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Making A Buck As The World Burns

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

Climate contrarianism has been showing up in some unusual places lately. Who, for example, would expect to see a cheer for G.W. Bushstyle denial in The Nation? Or a grubby piece on how we might play the stock market to benefit from the demise of the Earth as we know it in The Atlantic?

As a resident of Omaha, I suppose I should rejoice, with Gregg Easterbrook, (in “Global Warming: Who Loses — and Who Wins?” The Atlantic, April, 2007, 52-64) that the value of my house will skyrocket as refugees flood our area from the drowning coasts. Call my real-estate agent! I’ll be able to buy even cheaper stuff at Wal-Mart, shipped from Asia via the Northwest Passage. If I don’t lose sleep over the passing of the polar bears, I, myself, can do well in a warmer world, according to Easterbrook, provided I augment my holdings of General Electric common stock. Call my broker!

Easterbrook is not alone. I read in the Washington Post, June 7, 2007: “Four oil companies have applied to explore off shore [of Greenland], mining companies are sniffing out uranium and gold, and two aluminum companies want to build smelting plants and use the gushing glacial meltwater for hydroelectric power.”

Reading Alexander Cockburn on global warming in The Nation during May, I thought I was browsing the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, where most of the anti-warming nostrums that he relishes with such apparent novelty have been standard fare for most of the last two decades.

Cockburn suggests that in a couple of hundred years, historiby ans will compare global warming rhetoric to religious sin-mongering a millennium ago. With all due respect to facile irony, in a couple of hundred years the toilets at the White House (now 57 feet above sea level on the first floor) may be backing up as the warming oceans rise. The mantra of global warming as rhetorical “sin” has been repeated by right-wing chatters so often that it has reached nearly biglie status.

In the meantime, the science that supports the idea continues to accumulate. James E. Hansen (director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) and colleagues have published an article in Great Britain making a case for a “master switch” in climate change that they call an “albedo flip” which serves as a “tipping point” in global climatic conditions within a relatively short period of time on a paleoclimatic scale. They anticipate that unless greenhouse-gas levels are stabilized, the “albedo flip” could take hold within a decade or two, accelerating global warming beyond any attempt at control.

“Albedo” is the reflectivity of any given surface on the Earth. A dark surface, such as asphalt, absorbs much more heat than a light surface, such as snow-covered ground. Such changes are important in polar regions because melting ice and snow opens water and vegetation-covered earth, both of which have much lower reflectivity, increasing absorption of heat. As ice melts, darker surfaces absorb more heat, and drive the process even faster, a major reason why global warming is so insidious. It feeds upon itself. Speaking of melting ice, a team of NASA and university scientists has found clear evidence that extensive areas of snow melted in west Antarctica in January 2005 in response to warm temperatures. Combined, the affected regions comprise an area as large as California.

Andrew Revkin wrote of this report in the New York Times: “Balmy air, with a temperature of up to 41 degrees in some places, persisted across three broad swathes of West Antarctica long enough to leave a distinctive signature of melting, a layer of ice in the snow that cloaks the vast ice sheets of the frozen continent. The layer formed the same way a crust of ice can form in a yard in winter when a warm day and then a freezing night follow a snowfall, the scientists said.”

While Easterbrook and Cockburn weren’t watching, carbon- dioxide levels in the atmosphere jumped suddenly between 2000 and 2004, according to calculations published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during 2007. The rate of increase nearly tripled over the average rate in the 1990s. Instead of rising by 1.1 per cent a year, as in the previous decade, emissions grew by an average of 3.1 per cent a year from 2000 to 2004. “Despite the scientific consensus that carbon emissions are affecting the world’s climate, we are not seeing evidence of progress in managing those emissions,” said Chris Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, Calif., a co-author of the report.

While the literati debate, Gian- Reto Walther and his colleagues have tracked the expansion of Trachycarpus fortunei, the windmill palm, (similar to the palmetto), into southern Switzerland following rising winter minimum temperatures and a lengthening growing season. In addition to Trachycarpus fortunei reproducing naturally in the foothills of the southern Alps, they have been observed spreading in semi-natural habitats or seeding in gardens and parks as far north as southern coastal England, Brittany, in France, the Netherlands, and coastal southwestern British Columbia, all areas where warmer nights have extended the average annual growing season to well over 300 days a year. The palms of Switzerland are being observed about 300 kilometers (more than 200 miles) outside their historical range. Scientists conclude that the spread of these palms is a “significant global bio-indicator across continents for present-day climate change and the projected global warming of the near future.” The research was published in Global Ecology and Biogeography.

At the same time, penguins at the southern tip of Africa (on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was held prisoner) are starving because their main food, sardines, have followed warmer water to the south. If you are a penguin with an empty stomach, global warming is very, very real. A century ago, 1.5 million penguins called this area home. By 2001, the population was about 120,000. Now it is less than 20,000.

In addition, as humans continue to pump carbon, the oceans’ carrying capacity is diminishing. This is especially true of the southern ocean around Antarctica. Scientists have observed the first evidence that the southern ocean’s ability to absorb CO2, has weakened by about 15 percent per decade since 1981.

“This is the first time that we’ve been able to say that climate change itself is responsible for the saturation of the Southern Ocean sink. This is serious,” said Corinne Le Quere of the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey. “All climate models predict that this kind of feedback will continue and intensify during this century,” said Le Quere. “The Earth’s carbon sinks — of which the Southern Ocean accounts for 15 percent — absorb about half of all human carbon emissions. With the Southern Ocean reaching its saturation point more CO2 will stay in our atmosphere,” she said.

People who debate political aspects of global warming with hardly a sideways glance at the science often look like fools. Alexander Cockburn, et al. should be reading some of the science, smelling some coffee, and doing some math. Are we living on the same planet?

Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Johansen is the author of the three-volume “Global Warming in the Twenty-First Century” (Praeger, 2006).