TCI Climate Change

1. Introduction

It is not news that climate shapes history.

What is news is that the heating of our atmosphere has propelled our climate into a new state of instability. This new era of climate change could well be the most profound threat ever facing humanity. Climate change is far more than a merely environmental issue. Its dimensions cut to the core of our economic and political lives – even to our basic existence as an organized species. The crisis of the global climate clusters together three issues of enormous scope and pervasive impact.

Its natural dimensions are of truly cosmic proportions. Unintentionally, we have set in motion massive systems of the planet with huge amounts of inertia that have kept it relatively hospitable to civilization for the last 10,000 years. We have heated the deep oceans (1). We have reversed the carbon cycle by more than 600,000 years (2). We have loosed a wave of violent weather (3). We have altered the timing of the seasons (4). We are living on an increasingly narrow margin of stability.

While the world’s governments have spent nine years trying to ratify emissions reductions of five to seven percent, a larger reality is being ignored. The science tells us clearly we must cut our emissions by at least 70 percent if we are to allow the climate to re-stabilize (5).

As Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, declared recently, we have a 10 year window to begin to make "very deep cuts" in our carbon fuel use if "humanity is to survive." (6)

Conversely, the real solution to the climate crisis may well contain the seeds for solutions to some of the most threatening problems facing humanity today. The solution to climate change has the potential to begin to mend a profoundly fractured world.

Take, for example, our newfound vulnerability to terrorism.

The most obvious connection is that the solution to the climate crisis — a worldwide transition to renewable energy – would dramatically reduce the significance of oil — and with it our exposure to the political volatility in the Middle East.

That volatility will only become more explosive, given the approaching exhaustion of the region’s oil reserves.

Much more relevant is the fact that the U.S. generates a quarter of the world’s emissions with five percent of its population. And since poor countries are much more immediately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change — our continuing indifference to climate change will almost guarantee more anti-U.S. attacks. This warning was echoed recently by the head of the IPCC (7).

The real truth about terrorism is that, aside from hardening airports and nuclear plants, there is no way to protect any complex, highly organized society from guerrilla attacks. In the long run, what is really needed is a major change in our posture to developing countries.
To restore our inflamed atmosphere to a hospitable state ultimately requires nothing less than rewiring the entire globe - and replacing every oil burning furnace, every gasoline-burning car, every coal-powered generating plant with renewable and climate-friendly energy sources. The earth’s fossil fuel resources have blessed us with a level of prosperity and abundance unimaginable even a century ago; today they are propelling us forward into a century of disintegration.

Finally, the economic dimension of the climate crisis centers around a widening global fault line which threatens to split humanity irreparably between rich and poor. The impact of that inequality on the global climate crisis rests on one simple fact: if tomorrow the US and the rest of the industrial world were to cut its emissions dramatically, that reduction would be overwhelmed by the coming pulse of carbon from China, India, Brazil, Mexico and all the developing nations who are struggling to keep ahead of the relentless undertow of chronic poverty. We simply cannot deal with the crisis of the global climate without dealing with the crisis of global economic inequity.

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2. Science

While some aspects of the science are dizzyingly complex, the facts underlying the science are quite simple. Carbon dioxide traps in heat. For 10,000 years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has remained the same — 280 PPM — until the late 19th century when the world began to industrialize using more coal and oil. That 280 is now up to 380 — a level this planet has not experienced for at least 650,000 years. That 280 will double later in this century to 560 PPM which correlates with an increase in the global temperature of 3* to 10* F.(8)

	The Greenhouse Gas Effect

	The greenhouse effect makes life on earth possible. Without the natural greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the average temperature of the earth would be 30 degrees Celsius lower. Instead of 15 degrees Celsius, it would be well below freezing. The problem is that we have been putting more and more heat trapping gases into the atmosphere. This raises the average global temperature and creates climate change.

By contrast, the last Ice Age was only 5* to 9* F colder than our current climate. Each year, we are pumping seven billion tons of heat-trapping carbon into our atmosphere whose upper extent is about 10 miles overhead.

The first consequence of the small warming that has already occurred is a forcing of the planet’s hydrological cycle which is expressing itself in altered rainfall patterns, longer droughts, more severe storms, more temperature extremes, rising nighttime low temperatures, a 5 percent per decade increase in atmospheric humidity since the mid-1970s, and the fact that we are getting much more of our snow and rain in intense, severe downpours than we did 20 years ago (9).

The industry-sponsored "greenhouse skeptics" are fond of pointing out uncertainties in the science. The science, they tell us, can’t specify particular impacts in specific regions. Nor can it predict the future rates of warming -- or the thresholds of carbon dioxide concentrations which will propel the climate into abrupt shifts.

They have made a living off of scientific uncertainty. But they have used it in a very selective and misleading way. Dr. Michael McElroy, chairman of Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, cites a lesson about uncertainty he learned from the early days of the ozone depletion issue. When scientists first thought there might be an ozone problem, they ran a range of computer scenarios. But, a couple of years later, when they were actually able to measure the depletion directly with balloons and satellites, they found that the depletion was far worse than the worst-case computer scenario. "Just because there is uncertainty," McElroy said, "does not imply the reality is benign. It could easily be far worse." McElroy’s bottom line on the climate issue is this: "We have no right tampering with an immense system we don’t understand."

Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere 100 years. If we could magically stop all our coal and oil burning, we would still be subject to a long spell of costly and traumatic disruptive weather. Moreover new research indicates that prehistoric climate changes have happened as abrupt shifts rather than gradual transitions, and that small changes have triggered catastrophic outcomes. Not only are we gambling with our collective futures. We are gambling with our eyes blindfolded. We can’t even read the cards we’ve been dealt.

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3. Warming-driven Changes

Researchers at the National Climatic Data Center reported in Geophysical research letters (March 2000) that while the planet had been heating at the rate of 1 degree per century until the mid-1970s, (the upper rate to which most ecosystems are able to adapt) it has been warming at the rate of 4 degree per century in the last 20 years.

The economic consequences of our newly unstable climate are visible in the rising disaster relief costs to governments and the escalating losses of the world's property insurers. During the 1980s insurance losses to extreme weather events averaged $2 billion a year; in the 1990s they averaged $12 billion a year. In 1998, the insurance industry lost $89 billion to extreme events — more than it lost during the entire decade of the 1980s. The head of the Re-insurance Association of America has said that unless something is done to stabilize the climate, it could well bankrupt the industry (10).

But the stakes involve far more than the survival of the insurance industry. In 2004, the UN projected that losses from climate impacts will reach $150 billion a year within this decade (11). Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, estimates that within several decades, losses from climate impacts will amount to $300 billion a year (12). And the largest property re-insurer in Britain projects that, unchecked, the impacts of climate change could bankrupt the global economy within 65 years (13).

Politically, there is a strong totalitarian threat to climate change. It is easiest to see in certain poor countries whose ecosystems are as fragile as their traditions of democracy. It is not hard to foresee governments resorting to permanent states of martial law in the face of food shortages, droughts, floods, incursions of environmental refugees and epidemics of infectious disease.

Two years ago, the Pentagon released a major planning scenario detailing mass-migrations, wars and all kinds of political chaos that would result from a rapid climate change event (14). What is really significant about this document is that it reclassifies climate change from an environmental problem to a national security threat.

If you look at the direct, warming-driven impacts on the planet itself, you will see a number of very troubling physical changes on the planet which are independent of computer models and data analysis:

Finally, climatic instability is bad for human health. The most obvious impact comes from heating. Recently, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization predicted a worldwide doubling of deaths due to heat waves in the next 20 years (23). Witness the 35,000 heat deaths in Europe in the summer of 2003.

There is another, more complex set of health impacts — and they involve the warming-driven northward migration of tropical diseases. Warming accelerates the breeding rates and the biting rates of insects. It accelerates the maturation of the pathogens they carry. And it expands their range by allowing them to live longer at higher altitudes and higher latitudes. As a result, mosquitoes are now spreading yellow fever, malaria and dengue fever to populations which have never previously been exposed. Globally malaria quadrupled between 1990 and 1995.(24) (Find out more about the human health effects of climate change at: http://www.med.harvard.edu/chge/)

The British medical journal, the Lancet, has called indifference to climate change a form of "bio-political terrorism." (25)

So the consequences to our social existence are truly profound. As one world-class scientist co-chaired the IPCC told me: “If this newly unstable climate had begun 150 years ago, the planet would likely never have been able to support its current population.” (26)

The industry-sponsored “skeptics” are fond of pointing out uncertainties in the science. They have made a living off of scientific uncertainty. But they have used it in a very selective and misleading way.

Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere 100 years. If we could magically stop all our coal and oil burning, we would still be subject to a long spell of costly and traumatic disruptive weather. Moreover new research indicates that prehistoric climate changes have happened as abrupt shifts rather than gradual transitions (27), and that small changes in a very delicately balanced atmosphere have produced very large outcomes. Not only are we gambling with our future. We are gambling with our eyes blindfolded. We can’t really read the cards we’ve been dealt.

The solution to the climate crisis is as simple as it is overwhelming. To pacify our inflamed climate requires emissions reductions of 60-70 percent – and that means a rapid global energy transition away from oil and coal and to low-carbon, high efficiency and renewable energy sources. The job of the energy industry now is to reorient itself towards renewable energy.

First, in the US, we need to divert the subsidies for fossil fuels to renewable energy industry. In the US, those subsidies amount to $20 billion a year, globally they amount to $300 billion. The redirection of subsidies would raise the price of gasoline and discourage excess consumption. More important, it would provide a huge incentive for the oil companies to follow the subsidies and become aggressive developers of solar, fuel cell, biomass and wind technologies.

Unfortunately there remains the stumbling block of political resistance.
Even despite the puny reach of the Kyoto Protocol, the Senate in 1997 voted 95 to 0 not to ratify it because it exempts the large developing nations from the first round of emissions cuts. That fall, the fossil fuel industry launched a $13 million ad campaign to reinforce that resistance. What the industry lobby, as well as many Senators, must stop denying is that most developing nations are too burdened by debt, poverty and social instability to absorb energy restrictions. Most can barely feed and educate their poverty-stressed populations. They are in no position to finance energy transitions

A number of political conservatives are now embracing this issue. William F. Buckley has warned readers that this is “not an Al Gore issue” — that we are producing too many greenhouse gases for the planet to accommodate. A few years ago, Jim Woolsey, former head of the CIA and Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana wrote about the urgency of the issue in Foreign Affairs. Paul O’Neill, the former Treasury Secretary, has likened the coming impacts of climate change to a nuclear holocaust. And conservative Senator John McCain is taking the lead in the Congress in beginning to address with this issue.

On the ground today, many activist groups are now taking up climate as their central issue. The religious community has become involved with the climate issue in a very big way.

The Tufts Climate Initiative Is Part of a Larger US Movement
Tufts University is not alone in its efforts to stop climate change. Many US organizations have decided not to wait any longer for Washington to take action. There is an extraordinary amount of political activity underway in the U.S. Below just three examples of initiatives and groups active in the North East.