Bush Deals the World a Death Sentence & Billions May Die

G_j

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Tue Jan-17-06 09:39 AM
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Bush Deals the World a Death Sentence & Billions May Die

Edited on Tue Jan-17-06 10:25 AM by G_j

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000082&sid=aXY_OKEVe1BM&refer=canada

Climate Change Will Kill Billions, Scientist Says (Update1)

Jan. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Climate change will kill billions of people this century as the Earth warms, passing into a ``fever'' phase from which it may take 100,000 years to recover, James Lovelock, the scientist who propounded the ``Gaia'' theory, said.

Temperatures in temperate regions such as Europe and the U.S., will soar by 8 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) this century, and those in the tropics will rise by 5 degrees as a result of man-made emissions, Lovelock wrote in today's Independent newspaper.

``We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma,'' Lovelock wrote. ``She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences.''

Lovelock's Gaia theory, advanced in the 1970s, sees the Earth behaving like a self-sustaining organism, with a control system that keeps the environment fit for life. By trying to take over regulation of the planet's climate, humans have condemned themselves to ``the worst kind of slavery,'' and will soon find it impossible to keep the Earth fit for life, Lovelock said.

``Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 percent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves,'' he said. ``Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.''

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the single biggest challenge facing the planet
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18616

Volume 53, Number 1 · January 12, 2006

Review
The Coming Meltdown
By Bill McKibben
Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains
by Mark Bowen
Henry Holt, 463 pp., $30.00

Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots
by Alanna Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 239 pp., $25.00

The year 2005 has been the hottest year on record for the planet, hotter than 1998, 2002, 2004, and 2003. More importantly, perhaps, this has been the autumn when the planet has shown more clearly than before just what that extra heat means. Consider just a few of the findings published in the major scientific journals during the last three months:

—Arctic sea ice is melting fast. There was 20 percent less of it than normal this summer, and as Dr. Mark Serreze, one of the researchers from Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center, told reporters, "the feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover." That is particularly bad news because it creates a potent feedback effect: instead of blinding white ice that bounces sunlight back into space, there is now open blue water that soaks up the sun's heat, amplifying the melting process.

—In the tundra of Siberia, other researchers report that permafrost has begun to melt rapidly, and, as it does, formerly frozen methane—which, like the more prevalent carbon dioxide, acts as a heat-trapping "greenhouse gas"—is escaping into the atmosphere. In some places last winter, the methane bubbled up so steadily that puddles of standing water couldn't freeze even in the depths of the Russian winter.

—British researchers, examining almost six thousand soil borings across the UK, found another feedback effect. Warmer temperatures (growing seasons now last eleven days longer at that latitude) meant that microbial activity had increased dramatically in the soil. This, in turn, meant that much of the carbon long stored in the soil was now being released into the atmosphere. The quantities were large enough to negate all the work that Britain had done to switch away from coal to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. "All the consequences of global warming will occur more rapidly," said Guy Kirk, chief scientist on the study. "That's the scary thing. The amount of time we have got to do something about it is smaller than we thought."

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But the hurricanes also demonstrated another fact about global warming, this one having nothing to do with chemistry or physics but instead with politics, journalism, and the rituals of science. Climate change somehow seems unable to emerge on the world stage for what it really is: the single biggest challenge facing the planet, the equal in every way to the nuclear threat that transfixed us during the past half-century and a threat we haven't even begun to deal with. The coverage of Katrina's aftermath, for instance, was scathing in depicting the Bush administration's incompetence and cronyism; but the President —and his predecessors—were spared criticism for their far bigger sin of omission, the failure to do anything at all to stanch the flood of carbon that America, above all other nations, pours into the atmosphere and that is the prime cause of the great heating now underway. Though Bush has been egregious in his ignorance about climate change, the failure to do anything about it has been bipartisan; Bill Clinton and Al Gore were grandly rhetorical about the issue, but nonetheless presided over a 13 percent increase in America's carbon emissions.

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http://www.thousandreasons.org/get_article.php?article_id=174

Global Warming: Bush Deals the World a Death Sentence