Critical Times

INTRODUCTION

Global warming is not only real it is more intense and happening faster than earlier predictions. The last year has been a bad one for science deniers – if we compare the nay-sayers to that older form of scientific denial, the anti-evolution mob, it has been as if paleontologists had uncovered six or seven new missing links in human evolution in the last year or so. Of course the trick is that this isn’t about knowledge and reason, it is about vested interests. But let’s look at the new developments first before we turn to motives.

TIP-OVERPOINTS

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet shows early signs of disintegration – a dramatic change in West Antarctic ice could eventually produce a 16ft rise in sea levels. Yet the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report thought that very unlikely, and said such a collapse was improbable before the end of the current century, or even for 1,000 years.

Further, grass has become established in Antarctica for the first time, showing the continent is warming to temperatures unseen for 10,000 years. Scientists have reported that broad areas of grass are now forming turf where there were once ice-sheets and glaciers.

Climate researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream

- the ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing. For instance, such a change could have a severe impact on Britain, which lies on the same latitude as Siberia and ought to be much colder. The Gulf Stream transports 27,000 times more heat to British shores than all the nation’s power supplies could provide, warming Britain by 5-8C.

If the North Atlantic Ocean’s circulation system is shut down – an apocalyptic global-warming scenario – the impact on the world’s food supplies would be disastrous. It would decimate the marine food chain and ravage food stocks.

The latest tipping point is the West Siberian permafrost - a frozen peat bog the size of France and Germany combined, containing billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas (methane ) is melting, for the first time since the ice age. A Russian scientist said it was an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming”. He added that the thaw had probably begun in the past three or four years.

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.

Current computer models suggest that the Arctic will be entirely ice-free during summer by the year 2070 but some scientists now believe that even this dire prediction may be over-optimistic. Losing the sea ice of the Arctic is likely to have major repercussions for the climate.

There is a feedback mechanism between global warming and ozone layer depletion which accelerates the latter. So the Montreal Protocol on CFC’s is far from the end of the story. El Nino is also affected by global warming

- and the cycle is being intensified.

INCREASED GLOBAL EFFECT

New findings reveal much faster warming: The top end of the predictions, which range from 2-11 degrees, is double the estimates produced so far and could make the world dramatically different in the future. Australia faces a warmer, drier world swinging wildly between extremes of drought and flood, bushfires and dust storms. Melting ice and warming waters have raised average sea levels worldwide by more than an inch since 1995, new data from space satellites and robotic submarines have revealed.

That’s twice as fast as the rate the oceans rose during the previous 50 years.

More than half the sea rise was caused by a recent speedup in the melting of glaciers and ice sheets, especially in Greenland and Antarctica. The remaining increase in sea level is mostly the result of higher water temperatures, because water naturally expands as it warms.

SURFACE TEMPERATURE, AND THE GULF

Hurricane Katrina will not be a unique event, say scientists, who say that global warming appears to be pumping up the power of big Atlantic storms. Already, 2004 and 2003 were exceptional years: they marked the highest two-year totals ever recorded for overall hurricane activity in the North Atlantic. Scientists are cautious about connecting the number of storms with global warming, as there seem to be decade-long swings. But they are more confident in linking the growing intensity of storms to rising surface water temperatures. This is particularly evident in the enclosed Gulf of Mexico – where Katrina intensified.

A July study shows the destructive power of North Atlantic storms has doubled over the past 30 years. A further factor in destructiveness is flooding. Another study suggests that hurricanes are dumping more rainfall as warmer seas release more moisture into the air, swelling the storm clouds.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

New greenhouse-gas emissions from China, India, and the US will swamp cuts from the Kyoto treaty. The official treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions has hardly been activated and already these three countries are planning to build nearly 850 new coal-fired plants, which would pump up to five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce.

However, Kyoto represents something profoundly subversive to the global warming ‘adapters’ – its example is much more important than its modest aims. It is a globally-agreed effort to reduce greenhouse gases – not adapt, ignore, obscure or exploit.

WHAT RICE WAS COMING TO DO-

THE Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate

[Australia, China, Japan, India, South Korea and the USA- only Japan has ratified Kyoto]

The US- led initiative claims it is designed to rein in emissions without harming the economy – specifically focus on technology to limit emissions. But this is a smokescreen. The sort of technology they mean is clear

- things like nuclear energy and carbon sequestration. This latter will be used to excuse unrestricted production of CO2, on the grounds it can be dealt with. However this technology is untested at any meaningful scale. On a broader scale, this is about the fossil fuel industry in general and the coal producers in particular on the counter-attack. Here are four of the world’s biggest coal producers (US, Australia, China and India).

Even the Murdoch press calls it the alternative-to-Kyoto environmental pact.

Kill Kyoto and other initiatives, pursue dead-ends and business as usual

Congress has eliminated funding for a fledgling network of 110 observation stations intended to provide a definitive, long-term climate record for the United States.

The Bush administration has manipulated scientific processes – a former oil industry lobbyist has been given the authority to edit scientific statements developed by career federal science professionals.

There has been a new US move to spoil the recent G-8 climate accord.

Washington officials:

• Removed all reference to the fact that
  climate change is a ‘serious threat to human
  health and to ecosystems’;
• Deleted any suggestion that global
  warming has already started;
• Expunged any suggestion that human
  activity was to blame for climate change.

Bush administration officials working behind
the scenes have succeeded in weakening other
key sections of a proposal for joint action by
the eight major industrialized nations to curb
climate change.

Differential Effects of Global Warming and Disaster – class and race

New Orleans showed starkly how this works

- remediation and flood control, location of suburbs in danger, emergency management and evacuation, disaster relief, so-called control of looting – all were profoundly influenced by class and race.

Meanwhile, At the beginning of the year a report warned that the point of no return on warming may be reached in 10 years, including widespread agricultural failure, water shortages and major droughts, increased disease, sea-level rise and the death of forests.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the world has “already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” and called for immediate and “very deep” cuts in the pollution if humanity is to “survive”.

His comments rocked the Bush administration – which immediately tried to slap him down – not least because it put him in his post after Exxon, the major oil company most opposed to international action on global warming, complained that his predecessor was too “aggressive” on the issue.

But do not wealthy reactionaries and their corporate lobbyists inhabit the same polluted planet as everyone else, eat the same chemicalized food, and breathe the same toxified air? In fact, they do not live exactly as everyone else. They experience a different class reality, often residing in places where the air is somewhat better than in low and middle income areas. They have access to food that is organically raised and specially prepared. The nation’s toxic dumps and freeways usually are not situated in or near their swanky neighborhoods. The pesticide sprays are not poured over their trees and gardens. Clearcutting does not desolate their ranches, estates, and vacation spots.

At the corporate level, openly and unapologetically, the world’s No. 1 oil company Exxon disputes the notion that fossil fuels are the main cause of global warming. Exxon’s funding of several groups that continue to argue that the science doesn’t justify caps. Republican Senator Steve Symms (Idaho) once said that if he had to choose between capitalism and ecology, he would choose capitalism. A short-sighted idiot yes? But it isn’t so simple.

Meanwhile, worldwide production of essential crops such as wheat, rice, maize and soya beans is likely to be hit much harder by global warming than previously predicted. One in six countries in the world face food shortages this year because of severe droughts that could become semi-permanent under climate change, UN scientists warned. Droughts that have devastated crops across Africa, central America and south-east Asia in the past year are part of an emerging pattern.

Africa could bear the brunt of the damage from projected human-induced climate change.

In the long run the super-wealthy and the corporate sector will be sealing their own doom, along with everyone else’s. However, like us all, they live not in the long run but in the here and now. What is at stake for them is something more immediate than global ecology. It is global capital accumulation. The fate of the biosphere seems a far-off abstraction compared to the fate of one’s immediate investments. Furthermore, pollution pays, while ecology costs.

Ecology properly understood is profoundly subversive of capitalism. It needs planned, environmentally sustainable production rather than the rapacious unregulated free-market kind.

Prepared for the Rice Rumsfeld Reception Committee, by Stephen Darley of NOWAR.