Crossing The Red Line - Review Of Current Energy, Climate Books

[hatrack]

"In October of last year, two consultants on energy, one of them the former head of planning for Royal Dutch/Shell, produced a report for the Pentagon that they titled "Imagining the Unthinkable." The twenty-two-page document outlined one possible sequence of events that could result from the greenhouse effect. First, melting Arctic ice, less dense than saltwater, would flood the Atlantic with cool freshwater. By 2010 it would slow down or shut off the local branch of the relatively warm circulatory system that we know as the Gulf Stream. As a result, while the rest of the globe continues to grow warmer, western Europe and eastern North America would turn sharply colder and the relatively dry interior of Europe soon would have a climate comparable to present-day Siberia.

These developments would lead to shortfalls in grain harvest that are felt around the world. Before long, wars would threaten to erupt over "desperate need for natural resources" rather than "over ideology, religion, or national honor." Every time "there is a choice between starving and raiding, humans raid," the authors write. And so, as the number of human beings outweighs the greatly reduced carrying capacity of the planet, "deaths from war as well as starvation and disease" will over time have to "re-balance" our population.

The report is not novel—such visions of rapid and violent climate change have become common in recent years as our understanding of the wild weather swings in the climatic temperature record has grown. Nor is it extremely unlikely—a series of recent papers in Nature have noted just the sort of freshening of Atlantic waters that could set off this particular sequence. To focus on the report's more lurid predictions, however, would be to miss the real point, which is the mere fact of its existence. In an administration that has refused to even acknowledge global warming as a serious human problem—an administration whose Environmental Protection Agency removed the section on climate change from its annual report to avoid offending the White House—the report's calm and straightforward acceptance of the basic laws of physics and chemistry seems remarkable. "There is substantial evidence to indicate that significant global warming will occur during the twenty-first century," the summary begins. "Alternative fuels, greenhouse gas emission controls, and conservation efforts are worthwhile endeavors," it concludes, before adding a list of other, more exotic, responses that will likely have more direct appeal to the Pentagon ("explore geo-engineering options that control the climate").

Though the Pentagon officially played down the report (a spokesman promised it would not be passed along to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld), its internal think tank, the Office of Net Assessments, made no attempt to hide it from public view. In fact, someone made sure to pass it along to Fortune magazine, which published a long account of its contents. It suggests that even some in official Republican Washington have begun to notice how out of step the US has become on this issue —after all, every other government in the industrialized world (not to mention virtually all of organized science) has declared that climate is changing swiftly and dangerously. In those capitals, "alternative fuels, greenhouse gas emission controls, and conservation efforts" are not just "worthwhile endeavors" but cornerstones of national policy."

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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17179

This is very long, and very interesting - please read!!

[NJCher]

1. thanks, bookmarked it

I promise a read later--just have to get to work soon.

Thanks!


Cher