THE COASTS SUBMERGED

Survival!

Starving people and victims of war or natural disasters think about survival.  The rest of us, until recently, muddled along in our homes and workplaces thinking about the best savings or investment programs for the future.  Since September 11, 2001 concerns about physical survival have come closer to home.

Several millennia ago, everyone (except an occasional pharaoh or emperor) worried about how to deal with the basic elements of survival: earth, air, water and fire.

Once again, the concerns of our primitive ancestors plague even the wealthy.  Not only have our cityscapes and their inhabitants been purposely victimized, we continue to pollute our environment, destroy our forests, create wastelands and diminish our ozone layers.

With increased awareness of the destructive crimes that can afflict urban living, we need to become more aware of the slowly erosive forces of destruction.  Our environmental awareness needs to occupy a prominent position in our concerns.  Should we fail in this, the recognition that we have terrorized ourselves will come too late; and eradicating the “terrorist camps" won’t be an option.

To follow the current environmental news, see the regular updates to the Environmental Issues page at About. Another excellent source for late-breaking environmental news can be found at the Lycos Environmental news page.  One important environmental news item:  America recently backed out of the Kyoto treaty.

Christie Todd Whitman, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, confirmed, on March 28, 2001, that the U.S. will not implement the Kyoto Protocol. "We have no interest in implementing that treaty," Whitman told reporters.   In October, Bush administration's senior climate negotiator Harlan Watson confirmed, “there was never likely to be an immediate American turn around on the Kyoto Protocol.”

The Environment News Service reports that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning in electricity generation and from agriculture and transportation are thought by many scientists to have reached levels that require precautionary and prompt action. 

The same source reports that scientists warn that the Earth's average surface temperature could increase by five degrees Celsius (10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) over the next century.

Should that happen, much coastal land would be submerged under water.

The image portrayed by the Sierra Club in an article on "The Largest and Most Dangerous Experiment in History..." presents a grim portent.  The authors report "Manmade global warming is occurring much faster — faster, in fact, than at any time in the past 10,000 years. Unless we slow and ultimately reverse the buildup of greenhouse gases, we will have decades, not millennia, to try to adapt to radical changes in weather patterns, sea levels and serious threats to human health. Increased flooding, storms and agricultural

losses could devastate our economy. Plants and animals that cannot adapt to new conditions will be come extinct. The world's leading scientists project that during our children's lifetimes, global warming will raise the average temperature of the planet by 2.7 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit." 

The article points to CO2 and mercury emissions in the US as the culprit pollutants.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) addresses the problem of global warming on their Web site.  According to the EPA, the 20th century's 10 warmest years all occurred in the last 15 years of the century. Of these, 1998 was the warmest year on record. The snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere and floating ice in the Arctic Ocean have decreased. Globally, sea level has risen 4-10 inches over the past century.

The Union of Concerned Scientists presents a strong case for the assertion that global warming has already produced some striking results.  These include receding glaciers, a 40% loss in the Greenland ice sheet, and the global sea level rising three times faster in the past 100 years than the preceding 3000 years.

Scientists expect that the average global surface temperature could rise 1.6-6.3°F by 2100, with significant regional variation. Evaporation will increase as the climate warms, which will increase average global precipitation. 

Soil moisture is likely to decline in many regions, and intense rainstorms are likely to become more frequent. Sea level is likely to rise two feet along most of the U.S. coast.  Should that happen, coastal regions in many parts of the world would become submerged. This has already happened in the Tulun Islands, or the Carteret Atoll—which lie four hundred miles from the coast of Papua New Guinea, forcing islanders to evacuate.

Harbingers of global warming (events that foreshadow the types of impacts likely to become more frequent and widespread with continued warming), according to the maps and early warning signs at Global Warming: Early Warning Signs, include spreading disease, earlier spring arrival, plant and animal range shifts and population declines, coral reef bleaching, and downpours, heavy snowfalls, and flooding.

According to the same source, a number of fingerprints (Direct manifestations of a widespread and long-term trend toward warmer global temperatures) identified throughout the world, but particularly strong in North America, include: heat waves and periods of unusually warm weather, sea level rise and coastal flooding, glaciers melting, and Arctic and Antarctic warming.

According to the Sierra Club report on "The Largest and Most Dangerous Experiment in History..." the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations-sponsored organization made up of 2,500 scientists from around the world is the world's leading authority on global warming.

"The IPCC projects that more frequent and more severe heat waves will be an early effect of global warming. Events such as the deadly stretch of hot days that killed 669 people in the Midwest during the summer of 1995 and 250 in the Eastern United States in July 1999 are likely to become more common. Scientists are already finding that the number and intensity of extreme weather events are increasing."

The second major threat that global warming poses to human health, according to the report, is infectious disease. "As temperatures rise, disease-carrying mosquitoes and rodents move into new areas, infecting people in their wake. Scientists at the Harvard Medical School have linked recent US outbreaks of dengue ("breakbone") fever, malaria, hantavirus and other diseases to climate change."

The full Text of the "IPCC Third Assessment Report - Climate Change 2001" is available at the site of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That’s one side of the issue, the one most familiar to readers of Sierra.. The other side lies in the mental pages outside of the Sierra Club and in the minds of those who would ignore environmental issues.

Sierra Club articles and campaigns have refuted the skeptics.  However, the hard-line approach hasn’t allowed the nonbelievers to have their say.  Nor have the environmentalists acknowledged that Global Warming may be a real issue with more than one side to it.

The effect of this approach has been that the believers cheer, the doubters still want more proof, the apathetic don’t get wakened, and the cynics remain unconvinced.

For campaigns against Global Warming to be effective among non-believers, the voices of dissent need to be heard and countered directly.  A one-sided debate is no debate at all. The skeptics’ arguments will have to be dealt with; and for that to happen, the adherents will need to respond directly to the arguments that have cast doubts or created disbelief.

For instance, the Global Warming Information Page rejects the views of the environmentalists who castigate Bush for pulling out of the Kyoto accords. According to them the idea that global warming would melt the ice caps and flood coastal cities seems to be mere science fiction. A slight increase in temperature--whether natural or mankind induced--is not likely to lead to a massive melting of the earth ice caps, as sometimes claimed in the media. Also, sea-level rises over the centuries relate more to warmer and thus expanding oceans, not to melting ice caps.

Junkscience.com, a Web site decrying Bush's critics, takes aim at "All the junk that's fit to debunk."

Pointing to the fact that Christie Whitman "unleashed a hysteria in Europe unmatched even by the United Kingdom's current troubles with foot-and-mouth disease," Philip Stott, a professor of biogeography at the University of London, claims "In Europe, `global warming’ has become a necessary myth, a new fundamentalist religion, with the Kyoto protocol as its articles of faith.  The adherents of this new faith want Mr. Bush on trial because he has blasphemed."

Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Professor Stott points out that "just in the past three months, there has appeared a whole suite of hard science papers from major scientific institutions in major scientific journals, including Nature, Climate Research, and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, all raising serious questions about the relationship between gas emissions and climate."  The results of two of these studies can be found on the Global Warming Information page.

Stott concludes that "the idea that we can control a chaotic climate governed by a billion factors through fiddling about with a couple of politically selected gases is carbon claptrap.... It has taken our eye, internationally, off the true way by which humans have always had to cope with change, whatever its cause, direction or speed--namely, adaptation.”

Here are some additional dissenters voices that cannot be simply summarily dismissed: the IPCC sums up the question of attributing observed climate changes to human action, thus: "Although these global mean results suggest that there is some anthropogenic component in the observed temperature record, they cannot be considered as compelling evidence of a clear cause-and-effect link between anthropogenic forcing and changes in the Earth's surface temperature."

The World Climate Report covers breaking news concerning the science and political science of global climate change.  Their issue of November 5, 2001, features four articles that seriously call into question some of the past findings and predictions related to global warming.

According to its editors, the World Climate Report "has been proven to be an effective tool in pointing out the weaknesses and fallacies in the science which is being touted as "proof" of disastrous greenhouse warming." The scientific credentials of the editor and contributors can be viewed on the Contributors page.

Despite popularized claims to the contrary, the evidence is overwhelming that trees throughout the world will grow faster, produce more fruit, be more water-use efficient, and be more resistant to any number of stresses due to elevated CO2. The long-term study from "Sherwood's Forest" shows that the biological benefits are not short lived, but will last the lifetime of the trees.  The author, Robert C. Balling Jr., Ph.D. Arizona State University, debunks a number of popularized environmentalists' claims about the "Greenhouse Effect."  (November 5, 2001)

“To prove that some species is impacted by human-induced climate change, you need to demonstrate 1) that there really is a species change, using a sufficiently long period of record; 2) that, using data, the climate has changed there in close conjunction with the species change, and 3) that the local climate change that has occurred is related to higher levels of greenhouse gases in the global atmosphere and not just natural climate variability.

“Step 1 is the easiest, and even that depends on good, long-term species records, which are fairly rare.  Step 2 is easy for climatologists, but they are never invited to participate in these studies. And Step 3 is just beyond current capability (science fiction).”

Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at M.I.T. writes that “Fears of massive sea-level increases accompanied many of the early discussions of global warming, but those estimates have been steadily reduced by orders of magnitude, and now it is widely agreed that even the potential contribution of warming to sea-level rise would be swamped by other more important factors.”

A number of papers questioning the accuracy and validity of global warming predictions can be found on Skepticism.net.  Patrick J. Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, wrote about a failing paradigm of dramatic warming in "A Decade of Hot Air." Repeatedly finding that his models of global warming erred, Jim Hansen, climatologist golden boy to Al Gore, finally acknowledged his errors.

Michaels concluded, "When someone like NASA's Jim Hansen says that all of the anomalous warming is in Siberia and Nunavit, and that the planet is getting much greener and not much hotter as a result of increased carbon dioxide, it is over. The science is settled. The case is closed and the Kyoto treaty is dead, shot through the heart by the climatologist for whom Al Gore vowed to go to war."

Next, on the question of whether or not Florida will be submerged as a result of global warming and rising sea levels, the Competitive Enterprise Institute reported from Washington, DC, May 25, 1999 – “The Environmental Protection Agency continues to peddle unfounded fears about global warming and sea level rise even though there is no evidence to support such scares.”

“The EPA claims that global warming will lead to catastrophic sea level rise, inundating parts of Florida, but the science does not support these alarmist claims," commented CEI’s Paul Georgia, environmental research associate and managing editor of the Cooler Heads a bi-weekly newsletter covering global warming issues. "Such scare mongering has no place in an essentially scientific debate.”

“Sea level rise has been occurring for thousands of years and is explained by natural processes,” Dr. Malmquist observed. Claims that alleged human-induced global warming will cause sea level rise to accelerate is unfounded, he said. “Observations show that current accelerated rates of sea level rise date back to the early 19th century and preceded any substantial inputs of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from the Industrial Revolution.” This and the other reports from the Competitive Enterprise Institute can be viewed at the Skepticism.net.

S. Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, USA, wrote a stinging criticism of how "groupthink smothered inconvenient dissent," in recent meetings of the National Academy of Sciences, related to Global Warming.

Professor Singer's conclusion: “The Academy report stands or falls principally on whether the climate warmed in the past 50 years, and esp. since 1980. The overwhelming bulk of data from different independent sources shows no such warming trend. We are not talking just about science but about evidence. A full-scale open debate is in order to settle this matter.”

Sallie L. Baliunas, in an article with James K. Glassman (The Weekly Standard Magazine, June 25, 2001/Vol 6, Number 39) wrote: “Without computer models, there would be no evidence of global warming, (man-made, that is), no Kyoto. By simulating the climate on giant, ultra-fast computers, scholars try to find out how it will react to each new stimulus--like a doubling of CO2. An ideal computer model, however, would have to track five million parameters over the surface of the earth and through the atmosphere, and incorporate all relevant interactions among land, sea, air, ice and vegetation. According to one researcher, such a model would demand ten million trillion degrees of freedom to solve a computational impossibility even on the most advanced supercomputer.”

In March of this year, David Wojick wrote. "When a body of science comes to have public policy implications it must undergo a higher level of scrutiny."  Wojick also observes, "Climate change skeptics are expert witnesses for the defense in an adversarial policy process. Their job is to scrutinize the science for weakness, not to do the science or rectify the weakness. The process is the best we know of, its name being democracy, it's product being reason. And within it the skeptic's calling is a noble one."

Unfortunately, on the Sierra Club's own page of Internet links, none of the sites that take issue with the conclusions of campaigners against global warming have been listed.  This could easily lead visitors to believe that the Sierra Club is either unwilling to even acknowledge dissenters or that they're unaware of the Web sites that take issue with their position.  In either case, conclusions could be drawn about myopic visions of advocates for better climate control.

Environmentalists may not agree with, accept or appreciate the dissenting voices.  If, however, part of the aim of the believers is to convince doubters, to convert those hostile to their position or to persuade the apathetic to join in their cause, the policy advocates must confront and contend directly with the data and arguments presented by the dissenters.

If they fail in this challenge, the believers in the effects of global warming will find their own positions submerged as deeply as their future visions of coastal lands.