen held by the pressure of cold water on the ocean floor. Cold water that is slowly warming, and mixing with upper layers, losing its grip on enough gas to more than match everything we’ve dumped into the atmosphere so far. It could go slow; it could go like a series of explosions setting off a self-expanding chain reaction. The latter would be very, very unpleasant. The former would just be really, really nasty. And yet, all of the above is only part of the whole story.
We are watching the fabric of our lives — web of connection between all life on this planet — unravel before our eyes. Our ecological commons is falling apart before our eyes.
More to the point, this change we are experiencing isn’t ordinary, every day change. Even what we call “change” is changing.
You may be asking, well, what can I do about it? What’s it got to do with my life in Bermuda? You might even be asking, well even if everyone in Bermuda changed their lives completely and we became a zero-carbon society, it still wouldn’t change anything. Would it?
The questions for Bermudians are not so much about how they deal with climate change, but how it might deal with them, and how they prepare for that.
We will not only need to be able to adapt, but learn to be far more resilient. And more than anything else, flexible.
We have created an acutely connected society - and are peculiarly vulnerable to the dislocations these chaotic events may bring. Our connectedness is our greatest strength, but also our Achilles heel. This is especially true of Bermuda.
Hurricane Katrina disrupted and nearly destroyed one of North America’s major cities. Our response has been less than inspired. How are we going to cope, when this could happen every year to any major city along the continental seaboards?
Or how does a small island in the middle of the Atlantic cope when its economic, ecological and social fabric unravels at a time when the rest of the world is reeling from climate change and environmental destruction, political chaos and famine?
Between a rock and no place at all
