Most people don’t get global warming and can’t understand why we’d work so hard on a project that doesn’t help us pay our bills.
And that’s because they still think of global warming as it was explained to them in the 1990s: a slow almost-imperceptible change in climate that will bring a short drought here, the occasional flood over there, and hurt the alpine skiing industry more than any other. We’ll need to do something about it in the future.
That’s why inactivists frequently complain that Al Gore presented the worst-case scenario in an An Inconvenient Truth, and that the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is a political document that overstates the dangers of global warming.
The sad truth is that Gore didn’t engage in hyperbole, and that the IPCC assessment is out-of-date already because it UNDERestimates our peril.
Consider these two stories:
Four Katrinas per year?
Jonathon Porritt, chair of the Sustainable Development Commission and one of the UK government’s top environmental advisers, has today warned we are entering an era of catastrophic climate shocks in which the prospect of “four Katrinas in one year” is an “entirely credible threat”.
Speaking at a conference earlier today hosted by reporting software specialist SAS, Porritt warned that increasingly frequent “climate induced shocks” would become a reality over the next 10 to 20 years and would result in a dramatic acceleration of government’s climate change strategies.
“[Carbon legislation] will all be gently, gently until we get dramatic climate events to jolt us out of our complacency,” he said, adding that in a perverse way the world might need to see “four Katrinas in a year” to understand the true scale of the climate change threat.
Porritt said that governments were tending to adopt carbon emission legislation that allowed a high degree of flexibility, allowing them to tighten requirements on businesses to cut emissions very quickly if climate shocks result in public calls for even greater action on climate change.
Commenting on the government’s imminent Carbon Reduction Commitment cap-and-trade scheme and the existing EU emissions trading scheme, he observed that politicians could make caps “eye wateringly tight” if and when public perception of the climate change threat falls into line with scientific predictions.
(From Business Green)
Dust Bowl California
California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said Tuesday.
In his first interview since taking office last month, the Nobel-prize-winning physicist offered some of the starkest comments yet on how seriously President Obama’s cabinet views the threat of climate change, along with a detailed assessment of the administration’s plans to combat it.
Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation’s leading agricultural producer.
In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.
“I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,” he said. “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.” And, he added, “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going” either.
A pair of recent studies raise similar warnings. One, published in January in the journal Science, raised the specter of worldwide crop shortages as temperatures rise. Another, penned by UC Berkeley researchers last year, estimated California has about $2.5 trillion in real estate assets — including agriculture — endangered by warming.
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I was commiserating with another environmentalist about the flood of bad climate news lately. Truth to tell, the Bush administration had actively suppressed government scientists and buried studies that would help Americans better understand what we are facing. (Canada does so, too). And now that there’s a new sherriff in town, many of these stories are starting to trickle out.
And then we have administration officials — like the Nobel-Prize winning Dr. Chu — who are giving voice to the truth.