The Impact of Climate Change on Everywhere

 The Impact of Climate Change on Everywhere

Global Warming by Lynas, Mark: A Companion to Contemporary Issues Press of Greenhaven, Shasta Gaughen



Point of view



The discussion about climate change is over, even though few people notice. Worldwide, scientists have accumulated incontestable evidence that our planet is warming, mostly due to emissions of greenhouse gases from the combustion of fossil fuels.



In their last stand, the climate "sceptics"—a mishmash of former academics, semi-mad obsessed individuals, and shills for the oil and coal industries—are now trying to deflect attacks. The opinions of Fred Singer, Philip Stott, and Bjorn Lomborg are noticeable because to their absence from the scholarly literature, even though their names do occasionally emerge in the general press [in England] and the US.



The status quo is starting to fall apart at the same time. Even in Britain, the indicators are pervasive. More than twenty years ago, the first signs of spring were seen more than a week earlier in the horse chestnut, oak, and ash tree seasons. In 2000, there were just 39 designated days of winter, but today, the growing season last nearly all year.



As a result of this warming trend, destructive winter floods are becoming more common, and snow has virtually disappeared from lowland England. There has been zero snowfall in my hometown of Oxford for six of the last 10 winters, an occurrence that occurred just twice in the thirty years spanning 1960–1990. The current pace of warming is comparable to your garden relocating southward by 20 meters daily.



Evolution Throughout Five Oceans



There are more obvious manifestations of climate change in some regions of the world than in others. While doing research for a book on the topic, I have seen firsthand the catastrophic climate-related changes that have occurred on five different continents, putting millions of people in peril, without homes, and without food or water.



I stayed at the Eskimo settlement of Shishmaref for a week in Alaska. It was on the far western shore of the state, about 70 miles from Russia's eastern coast. I sat under the midnight sun and listened to Clifford Weyiouanna, an elder of the community, explain how the sea, which had previously frozen in October, would now remain ice-free all the way up until Christmas. He went on to say that even when sea ice does ultimately form, it is too thin to safely walk or hunt on. Elements of the Eskimo diet, such as seals and walruses, are becoming more scarce and early in their migrations as a result of the shifting seasons. There was just one walrus caught by the entire town in 2002, despite the thousands of kilometers covered by boat.



There is always dread for Shishmaref. The 600-strong village is perched on thawing cliffs; after the most recent major storm, 50 feet of earth was lost in a single night. In an effort to protect their homes from the oncoming waves, people bravely braved the 90 mph winds.



Looking up at a home left dangling over the clifftop, I stood on the coastline [in 2002] with Robert Iyatunguk, the coordinator of the Shishmaref Erosion Coalition. "The wind is getting stronger, the water is getting higher, and it's noticeable to everybody in town," he stated. "It just kind of scares you inside your body and makes you wonder exactly when the big one is going to hit." The Eskimos have lived on this small barrier island continuously for millennia, but in July 2002 they decided to leave.



Everyone in Fairbanks, the capital of interior Alaska, is talking about warming. My hostal manager is an avid hunter, and he filled me in on some interesting facts about the area: how the river was flowing in December (it normally freezes over in the fall), how the bears aren't sure if they should hibernate or remain awake, and how winter temperatures have dropped from 40 degrees below zero to barely 25 below.



As the permafrost beneath dwellings thaws, roads around town buckle and houses droop. At one property, I was shown by the cleaning lady and her daughter how to cross the kitchen without stepping on anything (the house was leaning sideways) and how to keep shelves from falling off by balancing them with pieces of wood. Some houses have been left for dead. The latest models rest on extendable stilts.



The Chinese drought



Climate change, according to scientists, will cause extreme drought and flooding in certain regions. During my April 2002 visit to China, the northern provinces were experiencing the most severe drought the nation had seen in over a hundred years. Whole lakes had evaporated, and sand dunes were quickly moving over farmers' crops in several areas.



One lakeside hamlet in Gansu Province, close to the ancient Silk Road, was deserted as the water level dropped. Now, only a single woman clings to the ruins, keeping company with a few chickens and a cow. She yelled out in response to my rude question, "Of course I'm lonely!" "Can you fathom how monotonous this existence is?" I am immobile; I am powerless. Nobody knows who I am, and I'm broke. Remembering the days when the neighbors would stay up late chatting and exchanging tales haunted her. Then the community turned into a ghost town.



I departed just minutes before a dust storm arrived. More and more often, even Beijing is being battered by these storms every spring. An even more intense storm occurred during my previous excursion to a secluded hamlet in eastern Inner Mongolia, not far from the remains of Kubla Khan's legendary Xanadu. A dust and sand blizzard swept over the mud-brick structures, turning day into night. Huddled together with a family of Mongolian peasants, I drank rice wine and listened to legends of a time when the grass on the plains was waist-high. Overgrazing and chronic drought have reduced the once fertile area to a barren wasteland. Hours passed while the storm raged. After the clouds parted and the sun came out again in the late afternoon, the cockerels in the village began to crow as if it were already morning.



Dangerous Water Sources



Drought in northwest China is exacerbated by melting snow and ice on neighboring mountains, which reduces run-off from those ranges. Standing lightheaded from altitude sickness in the high Andes 5,200 meters above Lima, the capital of Peru, I witnessed firsthand how one of the main water-supplying glaciers had shrunk by more than a kilometer in the last century. This phenomenon is repeated across the world's mountain ranges.



Lima, with a population of seven million, is the second-largest desert metropolis in the world, after Cairo. The city gets all of its water from coastal rivers that flow down from the ice fields far above. A senior manager of Lima's water authority later explained to me how melting ice is now a critical threat to future freshwater supplies. Once the glaciers melt, the rivers will only flow during the rainy season because the snows keep them flowing all year. The Indian subcontinent faces a similar dilemma: with the melting of glaciers at the headwaters of the Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra rivers, hundreds of millions of people there will face water scarcity.

decrease throughout the next hundred years.



Without the ability to secure alternate water sources, Lima will be deserted and its inhabitants dispersed as

people fleeing from harmful environments. The inhabitants of the nine coral atolls that make up Tuvalu in the central Pacific are already familiar with this category. Along with Kiribati, the Maldives, and a host of other island nations, Tuvalu has brought its predicament to the attention of the international community. A plan to evacuate 75 people to New Zealand annually is already in motion.



During the spring tides of 2002, I witnessed firsthand how the islands are already being impacted by the increasing sea level as I paddled through knee-deep floodwaters. These floods nearly encircled the airfield and flooded most of Funafuti. That same evening, Toaripi Lauti, the first prime minister of the country after independence, shared with me his dismay at discovering the death of his own crop of pulaka, a root vegetable similar to taro, which had been planted in sunken pits, due to the entry of saltwater. A few years ago, he remembered, the whole atoll had woken up to the news that one of the islets had vanished from view, swept away by the waves, its coconut trees shattered and drowned in the rising water.



Preventing a Global Warming Disaster



Like the canary in a coal mine, these climate change impacts are merely the beginning of the inevitable catastrophe that will ensue unless we take action to decrease emissions of greenhouse gases, no matter how bad they appear now. Global warming of up to six degrees Celsius, according to scientists gathering under the auspices of the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), would plunge the planet into perilous, unexplored territory in only this century. The intricacies of the carbon cycle may lead the temperature increase to be much more pronounced, according to researchers from the UK's Hadley Centre in June 2003.



An almost unfathomably disastrous outcome may result from the IPCC's worst-case scenario, which is six degrees. Just six degrees of warming 251 million years ago set off the greatest catastrophe in Earth's history, the end-Permian mass extinction, which killed 95 percent of all species in existence at the time.



To save ourselves from a similar catastrophe, we must reverse the recent predictions made by the International Energy Agency and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 60 to 80 percent below their present levels. The Kyoto Protocol should be ratified and swiftly implemented as a first step. The Global Commons Institute in London has proposed a "contraction and convergence" model that would replace it in the following decade. This model would allocate equal per-person emissions rights to all nations in the world.



While this is going on, a coalition of campaigning groups is organising under the slogan "No new oil," which means "stop digging for fossil fuels." Their reasoning is that the world's current reserves of oil, coal, and gas are more than enough to completely destabilize the climate. Seeking more is not only inefficient, but also irrational.



Averting catastrophic climate change and other widespread environmental catastrophes must take center stage as the guiding concept for society's development. It appears that very few in authority are aware of this, especially the present US government, which has vowed to engage in a destructive program centered on the control and exploitation of oil resources.



Not only does maintaining an economy dependent on oil fuel terrorism and wars, but it also threatens the very survival of our planet's biosphere.

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