Ian McDonald
I TAKE NP PLEASURE in causing concern, especially when that concern comes closer to our Guyana home than to most homes in the world. After all, we have quite enough big worries already - gun crimes accelerating brutally by 50 per cent in a single year; another general election looming, with the Opposition more and more agitated.
But consider the following, taken from an article 'The Coming Meltdown' by Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, in the New York Review of Books, January 12, 2006.
Arctic sea ice is disappearing. Last summer there was 20 per cent less of it than normal. This process may well have reached a tipping point beyond which there is no recovery. Instead of blinding white ice that bounces sunlight back into space, there is open blue water soaking up the sun's heat and accelerating melting.
In the Siberia tundra the vast permafrost has begun to melt, releasing into the atmosphere formerly frozen methane which, like carbon dioxide, is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas. The methane is bubbling up so abundantly in some places that puddles of standing water could not freeze last year, even in the depths of the Siberian winter.
CARBON RELEASED IN ATMOSPHERE
Examination of 6,000 soil borings across the United Kingdom found that warmer temperatures (growing seasons now last 11 days longer at that latitude) has led to dramatically increased microbial activity in the soil. This means that much of the carbon long stored in the soil is now being released into the atmosphere. The quantity involved is so large that it is negating all the work Britain has done to switch away from coal to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.
Lonnie Thompson, scientist at the Ohio State University, pre-eminent in exploring tropical and sub-tropical glaciers and decoding the information trapped in their ice, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February, 2001, that the snows on the summit of Kilimanjaro are fast disappearing and would all be gone in 20 years. Soon enough that magnificent, heart-stopping view will be lost to mankind.
In a presentation to the American Geophysical Union on December 6, 2005, James Hansen, NASA scientist and one of the world's foremost climate modellers, had this to say:
NEARING TIPPING POINT
"The Earth's climate is nearing, but has not passed, a tipping point beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences. These include not only the loss of the Arctic as we know it, with all that implies for wildlife and indigenous peoples, but losses on a much vaster scale due to rising seas."
It is not only what I read in this and other articles and books. Last November, my wife and I were visiting my sister and her husband at their lovely wind-swept home on a cliff overlooking the sea in Hodges Bay, Antigua, where my grandparents once lived and my parents after them. In the 1940s and 1950s my grandfather kept in a ledger a meticulous record of temperature and rainfall. He entered the statistics every day. In the last three years or so, my brother-in-law has resumed that meticulous daily record and when we visited, I took some time to compare these new figures with the figures entered decades ago by my grandfather in that precious old ledger. I found that compared with 50 years ago, the average daily temperature in any given month is three to four degrees Fahrenheit higher now than it was then. Warming at that rate makes one sweat, both literally and metaphorically.
Bill McKibben's sombre article is among other things, an elegy on the death of ice, that cold and shining and often so beautiful element. He writes:
NEARLY IRREVERSIBLE
"We are forced to face the fact that a century's carelessness is now melting away the world's storehouses of ice, a melting whose momentum may be nearing the irreversible. It's as if we were stripping the spectrum of a colour, or eradicating one note from every octave. There are almost no words for such a change: it's no wonder that scientists have to struggle to get across the enormity of what is happening."
In the face of crisis, threatened by great tragedy, people demote rivalries and differences (which suddenly seem petty) and close ranks against a common, overwhelming challenge. Perhaps, pray God, this will happen around the world and also here at home.
Ian McDonald is an occasional contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
