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LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
A SURVIVAL PLAN FOR THE HUMAN SPECIES
By PAUL HELLYER AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2010 Paul Hellyer
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4490-7612-2
Chapter One
WE ARE HELL BENT TOWARD THE EXTINCTION OF THE HUMAN SPECIES "We're all doomed! 40 years from global catastrophe - and there's NOTHING we can do about it." James Lovelock
Put another way, we have about ten years to turn the situation around and invalidate the above prediction that is based on our present trajectory. The possibility of saving the planet as a hospitable place for human life is real. But the probability, based on our track record to date, is not good.
James Lovelock is a maverick to some but his views are increasingly gaining credence in respectable circles. He has been proclaiming his Gaia Theory for a generation. This states that the Earth is a living, self-regulating system and that by filling its atmosphere with C[O.sub.2] (carbon dioxide emissions) we have destroyed the balance and overheated the planet. We are in the phase when the thermometer suddenly shoots up.
The scientist's predictions of what this means in real terms are so dramatic that I am reluctant to repeat them here. Two or three examples will suffice to give the magnitude of the pending catastrophe. Over-industrialization will make it impossible to grow food in China. Consequently the Chinese will relocate in Africa. They are already there preparing a new continent. "The Chinese industrialists who claim to be out there mining minerals are just there on a pretext of preparing for the big move." Central London would be inundated by water and the Parliament Buildings would have to be moved to higher ground. Many, if not most, Americans would move to Canada and not much of a rise in the sea level is required to wipe out Bangladesh from the face of the earth.
"Crackpot or visionary, the fact is that more and more people are paying attention to Lovelock, and that he, himself, supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the influential group who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former American vice president Al Gore for their campaigns on global warming."
A full-page article in the Toronto Star entitled "Grim prognosis for Earth: The World in 2050," almost echoes James Lovelock's grim predictions. 'It's a useful year to focus on,' Matthew Bramley, director of climate change at the Pembina Institute, which does environmental policy research, said in an interview from Ottawa. 'It's far enough away to be a year when real change is both necessary and possible.'
A subject that should be close to America's heart is BREEDING PERFECT STORMS: A Canadian researcher has demonstrated how global warming has widened the spawning grounds for hurricanes by hundreds of square kilometres since 1970, explaining for the first time why recent storm seasons have shattered one record after another. "Canadian researcher Robert Scott is the first to offer a physical explanation - backed up by statistics and measurements spanning decades - linking the Earth's warming to increased hurricane activity and intensity. Hurricanes are not entirely natural disasters. Humanity has had a discernible impact on hurricanes, Scott, a 40-year-old oceanographer at the University of Texas, said in an interview."
The sky-high cost of global warming witnessed following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, is just the tip of the global cost iceberg.
A lead editorial in the Toronto Globe and Mail had this to say about conclusions reached by Sir Nicholas Stern, the World Bank's former chief economist.
"A comprehensive study by Britain's top government economist has helped to fill that gap. It provides some hard truths about the enormous costs to the global economy if governments worldwide fail to take drastic measures to tackle the problem. It also provides an important counterweight to those who argue that such action would carry too high a price tag and pose too big an economic risk for an uncertain result.
"In fact, Stern argues that the opposite is true. It is doing too little too late that would have by far the more devastating impact on the global economy. He says that a weak global response to climate change in the next few decades could cause economic and social disruptions on a scale similar to those triggered by the world wars and the Great Depression, but at a far higher cost than all of them combined. He calculates that the cost in lost output could reach $7-trillion. What's worse, it will be hard, if not impossible, to reverse such changes."
The evidence of the effects of global warming are often dramatic and quite overwhelming. An article by Jessica Leeder in the Globe and Mail reported the reality of why the Inuit people are so concerned about their traditional habitat and hunting ground.
"A four-square-kilometre chunk has broken off Ward Hunt Ice Shelf - the largest remaining ice shelf in the Arctic - threatening the future of the giant frozen mass that northern explorers have used for years as the starting point for their treks.
"Scientists say the break, the largest on record since 2005, is the latest indication that climate change is forcing the drastic reshaping of the Arctic coastline, where 9,000 square kilometres of ice have been whittled down to less than 1,000 over the past century, and are only showing signs of decreasing further."
It appears that Antarctica is not immune from the global trend even though some weather stations, including the one at the South Pole, have recorded a cooling trend. This anomaly provided some comfort to the skeptics and contrarians. An article by Kenneth Chang entitled "Study Finds New Evidence Of Warming in Antarctica" gives a more comprehensive view.
"In the new study, scientists took into account satellite measurements to interpolate temperatures in the vast areas between the sparse weather stations.
"'We now see warming is taking place on all seven of the earth's continents in accord with what models predict as a response to greenhouses gases, said Eric J. Steig, a professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle,' the lead author of the paper published in the journal Nature, January 22, 2009."
One note of dissent comes from a Russian scientist, Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, who has been tracking the temperature on Mars and has noted an increase there. He attributes this to a long-term change in solar irradiance that is affecting both Earth and Mars. The implication, of course, is that the whole change is beyond our control and therefore there is no point in doing anything.
He may be correct that there is a natural increase that is beyond our control, but that is no excuse for ignoring the proven global warming effects that are due to our human lifestyles and the burning of fossil fuels in particular. The consensus of our best scientists is that we have a very significant measurable effect and that we could do something about it if we cared about the future habitability of our planet.
This "Let's take a chance and see what happens" attitude really bugs me. It reminds me of a time many years ago when I was bitten by a bat. I went to the doctor for advice. He said there was a probability that the bat did not have rabies, but on the other hand it might have. "How many people who have contracted rabies have lived?" I asked. "None yet," was his reply. Needless to say I was not wildly enthusiastic about playing Russian roulette with my life, so I took the shots.
An example that is more relevant for many people is the warning that increasing intensity of ultra violet radiation from the sun will certainly result in more skin cancer for those who allow themselves to get burned. Yet young people, in particular, pay no heed because the unhappy consequences may be decades away. This same generation routinely ignores the warning that listening to a lot of rock music is very likely to cause significant loss of hearing at an early age. But why worry because all that is somewhere in the distant future.
I was particularly incensed when I read "Enemy of the planet" by Paul Krugman. "Lee Raymond, the former chief executive officer of Exxon Mobil, was paid $686 million over 13 years. But that's not a reason to single him out for special excoriation. Executive compensation is out of control in corporate America as a whole, and unlike other grossly overpaid business leaders, Raymond can at least claim to have made money for his stockholders. There's a better reason to excoriate Raymond: For the sake of his company's bottom line, and perhaps his own personal enrichment, he turned Exxon Mobil into an enemy of the planet."
Though the company denies the allegations - naturally - Al Gore agrees with the critics. In an article headlined "Public misled, Gore says." "There has been an organized campaign, financed to the tune of about $10 million (U.S.) a year from some of the largest carbon polluters, to create the impression that there is disagreement in the scientific community (about global warming)," Gore warned at a forum in Singapore. "In actuality, there is very little disagreement.
"This is one of the strongest of scientific consensus views in the history of science," he said. "We live in a world where what used to be called propaganda now has a major role to play in shaping public opinion."
The propaganda continues. In March 2009 Andrew C. Revkin wrote that 600 self-professed climate skeptics were meeting in a Times Square hotel to challenge the widely held scientific and political consensus that humans are over-heating the planet. The sponsoring organization, according to the article that appeared in The New York Times, was the Heartland Institute.
A later article by Andrew Revkin headed "On Climate Issue, Industry Ignored Its Scientists" states that:
"For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming ...
"Environmentalists have long maintained that industry knew early on that the scientific evidence supported a human influence on rising temperatures, but that the evidence was ignored for the sake of companies' fight against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Some environmentalists have compared the tactic to that once used by tobacco companies, which for decades insisted that the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer was uncertain. By questioning the science on global warming, these environmentalists say, groups like the Global Climate Coalition were able to sow enough doubt to blunt public concern about a consequential issue and delay government action.
"George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, the industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had.
"'They didn't have to win the argument to succeed, Mr. Monbiot said, only to cause as much confusion as possible.'"
A few days before going to press the following Associated Press article appeared on the front page of the Toronto Star, "Greenhouse gases rise to record levels. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached record highs in 2008, the UN weather agency says. 'Concentration of greenhouse gases continued to increase, even a bit faster' than in previous years, Michel Jarraud, World Meteorological Organization chief, said Monday. Carbon dioxide was 385.2 parts per million, up 2 parts from 2007. Nitrous oxide increased by 0.9 parts per billion to 321.8. Methane was 1,797 parts per billion, up 7."
The facts are irrefutable and should convince anyone who is not in total denial. So I am obliged to come down heavily on the side of the environmentalists. I can understand the attitude of industries that profit from fossil fuels wanting to make as much money as they can for as long as they can, but they must not be allowed to get away with it. When the worship of mammon is weighed against the destruction of the planet as a friendly habitable biosphere it is "no contest." Life itself is more precious than any amount of money so no industry, no matter how paramount and profitable, can be allowed to continue as a prescription for certain death.
This is a message that had not yet gripped world leaders when they met in Copenhagen in December 2009. Most of the people I talked to were both sad and disillusioned by the bickering and my mind drifted to the story of the Roman Emperor Nero who fiddled on his violin while Rome burned. There was an alarming similarity between that story and an accord that is voluntary and non-binding in the face of great danger.
I was especially upset by the foot dragging of the Canadian delegation in a callous effort to put the interests of the oil industry ahead of global sustainability. Shame on us!
One can argue that the Copenhagen accord was a small step forward. The fact that so many world leaders actually met to consider and discuss what must be done to save our planet can be interpreted as positive. But as President Obama correctly observed, the accord was only a tentative step down a long road.
The poorer countries, in particular, felt let down and abandoned. The New York Times reported the summation of their spokesman as follows:
"Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, a Sudanese diplomat who has been representing the Group of 77 developing countries, denounced the accord. 'The developed countries have decided that damage to developing countries is acceptable,' he told reporters, noting that the 2-degree target 'will result in massive devastation to Africa and small island states.' He said many other vulnerable countries wanted a 1.5 degree target. Today's events, which really are a continuation of the history of the negotiations for the last two years, represent the worst development in climate change negotiations in history,' Mr. Lumumba said."
The inference is that the industrialized countries are willing to stand by and let the low-lying countries sink ignominiously into the sea. That doesn't have to happen. Mr. Lumumba's preferred 1.5 degree target is possible if the leaders of the industrialized countries would vigorously pursue the radical reforms necessary to make the miracle happen.
Three Essentials for Change
I have been giving considerable thought to the breadth and depth of change required to salvage a seemingly hopeless situation, and put planet earth on the road to recovery and its diverse inhabitants on a path of undeniable hope. It is a massive change that is required, an intellectual and moral revolution without precedent, leading to major action on many fronts.
There are three principal elements that come to mind. The first, and probably most urgent in some respects, is the availability of reliable sources of energy to replace the fossil fuels on which we have been relying for too long. There are, of course, some immediate steps that can be taken to reduce consumption. These include new skins on old high rise buildings that can dramatically reduce power consumption, better insulation for houses and low rise buildings, more fuel efficient cars and trucks and a drastic reduction in the use of military aircraft that are major contributors to carbon dioxide pollution. All of these things are good, and deserve urgent attention. But they pale in significance compared to the need for an exotic alternative to fossil fuels.
The second necessity is a world culture of cooperation in contrast with the traditional desire to dominate and rule supreme. This can only happen through leadership at all levels of government and industry that is more concerned about the welfare of all mankind and the future habitability of the planet than they are about accumulating power or wealth. In effect, men and women of high morality and unquestioned personal integrity.
The third requirement is a monetary and banking system that gives governments the financial flexibility to facilitate the transition from an oil economy to something quite different without undue hardship. I truly believe that such a system is possible because this is a subject that has engaged me all my adult life. I lament, therefore, that emerging from the worst financial crisis in decades, caused, once again, by an inherently unstable monetary and banking system, that there is not one government in the G20 group of countries that appears to have an inkling of what has to be done to prevent a recurrence. So this is a subject I will be addressing forcefully in a later chapter.
On the question of alternative fuels I claim no expertise. I have strong reason to believe, however, that exotic sources already exist, and remain secret. If this is the case, it would not be necessary to establish farms of unsightly and noisy windmills and install other systems that may be more expensive and less satisfactory. At least these alternatives should not be pursued until all the facts are known.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL by PAUL HELLYER Copyright © 2010 by Paul Hellyer . Excerpted by permission.
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