November 2004
Like weapons of mass destruction, human-induced climate change will hit the environment and smash people’s lives indiscriminately, punishing the vulnerable and the weak the hardest. The warning signs are evident everywhere.
By Renato Redentor Constantino
‘We sometimes get the feeling they are going to let us die,’ said Enele Soponga the other year. Soponga is the ambassador to the United Nations of Tuvalu, an island nation with a population of 12,000 that is projected to be the first island state to go under water. Tuvalu's main island has already been inundated three times in 2003; vegetable plots were washed away along with the island's drinking water.
Soponga, who is also the chairperson of the Association of Small Island States, is not alone in his sentiment.
Climate change is not a smart bomb. Like weapons of mass destruction, human-induced climate change will hit the environment and smash people's lives indiscriminately, punishing the vulnerable and the weak the hardest. The warning signs are everywhere.
The three hottest years in recorded history – 1998, 2002 and 2003 – all occurred in the last six years. The 1990s remain the warmest decade on record.
Recently Japan suffered from its fourth major storm since late August. It was reportedly ‘the most powerful to hit Okinawa since 1972’.
In March, a hurricane hit the Brazilian coast – the first ever recorded in the South Atlantic. The Brazilian weather service, with no established naming sequence, had no idea what to call it. The agency eventually settled on Catarina, after the state where the hurricane made landfall.
According to a recent scientific study, because of increasing global temperatures, ‘hurricanes will grow stronger and wetter as a result of global warming’. The study, said Dr Kerry A Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ‘is by far and away the most comprehensive effort’ to assess the problem. The study ‘clinches the issue’, Emanuel said, concerning the link between the warming of tropical oceans and storm intensity.
Other scientists agree. According to Tom Knutson and Bob Tuleya, tropical climate modellers at the Princeton, New Jersey-based Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, large parts of the world ‘can expect a 20% increase in rainfall, and damage due to increased wind speeds might rise as much as 10%. That 10 or 20% may not sound like much, but add it to a top-ranked Category 5 monster headed for Mobile, Alabama and you've got a major disaster in the making ... [In addition,] a greenhouse gas-induced warming may lead to a gradually increasing risk in the occurrence of highly-destructive Category 5 storms.’
Warming temperatures have resulted in massive ice loss. On the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory floats the 3,000-year-old tens-of-metres-thick Ward Hunt Ice Shelf. The reporter Jane George recounted last year that ‘when the British Arctic Expedition travelled there in 1875 and Robert E Peary explored the area in 1907, the shelf of land-fast ice was still intact, but, by 1982, 90% of the shelf had been lost’. Changes in the ice shelf have also drained the 30-km-by-5-km Lake Disraeli of its fresh water.
In the Pyrenees, glacier surface has decreased from 1779 hectares in 1894 to 290 hectares in 2001. Glacial mass in the region shrunk by 52% between1980 and 2001. The European Environment Agency has recently issued a report estimating that three-quarters of glaciers in the Swiss Alps are likely to disappear by 2050.
According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the rapid melting of the world's highest ice fields is ‘driving up sea levels, increasing floods and turning verdant mountain slopes into deserts’. The Chinese scientists recently published the most detailed study ever undertaken of China's glaciers, which are said to account for 15% of the planet’s ice. The study, the Glacier Inventory, was approved for publication recently after a quarter of a century of exploration in China and Tibet.
In the past 24 years, the Chinese scientists have measured glacier loss ‘equivalent to more than 3,000 sq km’. Among the most marked changes has been the 500-metre retreat of the glacier at the source of the Yangtze on the Tibet-Qinghai plateau. If the climate continued to change at the current pace, scientists predict that two-thirds of China's glaciers would disappear by the end of the 2050s.
The consequences for ecosystems and humans are nothing short of ominous. ‘In the short term,’ said Yao Tandong, who led 50 scientists in studying the decline of the Himalayan glaciers, ‘the water from the ice would fill reservoirs and lead to more flooding – as was already the case in Nepal and downstream areas of China.’
Yao predicted that in the future, ‘the end of the glaciers would deprive the mountain ecology of its main life source and hasten the desertification that threatens western China, particularly in Gansu and Xinjiang provinces’. Once the mountain ice disappears, ‘rivers would start to dry up and ocean levels would rise, threatening coastal cities’.
The Chinese study confirmed earlier studies of Everest, ‘which showed the world's tallest peak more than 1.3 metres shorter than in 1953, when it was first scaled by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’. Climate change, said the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is ‘a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power that it radically alters human existence’.
It’s time for the world to wean itself away from fossil fuels such as oil and coal, the burning of which releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas mainly responsible for global warming. It’s high time that we embraced the solution to the problem – a solution that is by no means difficult to embrace.
The European Renewable Energy Council has shown that with the right support policies from government, renewable energy from wind, geothermal, small hydro, modern biomass and solar power can provide 50% of global energy supply by 2040.
Traditional energy economists say that renewable energy is too expensive and that we can’t afford to develop it. The truth is, wrote a young environmentalist in the South China Morning Post recently, ‘we cannot afford not to’. – Third World Network Features
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About the writer: Renato Redentor Constantino is a writer and painter based in Quezon City, Philippines. He writes a weekly column for the Philippine national newspaper Today (in which the above article was first published), whose online partner is abs-
cbnNEWS.com. Constantino is the managing director of the Foundation for Nationalist Studies. His recent works can be accessed at www.redconstantino.blogspot.com Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
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