American way must become sustainable

 COMMENTARY:GEORGE TEMPLETON 

By George Templeton
Gazette Columnist

ALFRED E. NEUMAN

The freaky little kid on the MAD magazine cover typified global warming deniers when he declared: “What, me worry?”

There is no such thing as the “theory of global warming” that Governor Perry referred to. When we pray for God to reveal the answer we must remember that there is more than one question.

Skepticism and differing viewpoints are fundamental to science. Denial has no respect for evidence and fails to provide any new useful ideas or discoveries. Global warming has become politicized. The desire to disbelieve deepens as the climate change threat grows.

PREDICTION

Uncertainty means better or worse. It does not arise from ignorance or error. The certainty that we perceive in the world is something we bring to it. It does not exist independent of us. We need to learn to live with uncertainty. If we wait for certainty we will never act.

HOT

The earth is our uncontrolled experiment and we pray it does not go wrong. We experience short-term weather that varies with location and season. Global warming increases both warmer and colder extremes. Long-term, world-wide climate is our concern but that comes in a kaleidoscope of changes. We do not directly perceive the mechanisms of the world’s climate; just their effects. Observations are generalized to form theories reducing data to knowledge. Theories are explanations, not merely predictions.

HEAT

It takes 1000 times more heat energy to raise the temperature of the ocean than the air. The oceans and plant life store and interchange heat, carbon dioxide, and water vapor with the atmosphere causing climate inertia and regional weather variation. A small change in ocean temperature has a large impact on weather. The greenhouse gases that are already in our climate system will continue to cause temperature rise for another 50 years.

CLIMATE CHANGE

We know how summer and winter are caused by the earth’s yearly elliptical orbit about the sun but may not realize that the ice ages correlate with 22,000 to 100,000 year periodic wobbles in the earth’s orbit. Differential heating by the sun, ocean currents, winds, volcanoes, plant life, and carbon dioxide interact and influence climate, but computer models using only natural effects can’t reproduce today’s rapid warming. The disturbing fact is that the earth’s climate suddenly tips, taking on a new semi-permanent state.

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum began 56 million years ago. It was caused by volcanoes, methane bubbling up from the ocean floor, coal fires, and thawing permafrost. Maximum warming was 10 degrees F but at a rate of 0.05 degrees F per l00 years. This moderately fast change acidified the oceans causing extinction of sensitive sea floor life.

Today’s much faster heat rise is unprecedented at 2 to 8 degrees F per 100 years. Antarctic ice core bubbles show that greenhouse gases, caused by man, are now higher than at any time in 700,000 years or more. In decades we are returning to the atmosphere an amount of carbon that took hundreds of millions of years to lock-up in rock. The projected amount of the rise is far less important than the rate. Life will not have time to adapt.

A new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene, is a consequence of man’s refusal to live in harmony with nature. If man is still alive in another 50 million years, geologists will find only the slightest signs that our cities and cars existed. They will be dust and rust. Instead, the fossil remains will document extinction of species, denuding of land, soil erosion and death of coral reefs.

SEA ICE

In three decades more than a million square miles of the Arctic have been unshackled. Greenland’s ice sheet shrinks 50 cubic miles each year. Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the U.S. compete for a quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas located under the ice. If all of Greenland’s ice were to melt, the sea level would rise by 24 feet. We don’t need the melting of ice to cause sea level rise. Sea water expands as it heats. That alone could boost the sea level by 3 feet in the next 100 years.

In 2002 the Antarctic Larsen B ice shelf, a slab bigger than the state of Rhode Island, broke off. The ice shelves of the Antarctic float in the ocean and do not cause a rise when they break off. However, they prop up ice that is further inland. Warm ocean water circulates beneath ice thicker than two Empire State Buildings causing unseen thinning from below. If the West Antarctic ice sheet were to break-up, as it has in the geologically recent past, the sea level would rise by 19 feet. However, the sea level is not constant, depending on the tides, ocean currents, the shore-line, and storms. Because of increased thermal energy in the earth’s climate system 100 year storms take place in less than 10 Years and have cost 14 billion dollars with a total of 52 billion dollars in damage and over 1000 lives lost in the U.S. this past year.

Permafrost covers 20% of the earth’s surface. Global warming is causing it to thaw creating lakes that emit methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Approximately one half of the world’s permafrost is now within 2 degree F of melting. If it melts, the methane released into the atmosphere will be 40 percent beyond what will be produced by all other natural and man-made sources. Permafrost thawing releases more methane causing more heating that causes more thawing and so on, magnifying the effect and causing larger and more rapid temperature increases.

An ice free world would submerge all of Florida, the Statue of Liberty, and the Netherlands. Most of the planet’s large cities are situated near the ocean. In India, 40 million people would be displaced by a 3 foot rise in sea level as would 7 million residents of the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. What if the San Francisco Bay extended all the way to Sacramento causing salt water to work its way into the aquifers that supply California’s agriculture?

DRY

Drought, insect damage, and frequent large fires have quietly thinned the conifers of western forests over the past several decades. Often new trees are not replacing dying ones. A recent study using thousands of aerial photos taken in the 1940’s in northern Alaska reveals that the arctic tundra is greening because shrubs are advancing to the north and upslope while the forests south of the tundra are drying and browning. A transformation in landscape potentially as profound as the loss of sea ice is taking place before our eyes.

El Nino and La Nina are well known climate patterns. Less known but equally important is the Intertropical Convergence Zone rain band. This is a band of heavy rainfall that circles the earth near the equator. It moves up and down in response to the seasons, the sun, and climate. The rain band is driven toward the north by warming and is as far north today as it ever has been. Equatorial substance agriculture that now supports hundreds of millions of people living near the equator is at risk. The shift would hurt Mexico, Central America, Ecuador, Colombia, northern Indonesia, Thailand and the Southwestern United States. Millions of acres of farmland and tens of millions of people depend on water from the Colorado River. California is a semiarid land dependent on storing and diverting water. Shortages are forecast, but yet people continue to migrate.

HOW MUCH DO YOU CARE ABOUT THE FUTURE?

The odds of runaway warming are 1 in 2 in the next 200 years. That might warrant the purchase of an insurance policy! Are you worried about the budget and the national deficit but not about when and how we should prepare for the earth’s future? Climate instability is a greater threat than terrorism and the biggest opportunity since Columbus. Do we have a patriotic responsibility for the prevention and mediation of environmental damage or will we risk waiting until it is too late? Are you worried about America’s economic prosperity, global competitiveness, and geopolitical influence?

DOES OUR OWN PROSPERITY HERE AND NOW OUTWEIGH THE POSSIBILITY THAT WE ARE COMPROMISING OUR GRANDCHILDREN’S WORLD?

Pay me now or much more later! Will mitigating climate change help, or hurt the economy? Will we build dykes and wetlands to hold back the ocean? Will they be robust, and reliable? What are we willing to change? What kind of climate do you want to bequeath to future generations? Can we pull together in a common moral cause? The American way must become sustainable if it is to be practical for the developing world.

WILL FUTURE SOCIETIES BE MORE TECHNICALLY AND FINANCIALLY CAPABLE SO THAT THEY SHOULD LARGELY FEND FOR THEMSELVES?

What is the cost of irreversible climate change? Are developed countries that have more to lose, or poor countries that lack resources, more threatened? Should America help to provide clean energy and reduce deforestation in poor countries? Will America become a pariah, regarded with contempt, because of its foot-dragging reluctance to take action? Will the developing countries take full responsibility for the consequences of their increasing prosperity?

ARE THE RICH PERPETRATING AN INJUSTICE ON THE WORLD’S POOR?

Human misery rather than global warming is the most urgent problem for undeveloped countries. We have more tools than anyone else to deal with climate change and human suffering. The undeveloped countries blame America for causing the problem. We champion human rights but don’t embrace our responsibilities. We take for granted our entitlement to consume the greatest portion of the world’s resources and lose the high moral ground when we choose greed over empathy for the poor.

SHOULD THOSE WHO BENEFIT FROM NOT ADDRESSING CLIMATE CHANGE IMPOSE THE COSTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR INACTION ON THOSE WHO DO NOT?

In the Malaysian highlands there is a gambling casino where citizens must make a refundable deposit of a week’s living expense before entering. Is it bad for business but good for the country? Nixon (a RINO) knew when he signed into law the 1970 Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Protection Act. The world’s future and America’s prosperity depend on making the best business and technical decisions without delay. It’s not a time for an anti-science inconsequential government.