The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [110]
Over the following two decades, successive American administrations failed to heed these warnings. The eight years of the Bush Administration were particularly disastrous for efforts to curb emissions. Despite uncanny climatic disasters, from drought in Australia to more intense hurricanes in the southern U.S. to relentless floods in Europe, despite the overwhelming testimony of unbiased scientists, the White House has offered only repeated prescriptions for failure. Administration officials have even muzzled government scientists and censored their warnings that global warming is indeed a consequence of the use of fossil fuels.
When he again appeared before Congress, on June 23, 2008—twenty years to the day after his initial testimony—Hansen stressed that time is running out:
We have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time-bomb. The next president and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation. Otherwise it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity’s control. Changes needed to preserve creation, the planet on which civilization developed, are clear. . . . I argue that a path yielding energy independence and a healthier environment is, barely, still possible.
Hansen defined the precise targets we must meet to prevent warming from reaching catastrophic tipping points. The safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, he stressed, is no more than 350 ppm. What makes our current situation particularly ominous is that it is already 385 ppm and rising about 2 ppm per year.
The prospects for the future, however, are not encouraging. Demands worldwide for electric power, cars, and meat (a major source of carbon pollution) are escalating. If higher carbon concentrations should push the average temperature of the planet 2°C above preindustrial levels, this could trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet, a process that has already started. The melted ice would cause a dramatic rise in sea levels of at least four to six feet (about two meters) by the end of the century, flooding the coastal belts of all continents and inundating all major coastal cities. Altered climate patterns would usher in severe droughts, resulting in crop failures, famine, and possible mass starvation. Desperate battles could erupt over dwindling supplies of food and other resources, and vast populations would migrate in search of food. If the mountain glaciers of the Himalayas, Andes, and Rockies disappear through climate warming around midcentury, the billions of people who depend on them for fresh water would be left dry and desolate. Violent conflict over vanishing sources of water could replace the “oil wars” of the present.
Reckless human activity not only contributes directly to global warming, but also triggers feedback processes that accelerate the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Three such feedback loops have already been instigated. There is progressive and self-generating loss of the “albedo effect,” the benign reflection of sunlight back into space by white snow and ice. There is deforestation, which releases large quantities of carbon dioxide, removes a major “carbon sink,” and by further raising temperatures, provokes more forest fires. A third feedback process involves prodigious frozen deposits of the highly potent greenhouse gas methane. These have begun to be released from Siberian (and Tibetan) permafrost, and even from below the Arctic Ocean seabed. They might create a giant positive feedback loop leading to more permafrost melting and methane release.
Such is the predicament that we face today: a planet in peril, moving ever closer to what energy expert Joseph Romm has called “hell and