Article (as published in the April, 2006, edition of Time Magazine) by
By JEFFREY KLUGER, senior writer at TIME Magazine, and author of several books on science topics
The photograph taken in 1928, above, shows how the Upsala Glacier, part of
the South American Andes in Argentina, used to look. The ice on the Upsala
Glacier today, shown in 2004 below, is retreating at least 180 ft. per year
Polar Ice Caps Are Melting Faster Than Ever... More And More Land Is Being Devastated By Drought... Rising Waters Are Drowning Low-Lying Communities... By Any Measure, Earth Is At a... The Tipping Point The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame. Why the crisis hit so soon--and what we can do about it Posted Sunday, Mar. 26, 2006.
No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes
ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard
about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to
play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone
Larry--a Category 4 storm with wind bursts that reached 125 m.p.h.--exploded
through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as
curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to
drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that
way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating
Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage
of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather
themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have
always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard
and come this fast--when the emergency becomes commonplace--something has
gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.
The image of Earth as organism--famously dubbed Gaia by environmentalist James
Lovelock-- has probably been overworked, but that's not to say the planet
can't behave like a living thing, and these days, it's a living thing fighting
a fever. From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts,
the global climate seems to be crashing around us. Scientists have been calling
this shot for decades. This is precisely what they have been warning would
happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping
the heat that flows in from the sun and raising global temperatures.
Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about
whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the
serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have
concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it. If there
was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us
decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.
But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature.
What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped
with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep
of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse.
Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse
gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water
into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach
the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping
whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled
their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study
suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to
an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Nature, it seems, has
finally got a bellyful of us.
"Things are happening a lot faster than anyone predicted," says
Bill Chameides, chief scientist for the advocacy group Environmental Defense
and a former professor of atmospheric chemistry. "The last 12 months
have been alarming." Adds Ruth Curry of the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution in Massachusetts: "The ripple through the scientific community
is palpable."
And it's not just scientists who are taking notice. Even as nature crosses
its tipping points, the public seems to have reached its own. For years, popular
skepticism about climatological science stood in the way of addressing the
problem, but the naysayers--many of whom were on the payroll of energy companies--have
become an increasingly marginalized breed. In a new TIME/ ABC News/ Stanford
University poll, 85% of respondents agree that global warming probably is
happening. Moreover, most respondents say they want some action taken. Of
those polled, 87% believe the government should either encourage or require
lowering of power-plant emissions, and 85% think something should be done
to get cars to use less gasoline. Even Evangelical Christians, once one of
the most reliable columns in the conservative base, are demanding action,
most notably in February, when 86 Christian leaders formed the Evangelical
Climate Initiative, demanding that Congress regulate greenhouse gases.
A collection of new global-warming books is hitting the shelves in response
to that awakening interest, followed closely by TV and theatrical documentaries.
The most notable of them is An Inconvenient Truth, due out in May, a profile
of former Vice President Al Gore and his climate-change work, which is generating
a lot of prerelease buzz over an unlikely topic and an equally unlikely star.
For all its lack of Hollywood flash, the film compensates by conveying both
the hard science of global warming and Gore's particular passion.
Such public stirrings are at last getting the attention of politicians and
business leaders, who may not always respond to science but have a keen nose
for where votes and profits lie. State and local lawmakers have started taking
action to curb emissions, and major corporations are doing the same. Wal-Mart
has begun installing wind turbines on its stores to generate electricity and
is talking about putting solar reflectors over its parking lots. HSBC, the
world's second largest bank, has pledged to neutralize its carbon output by
investing in wind farms and other green projects. Even President Bush, hardly
a favorite of greens, now acknowledges climate change and boasts of the steps
he is taking to fight it. Most of those steps, however, involve research and
voluntary emissions controls, not exactly the laws with teeth scientists are
calling for.
Is it too late to reverse the changes global warming has wrought? That's still
not clear. Reducing our emissions output year to year is hard enough. Getting
it low enough so that the atmosphere can heal is a multigenerational commitment.
"Ecosystems are usually able to maintain themselves," says Terry
Chapin, a biologist and professor of ecology at the University of Alaska,
Fairbanks. "But eventually they get pushed to the limit of tolerance."
As a tiny component of our atmosphere, carbon dioxide helped warm Earth to
comfort levels we are all used to. But too much of it does an awful lot of
damage. The gas represents just a few hundred parts per million (p.p.m.) in
the overall air blanket, but they're powerful parts because they allow sunlight
to stream in but prevent much of the heat from radiating back out. During
the last ice age, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was just 180 p.p.m.,
putting Earth into a deep freeze. After the glaciers retreated but before
the dawn of the modern era, the total had risen to a comfortable 280 p.p.m.
In just the past century and a half, we have pushed the level to 381 p.p.m.,
and we're feeling the effects. Of the 20 hottest years on record, 19 occurred
in the 1980s or later. According to NASA scientists, 2005 was one of the hottest
years in more than a century.
It's at the North and South poles that those steambath conditions are felt
particularly acutely, with glaciers and ice caps crumbling to slush. Once
the thaw begins, a number of mechanisms kick in to keep it going. Greenland
is a vivid example. Late last year, glaciologist Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Pannir Kanagaratnam, a research assistant
professor at the University of Kansas, analyzed data from Canadian and European
satellites and found that Greenland ice is not just melting but doing so more
than twice as fast, with 53 cu. mi. draining away into the sea last year alone,
compared with 22 cu. mi. in 1996. A cubic mile of water is about five times
the amount Los Angeles uses in a year.
Dumping that much water into the ocean is a very dangerous thing. Icebergs
don't raise sea levels when they melt because they're floating, which means
they have displaced all the water they're ever going to. But ice on land,
like Greenland's, is a different matter. Pour that into oceans that are already
rising (because warm water expands), and you deluge shorelines. By some estimates,
the entire Greenland ice sheet would be enough to raise global sea levels
23 ft., swallowing up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh.
The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 215 ft.
FEEDBACK LOOPS
One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating is that
as the poles' bright white surface shrinks, it changes the relationship of
Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that 90% of the sunlight that
strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking much of its energy with
it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90% of the energy it receives.
The more energy it retains, the warmer it gets, with the result that each
mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that preceded it.
That is what scientists call a feedback loop, and it's a nasty one, since
once you uncap the Arctic Ocean, you unleash another beast: the comparatively
warm layer of water about 600 ft. deep that circulates in and out of the Atlantic.
"Remove the ice," says Woods Hole's Curry, "and the water starts
talking to the atmosphere, releasing its heat. This is not a good thing."
A similar feedback loop is melting permafrost, usually defined as land that
has been continuously frozen for two years or more. There's a lot of earthly
real estate that qualifies, and much of it has been frozen much longer than
two years--since the end of the last ice age, or at least 8,000 years ago.
Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of partially decayed organic
matter, rich in carbon. In high-altitude regions of Alaska, Canada and Siberia,
the soil is warming and decomposing, releasing gases that will turn into methane
and CO2. That, in turn, could lead to more warming and permafrost thaw, says
research scientist David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research
(NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. And how much carbon is socked away in Arctic soils?
Lawrence puts the figure at 200 gigatons to 800 gigatons. The total human
carbon output is only 7 gigatons a year.
One result of all that is warmer oceans, and a result of warmer oceans can
be, paradoxically, colder continents within a hotter globe. Ocean currents
running between warm and cold regions serve as natural thermoregulators, distributing
heat from the equator toward the poles. The Gulf Stream, carrying warmth up
from the tropics, is what keeps Europe's climate relatively mild. Whenever
Europe is cut off from the Gulf Stream, temperatures plummet. At the end of
the last ice age, the warm current was temporarily blocked, and temperatures
in Europe fell as much as 10°F, locking the continent in glaciers.
What usually keeps the Gulf Stream running is that warm water is lighter than
cold water, so it floats on the surface. As it reaches Europe and releases
its heat, the current grows denser and sinks, flowing back to the south and
crossing under the northbound Gulf Stream until it reaches the tropics and
starts to warm again. The cycle works splendidly, provided the water remains
salty enough. But if it becomes diluted by freshwater, the salt concentration
drops, and the water gets lighter, idling on top and stalling the current.
Last December, researchers associated with Britain's National Oceanography
Center reported that one component of the system that drives the Gulf Stream
has slowed about 30% since 1957. It's the increased release of Arctic and
Greenland meltwater that appears to be causing the problem, introducing a
gush of freshwater that's overwhelming the natural cycle. In a global-warming
world, it's unlikely that any amount of cooling that resulted from this would
be sufficient to support glaciers, but it could make things awfully uncomfortable.
"The big worry is that the whole climate of Europe will change,"
says Adrian Luckman, senior lecturer in geography at the University of Wales,
Swansea. "We in the U.K. are on the same latitude as Alaska. The reason
we can live here is the Gulf Stream."
As fast as global warming is transforming the oceans and the ice caps, it's
having an even more immediate effect on land. People, animals and plants living
in dry, mountainous regions like the western U.S. make it through summer thanks
to snowpack that collects on peaks all winter and slowly melts off in warm
months. Lately the early arrival of spring and the unusually blistering summers
have caused the snowpack to melt too early, so that by the time it's needed,
it's largely gone. Climatologist Philip Mote of the University of Washington
has compared decades of snowpack levels in Washington, Oregon and California
and found that they are a fraction of what they were in the 1940s, and some
snowpacks have vanished entirely.
Global warming is tipping other regions of the world into drought in different
ways. Higher temperatures bake moisture out of soil faster, causing dry regions
that live at the margins to cross the line into full-blown crisis. Meanwhile,
El Niño events--the warm pooling of Pacific waters that periodically
drives worldwide climate patterns and has been occurring more frequently in
global-warming years--further inhibit precipitation in dry areas of Africa
and East Asia. According to a recent study by NCAR, the percentage of Earth's
surface suffering drought has more than doubled since the 1970s.
FLORA AND FAUNA
Hot, dry land can be murder on flora and fauna, and both are taking a bad
hit. Wildfires in such regions as Indonesia, the western U.S. and even inland
Alaska have been increasing as timberlands and forest floors grow more parched.
The blazes create a feedback loop of their own, pouring more carbon into the
atmosphere and reducing the number of trees, which inhale CO2 and release
oxygen.
Those forests that don't succumb to fire die in other, slower ways. Connie
Millar, a paleoecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, studies the history
of vegetation in the Sierra Nevada. Over the past 100 years, she has found,
the forests have shifted their tree lines as much as 100 ft. upslope, trying
to escape the heat and drought of the lowlands. Such slow-motion evacuation
may seem like a sensible strategy, but when you're on a mountain, you can
go only so far before you run out of room. "Sometimes we say the trees
are going to heaven because they're walking off the mountaintops," Millar
says.
Across North America, warming-related changes are mowing down other flora
too. Manzanita bushes in the West are dying back; some prickly pear cacti
have lost their signature green and are instead a sickly pink; pine beetles
in western Canada and the U.S. are chewing their way through tens of millions
of acres of forest, thanks to warmer winters. The beetles may even breach
the once insurmountable Rocky Mountain divide, opening up a path into the
rich timbering lands of the American Southeast.
With habitats crashing, animals that live there are succumbing too. Environmental
groups can tick off scores of species that have been determined to be at risk
as a result of global warming. Last year, researchers in Costa Rica announced
that two-thirds of 110 species of colorful harlequin frogs have vanished in
the past 30 years, with the severity of each season's die-off following in
lockstep with the severity of that year's warming.
In Alaska, salmon populations are at risk as melting permafrost pours mud
into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning. Small animals
such as bushy-tailed wood rats, alpine chipmunks and piñon mice are
being chased upslope by rising temperatures, following the path of the fleeing
trees. And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears--prodigious swimmers but not
inexhaustible ones--are starting to turn up drowned. "There will be no
polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife
Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out."
WHAT ABOUT US?
It is fitting, perhaps, that as the species causing all the problems, we're suffering the destruction of our habitat too, and we have experienced that loss in terrible ways. Ocean waters have warmed by a full degree Fahrenheit since 1970, and warmer water is like rocket fuel for typhoons and hurricanes. Two studies last year found that in the past 35 years the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has doubled while the wind speed and duration of all hurricanes has jumped 50%. Since atmospheric heat is not choosy about the water it warms, tropical storms could start turning up in some decidedly nontropical places. "There's a school of thought that sea surface temperatures are warming up toward Canada," says Greg Holland, senior scientist for NCAR in Boulder. "If so, you're likely to get tropical cyclones there, but we honestly don't know."
WHAT WE CAN DO
So much for environmental collapse happening in so many places at once has
at last awakened much of the world, particularly the 141 nations that have
ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions--an imperfect accord, to be
sure, but an accord all the same. The U.S., however, which is home to less
than 5% of Earth's population but produces 25% of CO2 emissions, remains intransigent.
Many environmentalists declared the Bush Administration hopeless from the
start, and while that may have been premature, it's undeniable that the White
House's environmental record--from the abandonment of Kyoto to the President's
broken campaign pledge to control carbon output to the relaxation of emission
standards--has been dismal. George W. Bush's recent rhetorical nods to America's
oil addiction and his praise of such alternative fuel sources as switchgrass
have yet to be followed by real initiatives.
The anger surrounding all that exploded recently when NASA researcher Jim
Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a longtime
leader in climate-change research, complained that he had been harassed by
White House appointees as he tried to sound the global-warming alarm. "The
way democracy is supposed to work, the presumption is that the public is well
informed," he told TIME. "They're trying to deny the science."
Up against such resistance, many environmental groups have resolved simply
to wait out this Administration and hope for something better in 2009.
The Republican-dominated Congress has not been much more encouraging. Senators
John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice been unable to get through the Senate
even mild measures to limit carbon. Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman,
both of New Mexico and both ranking members of the chamber's Energy Committee,
have made global warming a high-profile matter. A white paper issued in February
will be the subject of an investigatory Senate conference next week. A House
delegation recently traveled to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand to visit
researchers studying climate change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were
believers," says Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York. "Every
one of the others said this opened their eyes."
Boehlert himself has long fought the environmental fight, but if the best
that can be said for most lawmakers is that they are finally recognizing the
global-warming problem, there's reason to wonder whether they will have the
courage to reverse it. Increasingly, state and local governments are filling
the void. The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate
Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that they will meet the
Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in their cities to 1990 levels
by 2012.
Nine eastern states have established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of developing a cap-and-trade program that would set ceilings on industrial emissions and allow companies that overperform to sell pollution credits to those that underperform-- the same smart, incentive-based strategy that got sulfur dioxide under control and reduced acid rain. And California passed the nation's toughest automobile- emissions law last summer.
"There are a whole series of things that demonstrate that people want
to act and want their government to act," says Fred Krupp, president
of Environmental Defense. Krupp and others believe that we should probably
accept that it's too late to prevent CO2 concentrations from climbing to 450
p.p.m. (or 70 p.p.m. higher than where they are now). From there, however,
we should be able to stabilize them and start to dial them back down.
That goal should be attainable. Curbing global warming may be an order of
magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon.
But is it moral not to try? We did not so much march toward the environmental
precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the scientific scolds who told
us we had a problem.
The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system
crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and
Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we're finally coming to appreciate the
knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century
we've been monkeying with those margins. It's long past time we set them right.
With reporting by With reporting by David Bjerklie, Andrea Dorfman/ New York,
Dan Cray/ Los Angeles, Greg Fulton/ Atlanta, Andrea Gerlin/ London, Rita Healy/
Denver, Eric Roston/ Washington.
