How should government view a looming catastrophe?

[nosmokes]

original-eugeneweekly

Discretion or Obligation?

How should government view a looming catastrophe?

By Mary Christina Wood

EDITOR'S NOTE: Mary Christina Wood is the Philip H. Knight Professor of Law and Morse Center for Law and Politics Resident Scholar (2006-07) at the UO School of Law, where she teaches natural resources law, federal Indian law, public lands law, wildlife law, hazardous waste law and property law. She is the founding director of the school's Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program. Below is a transcript of her talk to Eugene City Club May 4, 2007.

Last month Time magazine issued a special edition on climate change in which it said, "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."

United Nations reports show rapid melting of the polar ice sheets, Antarctica, Greenland and glaciers throughout the world. The oceans are heating and rising. Coral reefs are bleaching and dying. Species are on exodus from their habitats towards the poles. As a result of global warming the world now faces crop losses, food shortages, flooding, coastal loss, wildfire, drought, pests, hurricanes, heat waves, disease and extinctions. An international climate team has warned countries to prepare for as many as 50 million human environmental refugees by 2010. Scientists explain that, due to the carbon already in the atmosphere, we are locked into a temperature rise of at least 2 degrees F. This alone will have impacts for generations to come, but if we continue business as usual, they predict Earth will warm as much as 10.4 degrees F, which will leave as many as 600 million people in the world facing starvation and 3.2 billion people suffering water shortages; it will convert the Amazon rainforest into savannah, and trigger the kind of mass extinction that hasn't occurred on Earth for 55 million years.

Global heating is leagues beyond what civilization has ever faced before.

I will give only brief background here. As you know, global heating is caused largely by heat-trapping gasses that we emit into our atmosphere. The more greenhouse gasses we put into the atmosphere, the hotter Earth gets. It's rather like putting a greenhouse roof around the entire Earth and locking it down. Carbon dioxide has climbed to levels unknown in the past 650,000 years, and we are still pumping it out at an annual increase of over 2 percent per year. The U.S. produces 25 percent of the world's carbon emissions. Carbon persists in the atmosphere up to a few centuries, so our emissions on this very day will have impacts far beyond our lifetimes. We can't turn this thermostat down. Scientists across the globe warn that we are nearing a dangerous "tipping point" that will set in motion irreversible dynamics through environmental feedback loops. After that tipping point, our subsequent carbon reductions, no matter how impressive, will not thwart long-term catastrophe. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said months ago, "This disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future many years ahead, but in our lifetime. Unless we act now . . . these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible."

Let us consider the magnitude of the challenge we face.
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complete article here

[OneBlueSky]

1. upon reading "looming catastrophe," my first inclination was to ask "which one?" . . .

I mean, besides climate change we have the rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq, the pending situation with Iran, vanishing honeybees, vanishing rainforests, the rapidly approaching police state, the upcoming recession/depression, pending theft (or cancellation) of the 2008 elections, the next 9/11, the obscene concentration of wealth, growing poverty, dying oceans, species extinctions, etc. etc. etc. . .

how to choose? . . .:shrug:

[iamahaingttta]

2. Our current government views catastrophe...

...as an opportunity!

And therein lies the problem.

[Rydz777]

3. Elect Gore President and get real with the world. n/t