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| I'm doing my bit, now how about you? |
paraclete |
02/01/07 |
Feeling totally vindicated, I will go on sequestrating Carbon but what are the rest of you going to do?
No time for never-never solutions
Mike Archer
February 1, 2007
It was suggested recently that if everyone on the planet started gorging themselves on fatty foods, the amount of carbon sequestered could reverse global warming as long as no one did a stitch of exercise other than to produce more butterball humans. It's a tasteless idea, but it does raise some important themes that bear thinking about as scientists gather for the latest diagnosis of the state of the Earth's climate.
It seems pretty clear that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will tell us the patient is far worse than we thought and that her condition is deteriorating far faster than we thought when it releases its latest report tomorrow.
Naysayers and sceptics can argue all they like about how much of this change is "natural" and how much is the result of human activity: the bottom line, in terms of treating the patient, is that the hotter she gets the less time we have to fix her up. Likewise, our options become more and more limited the longer we stand around like stunned mullets. We need to take action, now.
The trouble is that most of the major solutions being suggested to Australians are of the never-never kind. Whatever the relative merits of carbon sequestration and nuclear energy, for example, they will take decades to develop and decades more to have any serious impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
Worse still, these prescriptions carry an in-built assumption that we have the luxury of time in which to administer them. We don't.
More disturbingly, we now have plenty of evidence to suggest that swings in the global climate can happen faster than we previously believed. Much faster.
The US National Academy of Sciences' 2002 report Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises noted, for example, that although general global warming and a glacial meltdown began about 15,000 years ago, the process came to an abrupt halt about 3000 years later in the span of a couple of decades.
Known as the Younger Dryas event, it featured a rapid, steep drop in global temperature and an abrupt return to full-on glacial conditions for about 500 years. It ended even more abruptly than it began, with a return to global warming that took perhaps as little as one decade.
The Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow began with a climatologist lecturing thick-headed US politicians about the vital message of the Younger Dryas event that abrupt climate change could happen again just as quickly, with awesome consequences.
For example, if the Greenland and Antarctica icesheets melt (which they are doing in spectacular fashion), sea levels could rise, as they have done many times in the past, by 100 metres. If that were to happen, forget the metre-in-a-century mantra, and forget half of Sydney, along with most of the world's coastal populations. Why climates swing so violently is less relevant than the consequences when they do.
As a palaeontologist and geologist who has studied the history of climate change and its effects on life, it's clear to me from Earth's fossil record that major swings in climate have had massive consequences for living things. Extinctions are the most common outcome.
In short, if we don't want these consequences, we don't have the luxury of time to dither. We must respond now.
I don't have all the answers, but I remind everyone of the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change, put together by an eminent group of scientists from four international global change research programs. It pointed out that the dynamics of global systems "are characterised by critical thresholds and abrupt changes" and that "human activities could inadvertently trigger such changes with severe consequences for Earth's environment and inhabitants". Those changes could be irreversible and will be far less hospitable to human life.
The broader message here is that we shouldn't focus on climate change as the only threat looming on the horizon. We need to look as well to the other ways humans are increasingly modifying the planet for their own purposes and question whether we're at risk of crossing other thresholds that may lead, faster than expected, to ugly outcomes.
As the Amsterdam declaration noted, the planet behaves as a single, self-regulating system, with complex interactions and feedback between its component parts.
Humans are influencing environments in many ways, not just the atmosphere but the oceans, fresh water, biological systems and so on. All the signals coming back are that the way we live as a species is not sustainable.
While some might take comfort in the thought that "ugly" will not happen in their lifetime, new studies of thresholds and accelerating rates of change suggest these are problems that will challenge all generations now living on the planet.
The Prime Minister has rightly acknowledged that our way of managing the Murray-Darling Basin has passed its use-by date. That's a step in the right direction. Next, we all have to acknowledge that the same is true of our overall environmental management. We must invest now in environmentally friendly technologies, such as solar hydrogen to produce energy that won't cost the world.
Sooner or later, we're all going to have to cease our collective state of denial and accept that business and technology as usual is not an option. We simply can't keep gorging ourselves on the world's resources (even if 6 billion obese, inactive humans would sequester a lot of carbon). Civilisations exist by the grace of Earth, subject to change without notice. Let's hope we all realise that in time.
Mike Archer is dean of science at the University of NSW.
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Clarification/Follow-up by tropicalstorm on 02/01/07 3:55 am:
oh Parac if you are doing your part how much weight do you plan on gaining?
Clarification/Follow-up by tropicalstorm on 02/01/07 3:59 am:
oh and Parac here in America the liberals are blaming global warming on cow farts so how can your first sentence be true? Which one is it? Does that mean the American liberals are wrong?
Clarification/Follow-up by tropicalstorm on 02/01/07 3:59 am:
oh and Parac here in America the liberals are blaming global warming on cow farts so how can your first sentence be true? Which one is it? Does that mean the American liberals are wrong?
Clarification/Follow-up by tropicalstorm on 02/01/07 6:17 am:
Thats there problem!
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