After Katrina, the climate just gets worse and worse

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Sun, 11 Sep 2005 20:56:30 -0700

SFGate: After Katrina, the climate just gets worse and worse

 

 

 

 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/09/11/ING38EJQKC1.DTL

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Sunday, September 11, 2005 (SF Chronicle)

After Katrina, the climate just gets worse and worse

Bill McKibben

 

 

If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end

of one

story -- the United States safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil

of the world -- then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling

roof marks the beginning of the next story, the one that will dominate our

politics in the coming decades of this century: an America befuddled about

how to cope with a planet suddenly unstable and unpredictable.

Over and over, people said that the scenes from the convention

center, the

highway overpasses and the other suddenly infamous Crescent City venues

didn't " look like America, " that they seemed instead to be straight from

the Third World.

That was almost literally accurate, for poor, black New Orleans (whose

life had never previously been of any interest to the larger public) is

not so different from other poor and black parts of the world: its infant

mortality and life expectancy rates, its educational achievement

statistics mirroring scores of African and Latin American enclaves.

But it was accurate in another way, too, one full of portent for the

future.

A decade ago, environmental researcher Norman Myers began trying to

add up

the number of humans at risk of losing their homes from global warming.

He looked at all the obvious places -- coastal China, India,

Bangladesh,

the tiny island states of the Pacific and Indian oceans, the Nile delta,

Mozambique, on and on -- and predicted that by 2050, it was entirely

possible that 150 million people could be " environmental refugees, " forced

from their homes by rising waters. That's more than the number of

political refugees sent scurrying by the bloody century we've just

endured.

Try to imagine, that is, the chaos that attends busing 15,000

people from

one football stadium to another in the richest nation on Earth, and then

multiply it by four orders of magnitude and resituate your thoughts in the

poorest nations on Earth.

And then try to imagine doing it over and over again -- probably

without

the buses.

Because so far, even as blogs and Web sites all over the Internet fill

with accusations about the scandalous lack of planning that led to the

collapse of the levees in New Orleans, almost no one is addressing the

much larger problems: the scandalous lack of planning that has kept us

from even beginning to deal with climate change, and the sad fact that

global warming means the future will be full of just this kind of horror.

Consider the first problem for just a minute. No single hurricane

is " the

result " of global warming. But a month before Katrina hit, MIT hurricane

specialist Kerry Emmanuel published a landmark paper in the British

science magazine Nature showing that tropical storms are now lasting half

again as long and spinning winds 50 percent more powerful than just a few

decades before.

The only plausible cause: the ever-warmer tropical seas on which these

storms thrive. Katrina, a Category 1 storm when it crossed Florida, roared

to full life in the abnormally hot water of the Gulf of Mexico.

It then punched its way into Louisiana and Mississippi -- the

latter now

governed by Haley Barbour, who in an earlier incarnation as a GOP power

broker and energy lobbyist helped persuade President Bush to renege on his

promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

So far, the United States has done exactly nothing even to try to

slow the

progress of climate change. We're emitting far more carbon than we were in

1988, when scientists issued their first prescient global-warming

warnings.

Even if, at that moment, we'd started doing all we could to

overhaul our

energy economy, we'd probably still be stuck with the 1 degree Fahrenheit

increase in global average temperature that's already driving our

disruptions.

Now, scientists predict that without truly dramatic change in the very

near future, we're likely to see the planet's mercury rise 5 degrees

before this century is out. That is, five times more than we've seen so

far.

Which leads us to the second problem: For the 10 thousand years of

human

civilization, we've relied on the planet's basic physical stability.

Sure, there have been hurricanes and droughts and volcanoes and

tsunamis,

but averaged out across the Earth, it has been a remarkably stable run.

If your grandparents inhabited an island, chances were that you

could too.

If you could grow corn in your field, you could pretty much count on your

grandkids being able to do likewise. Those are now sucker's bets -- that's

what those predictions about environmental refugees really mean.

Here's another way of saying it: In the past century, we've seen

change in

human societies speed up to an almost unimaginable level, one that has

stressed every part of our civilization.

In this century, we're going to see the natural world change at the

same

rate. That's what happens when you increase the amount of heat trapped in

the atmosphere.

That extra energy expresses itself in every way you can imagine: more

wind, more evaporation, more rain, more melt. ...

And there is no reason to think we can cope. Take New Orleans as an

example. It is currently pro forma for politicians to announce that it

will be rebuilt, and doubtless it will be. Once. But if hurricanes like

Katrina go from once-in-a-century storms to once-in-a-decade-or-two

storms, how many times are you going to rebuild it?

Even in the United States, there's not that kind of money --

especially if

you're also having to cope with, say, the effects on agriculture of more

frequent and severe heat waves, and the effects on human health of the

spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria.

Not to mention the costs of converting our energy system to

something less

suicidal than fossil fuel, a task that becomes more expensive with every

year that passes.

Our rulers have insisted in both word and deed that the laws of physics

and chemistry do not apply to us. That delusion will now start to vanish.

Katrina marks Year One of our new calendar, the start of an age in which

the physical world has flipped from sure and secure to volatile and

unhinged.

New Orleans doesn't look like the America we've lived in. But it

very much

resembles the planet we will inhabit the rest of our lives.

 

Bill McKibben is the author of " The End of Nature " and " Wandering

Home, A

Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape. " This article appeared

on www. tomdispatch.com. Contact us at insight.

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Copyright 2005 SF Chronicle