Impacts of Climate Change on a Global Scale

 Impacts of Climate Change on a Global Scale

A Companion to Modern Problems: Global Warming by Mark Lynas Greenhaven Press, Shasta Gaughen

Point of view

Climate change is no longer a contentious topic, although few people seem to notice. There is now indisputable evidence from scientists all across the world that our planet is warming, and that this warming is being driven by 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 due to their absence from the scholarly literature, even though their names do occasionally emerge in the general press [in England] and the US.

At the same time, all that we once knew is starting to fall apart. Including the UK, the indications are pervasive. The emergence of new leaves on horse chestnut, oak, and ash trees is occurring over a week earlier than it did twenty years ago. 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. In the thirty years between 1960 and 1990, there was only one snowstorm in my hometown of Oxford. However, six of the last ten winters have been entirely snowless. The current pace of warming is comparable to your garden relocating southward by 20 meters daily.

Transformation Across Five Oceans

The effects of climate change are more noticeable in some regions than others.... As I've been researching this topic for a book, I've seen firsthand how five continents are experiencing massive climate-driven shifts that are putting millions of people in danger, 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. Under the light of the midnight sun, I listened to Clifford Weyiouanna, an elder of the village, explain that the sea, which had previously frozen in October, would be ice-free all the way up to Christmas. According to him, it is risky to walk or hunt on the sea ice even when it forms; it is too thin. Animals are also feeling the effects of the changing seasons. Walruses and seals, which are still important parts of the Eskimo diet, are moving earlier and are becoming nearly hard to catch. In 2002, the entire village traveled thousands of miles by boat, but they only managed to catch one walrus.

Shishmaref is always on edge. Fifty feet of ground was lost overnight during the last major storm, and now the cliffs upon which the 600-strong village sits are thawing. In an effort to protect their homes from the oncoming waves, people bravely braved the 90 mph winds.

Standing on the coastline [in 2002], I looked up at a home left dangling over the clifftop 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 centuries, 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.

The community is experiencing widespread road buckling and housing sinking due to the thawing of the permafrost underneath. 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 movable stilts.

The Chinese drought

Climate change, according to scientists, will cause extreme drought and flooding in certain regions. The northern provinces of China were experiencing their worst drought in over a hundred years when I visited the nation in April of 2002. 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 passionately exclaimed, "Of course I'm lonely!" in response to my callous inquiry. "Can you fathom the monotony of this existence? There is nothing I can do; I am immobile. Nobody knows who I am, and I'm broke. Recollections of the days when the town's residents still lingered into the night, chatting and sharing tales, haunted her.

I departed just minutes before a dust storm arrived. These storms are becoming increasingly common; in fact, Beijing is now battered many times per spring. I had an even worse storm on a previous trip to a remote Inner Mongolian town, close to the ruins of Kubla Khan's legendary Xanadu. A dust and sand blizzard swept over the mud-brick structures, turning day into night. As I hid out in a house with a family of Mongolian peasants, we drank rice wine and listened to stories about how the grass on the plains used to be waist-high. Due to chronic drought and overgrazing, the area has degraded into dry desert. 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.

Water Supply in Danger

Less run-off from neighboring mountains is contributing to the drought in northwest China. As a result of increasing temperatures, the snow and ice covering these mountains is melting, leaving behind less precipitation than in the past. One of the main water-supplying glaciers has shrunk by more than a kilometer during the past century, and I witnessed this phenomenon firsthand in Peru, standing dizzy with altitude sickness in the high Andes 5,200 meters above the capital, Lima. This phenomenon is repeated across the world's mountain ranges.

After speaking with a senior manager of Lima's water authority, I learned that the melting ice caps pose a serious danger to the city's future access to potable water. With a population of seven million, Lima is the second-largest desert metropolis in the world, behind Cairo; the city gets all of its water from coastal rivers that flow down from distant ice fields. Once the glaciers melt, the rivers will only flow during the rainy season because the snows keep them flowing all year. Similar issues will be faced by the Indian subcontinent in the next century when the glaciers that feed the Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra rivers dwindle in size. Hundreds of millions of people living there would be at risk of water scarcity due to this.

The city of Lima will be deserted and its inhabitants will be forced to flee as environmental refugees unless other water sources are found. 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.

In the spring tides of 2002, I witnessed firsthand how the islands are being impacted by the increasing sea level as I paddled through knee-deep floodwaters. These floods nearly encircled the airfield and inundated 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. He reminisced about the morning a few years ago when 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 ruined by the escalating water.

Preventing a Global Warming Disaster

No matter how bad these climate change effects are becoming, they are only the canary in the coal mine—the earliest warning signs of the impending Holocaust that will occur unless we take action to lower emissions of greenhouse gases. 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. Due to the intricacies of the carbon cycle, researchers from the UK's Hadley Centre warned in June 2003 that the warming may be considerably worse.

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.

Worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases must be reduced by 60 to 80 percent below their present levels if humanity is to escape a comparable fate. This is in stark contrast to the latest emissions predictions made by the International Energy Agency. The Kyoto Protocol, which should be ratified and swiftly implemented, should be replaced the following decade by the "contraction and convergence" model, which the Global Commons Institute in London has suggested, with all nations receiving equal per-person emissions rights.

Meanwhile, a coalition of environmental organizations is currently organizing under the slogan "No new oil," calling for a halt to the discovery and extraction of any additional fossil fuel reserves. This is due to the fact that the world's present reserves contain more than enough coal, gas, and oil to completely disrupt the global climate. Looking for more is a fruitless and irrational pursuit.

Society must evolve with the overarching goal of preventing catastrophic climate change and other widespread environmental catastrophes. The present US administration, in particular, has vowed to a disastrous policy centered on controlling and exploiting oil resources, and all indications suggest that few in authority are aware of this.

Not only does maintaining an oil-based economy breed terrorists and wars, but it also threatens the very existence of our planet. Hence, we must reject this outdated way of thinking.

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