For the week of June 27 - July 3, 2001

Fires, floods, 
sound science and 
the bottom line

Commentary by DICK DORWORTH

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A couple of weeks ago I was driving by Bridgeport, Calif., on my way north after a superb weekend of climbing in the exquisite Tuolumne Meadows above Yosemite Valley. It was late afternoon of a clear, hot, windy late spring day. It was early in the season to be climbing in Tuolumne, a circumstance made possible by a mild winter and a consequent (and disturbing) lack of snow for that time of year in the high Sierra. A fair-sized forest fire burned south and west of Bridgeport, driven by the winds and fueled by the unusually dry conditions caused by that same mild winter. As I passed by, the fire was within half a mile of Highway 89. The heat from the flames was perceptible inside my car. It was the first fire I’ve seen this fire season. Two weeks later I saw a huge fire west of Reno, Nev., that closed Interstate 80 and filled Reno with dangerous and unpleasant-to-breathe smoke while burning thousands of acres of unseasonably dry timber and brush. We all know 2001 is going to be a long, hot summer in western America. Predicting weather is a risky and thankless endeavor, but it seems reasonable to postulate that human-induced global warming is a factor in what is anticipated to be a fire-filled summer. It is likely there will be more summers of fire to follow.

Between those two fire events, a tropical storm dumped more than three feet of rain on Texas (especially Houston), killing more than 20 people and flooding thousands of others out of their homes. It seems reasonable as well to postulate that human-induced global warming was a factor in that unusually fierce rogue storm, and to predict that there will be many more to come.

Those are but three examples, two of them personally observed within the month, of the compounding consequences of global warming. Anyone who pays attention to such things can come up with a list of ways in which global warming is affecting life on earth.

Fires, floods, droughts and pestilence have been part of the experience of living on the planet since long before the beginning of human memory. But only recently have those disasters been caused and exacerbated by human activities that release heat-trapping gases and particles into the air, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxides. The most important sources of those gases in the atmosphere are the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, gas and oil, and deforestation. The United States alone produces one-fourth of the carbon dioxide released into the earth’s atmosphere.

Though there are a few dingbats who deny that global warming is real, and an equal number of (heated) air heads who accept its reality but not the significance of its potential and actual consequences, the science is in and it is disquieting. Since the late 19^th century, the mean surface temperature of the earth has increased by about one degree Fahrenheit. Over the last 40 years, the period with most reliable date, the temperature increased by about 0.5 degrees F. Warming in the 20^th century is greater than at any time during the past 400-600 years. Seven of the ten warmest years in the 20^th century occurred in the 1990s. 1998 was the hottest year since reliable measurements began. Mountain glaciers the world over are receding rapidly. The Greenland ice sheet has lost about 40 percent of its thickness in the past four decades. The global sea level is rising about three times faster during the past 100 years than it has during the previous 3,000 years. Numerous studies show that plants and animals are changing their range and behavior in response to shifts in climate. And there are floods in Texas and fires in California and Nevada and it will be a fire-filled fire season in western America.

How this compounding global warming will affect the lives of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren and their descendants is unclear, but it seems reasonable to postulate that the quality of their lives will be greatly diminished, as will be that of all life on planet earth.

Global warming is a huge problem, increasing daily, and there are no easy solutions. The most obvious and easiest (and effective) is for all of us to curb our consumption of fossil fuels, use technologies that reduce the amount of emissions wherever possible, and protect what’s left of the world’s diminishing forests.

Each individual can do his and her best to live responsibly on the planet, but an individual’s efforts in this regard are insignificant in the face of the obtuse, irresponsible, greed-driven policies of the current U.S. government administration and the large corporations that call its tune and ignore all science that doesn’t inflate the bottom line. George Bush’s turning his back on the Kyoto Protocols was likely the most significant and most stupid environmental inaction of the last century. It will haunt the politics, the economics and the environment of Bush’s entire administration. In the long run it will cripple the bottom line of the very businesses it is, in the short run, supporting.

And it will give new meaning to the old maxim of the radical activist, "Burn, baby, burn."

 

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