Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [28]
Two Degrees Celsius
Around 125,000 years ago, average global temperature was only about 1°C higher than it is today, but the sea level was fully four to six meters higher. Any heating beyond 2°C will likely cause catastrophic changes, transformations too sudden and radical for civilization to cope with. The 2°C threshold runs throughout the most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and it is the official stabilization target of numerous governments and the European Union.9
The question then becomes, What is the corresponding limit on atmospheric concentrations of CO2? For years it was assumed to be around 450 ppm. To meet this goal, the IPCC recommends that developed countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to about 40 to 90 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. This would require global targets of at least 10 percent reductions in emissions per decade—starting now. Those sorts of emissions reductions have only been associated with economic depressions. Russia’s near total economic collapse in the early 1990s saw a 5 percent per annum decline in CO2 emissions.10
Calculations by the United Kingdom’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research demonstrate that, without radical mitigation efforts, we are almost inevitably on course to reach atmospheric CO2 levels of 450 ppm. Even with drastic emissions reductions over the next 20 years, cumulative atmospheric CO2 could easily surpass 450 ppm.11 If that’s not grim enough, James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University now believes the tipping point at which climate change becomes a runaway, self-fueling process is closer to 350 ppm. We are already at 390 ppm.12 In terms of adaptation, that would mean we must prepare to deal with a 4°C increase in average global temperatures and the massive social dislocations that will bring.
Bone-Eating Storks
Across northern Kenya there are various responses to drought and flooding—some more violent than others. In the Turkana, people live amidst the gun culture and raiding cycle. But further east, near the desert outpost of Garissa, despite devastated herds and brutal drought, violence is relatively uncommon.13 To find out more about that equation, I drove the 375 kilometers out to Garissa with an American photojournalist, Dan McCabe, and a Kenyan friend of his named Tim. We reached Garissa as the sun was setting. The town begins at a checkpoint and a narrow bridge over the wide, shallow waters of the river Tana. Its waters rise hundreds of miles away, among the snows, rains, and mist of Mount Kenya. By the time it drains to Garissa, it is the desert’s main lifeline.
Guarding the bridge were huge, blue and white, buzzard-like creatures called marabou storks; massive flocks of them perched everywhere. They look like pelicans, have ten-foot wingspans, and do not sing or squawk. The only sound they make comes from the occasional clacking of their huge beaks.
Marabous are “colony breeders,” and they like to live near people. The storks scavenge carrion from the drought-felled cattle and are known to carry bones high into the sky, then drop them onto rocks to break them open and scrape out the marrow. In town, perched on the bare, desiccated acacia trees, the birds seemed to be the mascots of drought. As if to highlight the theme of scarcity even further, it was Ramadan, the month of fasting and nicotine withdrawal; in Garissa most people are ethnic Somali Muslims. Not only was it hard to find beer, but there was no food or coffee available by day.
The next morning we pushed out past the town into the desert. The road soon turned soft and sandy. Again, the flattop acacia trees were all dead and bleached, like standing driftwood, and cast an eerie blue sheen, the empty sky reflecting off the pale wood. Shepherd boys waved