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GLOBAL WARMING COMES TO COAL COUNTRY: THE SYMPTOMS
Winter in West Virginia lasted less than two months this year. That could just be a fluke, but globally, eleven of the last twelve years have been the hottest on record, with later winters and earlier springs. There are severe droughts out West, with whole forests dying. Forest fires are worse and more frequent. It’s the same for much of the world. The US is producing less food. Not a fluke: for five out of the last six years the world has produced less food than was consumed, depleting food reserves. We hosted some Katrina evacuees last September; severe weather and floods have increased around the world and the numbers of refugees from these disasters are climbing. Also, due to global warming and habitat destruction, we’re undergoing the Earth’s sixth mass extinction. Our global fisheries will be wiped out by mid-century. Island countries are being submerged by rising seas, and the Dutch are developing floating architecture. The denial industry, funded by the fossil fuel industry, says the current warming is just another routine fluctuation caused by variations in solar energy reaching Earth. Although there are cyclic variations in solar irradiance of Earth, they can’t account for this much warming. We know from radioisotope analyses of annual ice layers in Greenland and Antarctica that temperatures are the highest in more than 600,000 years. Our species is only 120,000 years old, so we’ve never experienced this before. Over all that time, carbon dioxide (CO2) and temperature have varied in parallel. Carbon isotope analysis of tree rings, which provide a sample of atmospheric CO2 over the life of a tree, shows that today’s excess carbon above preindustrial levels is millions of years old - the age of carbon in fossil fuels. There’s no other source of ancient carbon (such as volcanic eruptions) that can account for it. We know from satellite studies how much heat is trapped by atmospheric CO2. Quantitative studies show that the amount of fossil fuel we’ve burned since the industrial revolution accounts for the excess CO2, and the excess CO2 accounts for the warming. Over 2500 scientists from all over the world on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are unanimous in their conclusion that our fossil fuel use is behind global warming. Ice all over the world is melting, including Arctic and Antarctic ice that hasn’t melted since before we appeared on Earth. Increasing energy consumption is causing greenhouse emissions to skyrocket. We have little time left to turn this around, before Earth becomes a wholly different planet - probably without any people. If we had responded appropriately to the 2001 IPCC report, we could be turning this around by 2010, at lower cost than the Iraq war, brought to us by - you guessed it - the fossil fools running our state and national governments. Now it will be much more expensive or impossible. Some states, those that are switching to renewable, non-carbon energy sources, will do relatively well. States that stick with carbon fuels will do poorly, because soon there will be no demand for carbon. Which way do you think West Virginia will go?
Paul Brown is a professor of physiology at West Virginia University and author of Notes from a Dying Planet, 2004 - 2006.
Paul Brown Physiology Department West Virginia University Health Sciences Center Morgantown, WV 26506 (304) 293 - 1512