Think Again: Climate Change

"Scientists Are Divided"

No, they're not. In the early
years of the global warming debate, there was great controversy over
whether the planet was warming, whether humans were the cause, and
whether it would be a significant problem. That debate is long since
over. Although the details of future forecasts remain unclear, there's
no serious question about the general shape of what's to come.

Every national academy of science, long lists of Nobel laureates,
and in recent years even the science advisors of President George W.
Bush have agreed that we are heating the planet. Indeed, there is a
more thorough scientific process here than on almost any other issue:
Two decades ago, the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) and charged its scientists with synthesizing
the peer-reviewed science and developing broad-based conclusions. The
reports have found since 1995 that warming is dangerous and caused by
humans. The panel's most recent report, in November 2007, found it is
"very likely" (defined as more than 90 percent certain, or about as
certain as science gets) that heat-trapping emissions from human
activities have caused "most of the observed increase in global average
temperatures since the mid-20th century."

If anything, many scientists now think that the IPCC has been too
conservative-both because member countries must sign off on the
conclusions and because there's a time lag. Its last report synthesized
data from the early part of the decade, not the latest scary results,
such as what we're now seeing in the Arctic.

In the summer of 2007, ice in the Arctic Ocean melted. It melts a
little every summer, of course, but this time was different-by late
September, there was 25 percent less ice than ever measured before. And
it wasn't a one-time accident. By the end of the summer season in 2008,
so much ice had melted that both the Northwest and Northeast passages
were open. In other words, you could circumnavigate the Arctic on open
water. The computer models, which are just a few years old, said this
shouldn't have happened until sometime late in the 21st century. Even
skeptics can't dispute such alarming events.

"We Have Time"

Wrong. Time might be the toughest
part of the equation. That melting Arctic ice is unsettling not only
because it proves the planet is warming rapidly, but also because it
will help speed up the warming. That old white ice reflected 80 percent
of incoming solar radiation back to space; the new blue water left
behind absorbs 80 percent of that sunshine. The process amps up. And
there are many other such feedback loops. Another occurs as northern
permafrost thaws. Huge amounts of methane long trapped below the ice
begin to escape into the atmosphere; methane is an even more potent
greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Such examples are the biggest reason why many experts are now
fast-forwarding their estimates of how quickly we must shift away from
fossil fuel. Indian economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the 2007
Nobel Peace Prize alongside Al Gore on behalf of the IPCC, said
recently that we must begin to make fundamental reforms by 2012 or
watch the climate system spin out of control; NASA scientist James
Hansen, who was the first to blow the whistle on climate change in the
late 1980s, has said that we must stop burning coal by 2030. Period.

All of which makes the Copenhagen climate change talks that are set
to take place in December 2009 more urgent than they appeared a few
years ago. At issue is a seemingly small number: the level of carbon
dioxide in the air. Hansen argues that 350 parts per million is the
highest level we can maintain "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet
similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on
Earth is adapted." But because we're already past that mark-the air
outside is currently about 387 parts per million and growing by about 2
parts annually-global warming suddenly feels less like a huge problem,
and more like an Oh-My-God Emergency.

"Climate Change Will Help as Many Places as It Hurts"

Wishful thinking. For a long
time, the winners-and-losers calculus was pretty standard: Though
climate change will cause some parts of the planet to flood or shrivel
up, other frigid, rainy regions would at least get some warmer days
every year. Or so the thinking went. But more recently, models have
begun to show that after a certain point almost everyone on the planet
will suffer. Crops might be easier to grow in some places for a few
decades as the danger of frost recedes, but over time the threat of
heat stress and drought will almost certainly be stronger.

A 2003 report commissioned by the Pentagon forecasts the
possibility of violent storms across Europe, megadroughts across the
Southwest United States and Mexico, and unpredictable monsoons causing
food shortages in China. "Envision Pakistan, India, and China-all armed
with nuclear weapons-skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access
to shared rivers, and arable land," the report warned. Or Spain and
Portugal "fighting over fishing rights-leading to conflicts at sea."

Of course, there are a few places we used to think of as possible
winners-mostly the far north, where Canada and Russia could
theoretically produce more grain with longer growing seasons, or
perhaps explore for oil beneath the newly melted Arctic ice cap. But
even those places will have to deal with expensive consequences-a real
military race across the high Arctic, for instance.

Want more bad news? Here's how that Pentagon report's scenario
played out: As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient
pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy
supplies would reemerge. The report refers to the work of Harvard
archaeologist Steven LeBlanc, who notes that wars over resources were
the norm until about three centuries ago. When such conflicts broke
out, 25 percent of a population's adult males usually died. As abrupt
climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life.
Set against that bleak backdrop, the potential upside of a few longer
growing seasons in Vladivostok doesn't seem like an even trade.

"It's China's Fault"

Not so much. China is an easy
target to blame for the climate crisis. In the midst of its industrial
revolution, China has overtaken the United States as the world's
biggest carbon dioxide producer. And everyone has read about the
one-a-week pace of power plant construction there. But those numbers
are misleading, and not just because a lot of that carbon dioxide was
emitted to build products for the West to consume. Rather, it's because
China has four times the population of the United States, and per
capita is really the only way to think about these emissions. And by
that standard, each Chinese person now emits just over a quarter of the
carbon dioxide that each American does. Not only that, but carbon
dioxide lives in the atmosphere for more than a century. China has been
at it in a big way less than 20 years, so it will be many, many years
before the Chinese are as responsible for global warming as Americans.

What's more, unlike many of their counterparts in the United
States, Chinese officials have begun a concerted effort to reduce
emissions in the midst of their country's staggering growth. China now
leads the world in the deployment of renewable energy, and there's
barely a car made in the United States that can meet China's much
tougher fuel-economy standards.

For its part, the United States must develop a plan to cut
emissions-something that has eluded Americans for the entire two-decade
history of the problem. Although the U.S. Senate voted down the last
such attempt, Barack Obama has promised that it will be a priority in
his administration. He favors some variation of a "cap and trade" plan
that would limit the total amount of carbon dioxide the United States
could release, thus putting a price on what has until now been free.

Despite the rapid industrialization of countries such as China and
India, and the careless neglect of rich ones such as the United States,
climate change is neither any one country's fault, nor any one
country's responsibility. It will require sacrifice from everyone. Just
as the Chinese might have to use somewhat more expensive power to
protect the global environment, Americans will have to pay some of the
difference in price, even if just in technology. Call it a Marshall
Plan for the environment. Such a plan makes eminent moral and practical
sense and could probably be structured so as to bolster emerging green
energy industries in the West. But asking Americans to pay to put up
windmills in China will be a hard political sell in a country that
already thinks China is prospering at its expense. It could be the
biggest test of the country's political maturity in many years.

"Climate Change Is an Environmental Problem"

Not really. Environmentalists
were the first to sound the alarm. But carbon dioxide is not like
traditional pollution. There's no Clean Air Act that can solve it. We
must make a fundamental transformation in the most important part of
our economies, shifting away from fossil fuels and on to something
else. That means, for the United States, it's at least as much a
problem for the Commerce and Treasury departments as it is for the
Environmental Protection Agency.

And because every country on Earth will have to coordinate, it's
far and away the biggest foreign-policy issue we face. (You were
thinking terrorism? It's hard to figure out a scenario in which Osama
bin Laden destroys Western civilization. It's easy to figure out how it
happens with a rising sea level and a wrecked hydrological cycle.)

Expecting the environmental movement to lead this fight is like
asking the USDA to wage the war in Iraq. It's not equipped for this
kind of battle. It may be ready to save Alaska's Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge, which is a noble undertaking but on a far smaller
scale. Unless climate change is quickly de-ghettoized, the chances of
making a real difference are small.

"Solving It Will Be Painful"

It depends. What's your
definition of painful? On the one hand, you're talking about
transforming the backbone of the world's industrial and consumer
system. That's certainly expensive. On the other hand, say you manage
to convert a lot of it to solar or wind power-think of the money you'd
save on fuel.

And then there's the growing realization that we don't have many
other possible sources for the economic growth we'll need to pull
ourselves out of our current economic crisis. Luckily, green energy
should be bigger than IT and biotech combined.

Almost from the moment scientists began studying the problem of
climate change, people have been trying to estimate the costs of
solving it. The real answer, though, is that it's such a huge
transformation that no one really knows for sure. The bottom line is,
the growth rate in energy use worldwide could be cut in half during the
next 15 years and the steps would, net, save more money than they cost.
The IPCC included a cost estimate in its latest five-year update on
climate change and looked a little further into the future. It found
that an attempt to keep carbon levels below about 500 parts per million
would shave a little bit off the world's economic growth-but only a
little. As in, the world would have to wait until Thanksgiving 2030 to
be as rich as it would have been on January 1 of that year. And in
return, it would have a much-transformed energy system.

Unfortunately though, those estimates are probably too optimistic.
For one thing, in the years since they were published, the science has
grown darker. Deeper and quicker cuts now seem mandatory.

But so far we've just been counting the costs of fixing the system.
What about the cost of doing nothing? Nicholas Stern, a renowned
economist commissioned by the British government to study the question,
concluded that the costs of climate change could eventually reach the
combined costs of both world wars and the Great Depression. In 2003,
Swiss Re, the world's biggest reinsurance company, and Harvard Medical
School explained why global warming would be so expensive. It's not
just the infrastructure, such as sea walls against rising oceans, for
example. It's also that the increased costs of natural disasters begin
to compound. The diminishing time between monster storms in places such
as the U.S. Gulf Coast could eventually mean that parts of "developed
countries would experience developing nation conditions for prolonged
periods." Quite simply, we've already done too much damage and waited
too long to have any easy options left.

"We Can Reverse Climate Change"

If only. Solving this crisis is
no longer an option. Human beings have already raised the temperature
of the planet about a degree Fahrenheit. When people first began to
focus on global warming (which is, remember, only 20 years ago), the
general consensus was that at this point we'd just be standing on the
threshold of realizing its consequences-that the big changes would be a
degree or two and hence several decades down the road. But scientists
seem to have systematically underestimated just how delicate the
balance of the planet's physical systems really is.

The warming is happening faster than we expected, and the results
are more widespread and more disturbing. Even that rise of 1 degree has
seriously perturbed hydrological cycles: Because warm air holds more
water vapor than cold air does, both droughts and floods are increasing
dramatically. Just look at the record levels of insurance payouts, for
instance. Mosquitoes, able to survive in new places, are spreading more
malaria and dengue. Coral reefs are dying, and so are vast stretches of
forest.

None of that is going to stop, even if we do everything right from
here on out. Given the time lag between when we emit carbon and when
the air heats up, we're already guaranteed at least another degree of
warming.

The only question now is whether we're going to hold off
catastrophe. It won't be easy, because the scientific consensus calls
for roughly 5 degrees more warming this century unless we do just about
everything right. And if our behavior up until now is any indication,
we won't.