The tipping point

I was impressed when TIME magazine-a mainstream publication-produced a fair and balanced report on global warming as the cover story for its April 3 edition. CNN quickly picked up the story and ran an abridged version with the headline "Be Worried, Be Very Worried." Within days, most of the major media outlets had published articles about what is being called colloquially "climate crash." Essentially, scientists fear that we are in the midst of a long-feared "tipping point" in global climate change. The surprise is not that it is happening, but that it came so soon.

Anyone can go to cnn.com and find the details about what the new studies show, so I will only highlight them here. Basically, a tipping point in climate change describes the period in which global warming accelerates rapidly due, in this case, to positive feedback loops. The most acute evidence of such feedback mechanisms can be found at the poles. First, the extreme Northern and Southern glaciers and ice sheets are melting much faster than previously thought. Greenland's ice sheet, for example, is turning to slush at a rate twice as fast as nine years ago. A large part of the explanation is the fact that ice reflects 90 percent of sun and heat back to space, while dark water absorbs 90 percent, thereby compounding the warming trend, thus leading to more melting, and on and on.

Similarly, the vast carbon-rich permafrost in the northern tundra-frozen since the last ice age 10 thousand years ago-is melting. Scientists were shocked to find last year that Siberia's permafrost-the size of France and Germany combined, and with 25 percent of the world's dangerously potent greenhouse gas, methane-is turning to mush. Projections show that methane release from Siberia alone (not to fear, mud pits have formed throughout Canada's permafrost, too) will lead to an increase in global warming of 10 to 25 percent over the next few decades.

Ecosystems are also crashing. In the Pacific Northwest, salmon populations have declined rapidly as their spawning grounds are buried beneath landslides of once solid soil. Extinction rates in general have accelerated, as well, while polar bears drown and animals in once colder and temperate climates struggle to find higher elevations.

In the midst of what can only be called a crisis, some people have woken up to the fact that we needed to do start doing something 20 years ago. Unfortunately for our generation and our posterity, others have buried their heads in the sand. Bush news first. From abandoning its global leadership responsibility to reduce GHGs to doctoring scientific reports to subsidizing an oil industry awash in profits, the Bush administration's malfeasance on the issue has been criminal. Fortunately, others have taken action. When the Kyoto Protocol went into effect on February 16, 2005, with 141 nations on board, Mayor Greg Nickels of Seattle announced that his city would meet the requirements of the international climate change treaty. At the same time, he exhorted mayors across the country to take similar action because, let's face it, we have an administration and Congressional majority that would rather drill and mine their way into the future than use new technologies to solve our energy problems.

Today, the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement has 200 cities on board, and they're using some pretty cool and innovative techniques to clean themselves up. The city of Seattle has set a goal of reducing its paper consumption 30 percent by the end of 2006 and has switched to purchasing only 100 percent recycled paper. It has also converted its 180-truck garbage and recycling fleet to low-sulfur, clean-burning biodiesel.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger also deserves credit for pushing California's legislature to introduce a bill announced just two days ago, which requires that all emitters of GHGs-automobiles, power plants, and other industrial facilities-reduce their emissions by 25 percent by 2020. Unfortunately, a politically entrenched Environmental Protection Agency has threatened to take California to court over the measure, arguing that the state does not have the right to go beyond its ever more polluter-friendly regulations. The climate is crashing around us faster than ever, and no matter what we do today, we're looking at substantial warming and increasingly severe ecological dislocation for the next few decades due to the carbon we have already pumped into the atmosphere. The question is, will we confront the crisis now or sacrifice our futures for selfish wastefulness today?

Jared Fish is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Thursday.