The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [13]
In addition to number-crunching weather data, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that our climate is beginning to act strangely. A staggering thirty-five thousand people were killed in 2003 when a massive heat wave spilled across Europe. Lesser waves killed hundreds more in Japan, China, India, and the United States in the following summers, when the world suffered eleven of the top twelve hottest years ever recorded. That’s dating all the way back to the first weather stations of 1850, when Zachary Taylor was president of the United States, and Italy wasn’t even a country yet. Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans in 2005, a record year for tropical storms. Ironically, many of the displaced moved to Houston, where they got pounded again by Hurricane Ike in 2008. That one killed about two hundred people and put a tree through the roof of my best man, then proceeded to black out nearly a million homes across Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.
Like the pizzly bear, no one of these events is conclusive of anything. But after enough of them happen, the private sector gets moving. Goldman Sachs and the Harvard Business Review started writing reports on how to contain risk and maximize profits from climate change.39 Multinational corporations like General Electric, Duke Energy, and Dupont began stumping green technology and formed the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, calling on the U.S. federal government to “quickly enact strong national legislation to require significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.”40 By 2008 its membership included American International Group, Inc. (AIG), Boston Scientific Corporation, Chrysler LLC, ConocoPhillips, Deere & Company, the Dow Chemical Company, Exelon Corporation, Ford Motor Company, General Motors Corporation, Johnson & Johnson, Marsh, Inc., the National Wildlife Federation, the Nature Conservancy, NRG Energy, Inc., PepsiCo, Rio Tinto, Shell, Siemens Corporation, and Xerox Corporation.41 However, by late 2009 the rush of corporations to join the U.S. Climate Action Partnership had slowed, following the failed climate treaty conference at Copenhagen, some dumb e-mails circulated among a clique of climate scientists (the so-called Climategate scandal, a scientifically minor but politically devastating public-relations fiasco), and a moribund cap-and-trade bill in the U.S. Senate. By 2010 ConocoPhillips, BP America, Caterpillar, and Xerox had pulled out.
Gas molecules are impervious to politics, so all of this is really just the beginning. To underscore just how dramatic our run-up of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere is, let’s place it within the much longer context of geological time. Greenhouse gases follow both natural cycles—which fall and rise with ice ages and warm interglacial periods, respectively—and human activity, which proceeds much faster. These two actors operate over totally different time scales, with the ice age variations happening over tens of thousands of years but our human excursion unfolding over tens of years. The natural processes that drive greenhouse-gas shifts—rock weathering, astronomical cycles, the spread of forests or wetlands, ocean turnover, and others—take thousands of years, whereas human excavation and burning of old buried carbon—as illustrated earlier from U.S. history—is an action both massive and brief. And because our human-generated carbon burst is perched atop an already large, slow-moving natural interglacial peak, we are taking the atmosphere to a place the Earth has not seen for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years. 42
We know this from the ancient memories of glaciers, deep ocean sediments, tree rings, cave speleothems, and other natural archives. Most spectacular are tiny air bubbles trapped within Greenland