Ian Boyne/ColumnistThe unprecedented devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina in the United States, its exposure of the vulnerability of the world's only superpower, and its mammoth US$50-odd billion cost to the Federal budget might be the tip-of-the-iceberg, miner's-canary-type of omen of what is to be unleashed on the world.
The doomsday, Armageddon-like scenarios and projections which have been made by futurists and religious apocalypticists now seem frighteningly close and not as speculative as before. Katrina has again demonstrated the power of natural disasters (which is really a gross misnomer) to totally abrogate the best-laid plans of the best and the brightest economists and national planners. One day or a few hours can change the life of a country for decades.
For years scientists have been warning about the effects of global warming and rising sea levels but many have dismissed these warnings as the Chicken Little pronouncements of the incurably pessimistic. The United States itself stubbornly refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and had downplayed the impact and effects of global warming. Katrina has already humbled President George Bush to admit his failings and it might yet further chasten him into seeing the folly of his ways. It is not just natural disasters which are likely to be catastrophic for their world economy, but the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the avian influenza, termed the Killer Flu, are likely to bring literally unimaginable destruction of our modern systems.
CLIMATE CHANGE
But let's focus on climate change today for there are still scientists arguing against what appears to be overwhelming evidence for dramatic, unnatural climate change. In the July/August issue of Foreign Policy, Bjorn Lomborg, who sparked much controversy in 2001 with the publication of his anti-global warming manifesto, 'The Skeptical Environ-mentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World' is still expressing skepticism about the deterioration of the global environment.
Arguing against him, Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, cites a study by over 1,300 scientists who note that 15 of the 24 ecosystems vital to life on earth are in a degraded or overdrawn state. "That's like a doctor telling you that 60 per cent of your organs is failing", Pope notes in a biting dismissal of Lomborg's runaway optimism, or blind faith. In a special report on 'Global Warming: Bulletins from a Warmer World'in the September, 2004, issue of National Geographic it is noted that "from Alaska to the snowy peaks of the Andes, the world is heating up right now and fast. The results aren't pretty... Ice is melting, rivers are running dry and coasts are eroding, threatening communities. Global temperatures are shooting up faster than at any other time in the past thousand years."
Our disastrous mismanagement and rape of the environment is catching up with us as a species. The world had better brace itself for more Katrinas. And if the United States has proven so inept in dealing with that emergency, what does it say for the preparedness of less developed states? Answering the sceptics who say that the climate change which we are experiencing is just cyclical, National Geographic notes that while sea levels have, indeed, risen and fallen "substantially over Earth's 4.6 billion-year history ...the recent rate of global sea-level rise has departed from the average rate of the past two to three thousand years about one-tenth of an inch a year. Continuation or acceleration of that trend has the potential to cause striking changes to the world's coastlines". More than a 100 million people live within three feet of mean sea level. One billion people live at sea level or just a few metres above it.
disastrous mismanagement
"The projected economic and humanitarian impacts on low-lying, densely populated and desperately poor countries like Bangladesh are potentially catastrophic. The scenarios are disturbing even in wealthy countries like the Netherlands with nearly half its landmass already at or below sea level, says the National Geographic special report.
The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change said in its 2001 report that sea level would rise between 4 and 35 inches by the end of this century, the high-end projection of which, says one scientist, would be "an unmitigated disaster".
One scientific study at the end of last year found that the largest glacier in Greenland doubled its forward progress toward the sea between 1997 and 2003. This major acceleration-called "alarming" by some commentators-coincides with the rapid thinning of the colossal structure adding water to a rising sea at a faster pace than scientific models had been previously predicting. Glacial shifts usually occur over centuries or millennia. But scientists are now saying these shifts are taking place in a matter of years.
A recent report from the University of Liverpool says while the debate on global warming is heating up, "a growing number of documented shifts in traits and behaviours in the wild kingdom are leading many scientists to conclude the world is changing in unnatural ways". Here is some of the evidence: Polar bears are thinner and less healthy today than those of 20 years ago; marmots end their hibernation about three weeks earlier now, compared to 30 years ago; many fish species are moving northward in search of cooler waters and a fruitfly gene normally associated with hot, dry conditions has spread to populations living in traditionally cooler southern regions.
global warming
Says the University of Liverpool report of June 2005: "Terry Root, an environmental science and policy professor at Stanford university, says that as humans argue about thermometer readings, animals are providing evidence that should be figured in the scientific and political decisions. "Animals are just reacting to what's out there," Root says. And according to the report, quoting the Stanford Professor, "if their behaviour is very similar to what we expect with what's going on with global warming; if they're shifting and they're moving, if they are changing their breeding time by five days in 10 years we can use that information to support what the thermometers are also showing."
Continues the University of Liverpool report: "Climate change can occur naturally, but what worries many scientists the most-and the reason why they don't think this is a part of a natural cycle is the rapid rate at which the current changes are happening changes that are being reflected in the responses of wildlife."
In a 2003 study published in the respected Nature magazine, Root and her colleagues analysed a number of studies involving wild plant and animal changes due to global warming. Of the nearly 1,500 species examined, approximately 1,200 exhibited temperature-related changes
similar to what scientists would expect if they are affected by global warming.
In a sobering report issued
earlier this year aimed to jolt businesses to take the issue of environmental degradation seriously, ('Ecosystems and Humane Well-being: Opportunities and Challenges for Business and Industry'), it is stated that two-thirds of the ecosystem services are being "degraded or used unsustainably". The report states that "over the past 50 years humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period in human history."
The report by a large group of scientists go on to state that, "By the end of the century climate change may be the dominant direct driver of biodiversity loss and changes to ecosystem services globally'.
developmental challenges
And UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his major, wide-ranging report issued in March as a follow-up to the Millennium Summit and titled 'In Larger Freedom: Towards Development Security Human Rights for All' says, "one of the greatest environmental and developmental challenges in the 21st century will be that of controlling and coping with climate change. The overwhelming number of scientists now agree that human activity is having a significant impact on the climate. With the concentration of greenhouse gases projected to rise still further over the next century a corresponding increase in the global mean
surface temperature is likely to trigger increased climate variability and greater incidence of extreme weather events such as hurricanes and droughts." There will be more Katrinas and more Tsunamis just with greater intensity and unimaginable
suffering and dislocations.
The chickens are coming home to roost. Our over-consumptive patterns of life and addiction of hedonism are catching up with us. The Communist East of the past and the capitalist West were at one in the philosophy that civilisation was about rapid industrialisation, senseless exploitation of the earth's resources, ever-increasing materialistic 'progress' because both communism and capitalism are humanistic systems.
Some scientists can debate whether global warming is a reality and sceptics among the political class can continue to delay serious action. The sad thing is that it is the poor and defenceless that will bear the brunt of this elite folly and stubbornness.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can send your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com or infocus@gleanerjm.com.
