http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,895297,00.html
End of the
world nigh - it's official
Ignore the optimists: the global warming horror stories are all
true
Michael Meacher
Friday February 14, 2003
The Guardian
There
is a lot wrong with our world. But it is not as bad
as many people think. It is worse. Global warming is slowly
but relentlessly changing the face of the planet.
We are only in the
early stages of this process, but already
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached 375 parts per million,
the highest level for at least half a million years. Temperatures
are projected to rise by up to 5.8 C this century, 10 times
the increase of 0.6 C in the last century, and by 40% more
than this in some northern land surface areas. This means
temperatures could rise by up to 8.1 C in some parts of the
world.
Does this matter? The
evidence suggests that it does.
In China severe floods used to occur once every 20 years;
now they occur in nine out of every 10. The number of people
affected by floods globally has risen from 7 million in the
1960s to 150 million now. In 1998 two-thirds of Bangladesh
was under water for months, affecting 30 million people.
In the UK, 5 million people and 185,000 businesses are at risk.
Flooding is only the
beginning. The number of people
worldwide devastated by hurricanes or cyclones has increased
eightfold to 25 million a year over the past 30 years.
The oceans are steadily warming, and since they currently
absorb 50 times more CO2 than is contained in the atmosphere,
even a tiny reduction in CO2 absorption by the sea could
cause global temperatures to rise significantly.
Even more seriously,
10,000 billion tonnes of methane
(a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2) are
stored, according to the US Geological Survey, on the
shallow floor of the Arctic, in sediments below the seabed.
If the temperature surrounding the methane warms,
it becomes unstable and methane gas is released,
causing temperatures to increase further. Warming
oceans also cause the waters to expand and the sea
level to rise. Sea level is predicted to rise by 3ft
over the next century, leading to huge areas of Bangladesh,
Egypt and China being inundated.
We don't know the limits
of nature - how much rain could
fall for how long a period, how much more powerful and
frequent hurricanes could become, for how long droughts
could endure. The ultimate concern is that if runaway global
warming occurred, temperatures could spiral out of control
and make our planet uninhabitable.
Five
times in the past 540 million years there have been
mass extinctions, in one case involving the destruction
of 96% of species then living. But while these were the
result of asteroid strikes or intense glaciation, this is
the first time that a species has been at risk of generating
its own demise.
James Lovelock's Gaia
hypothesis conceives of the planet
as an active control system. It posits the existence of
feedbacks at the global level which, so far, have served
to keep the earth's surface habitable within a tolerable
range, despite significant external changes, including
changes in the radiation from the sun. However, with severe
human-induced activity, that is now beginning to change.
We have almost become
our own geophysical cycle. There are
many examples of this trend. On a global scale our biological
carbon productivity is now only outpaced by the krill in
the oceans. Our civil engineering works shift more soil
than all the world's rivers bring to the seas. Our industrial
emissions eclipse the total emissions from all the world's
volcanoes. We are bringing about species loss on the scale
of some of the natural extinctions of palaeohistory.
We face a transformation
of our world and its ecosystems
at an exponential rate, and unprecedentedly brought about,
not by natural forces, but by the activities of the dominant
species. Climate change is only the most dramatic example.
At a time when scientists say the world should be reducing
its CO2 emissions by 60% to stabilise and then reverse
global warming, they are projected to increase by around
75% on 1990 levels by 2020.
The dinosaurs dominated
the earth for 160 million years.
We are in danger of putting our future at risk after
a mere quarter of a million years. The force of the
Gaia thesis has never been more apparent. When an alien
infection invades the body, the body develops a fever
in order to concentrate all its energies to eliminate
the alien organism. In most cases it succeeds, and the
body recovers. But where it does not, the body dies.
The
lesson is that if we continue with activities which
destroy our environment and undermine the conditions
for our own survival, we are the virus. Making the change
needed to avoid that fate is perhaps the greatest challenge
we have ever faced.
· Michael Meacher
is environment minister. This article is
based on a lecture he will deliver today at Newcastle University
environment.minister@
defra.gsi.gov.uk
