| This much is certain: at some point in the future, all life on Earth will cease to exist. Over the next billion years or so, the Sun will follow the life-cycle of all stars and continue to increase in brightness. In the process, it will superheat our planet, boil away all the oceans and thereby kill the planet.
On the off-chance that any form of being should survive, within a few more billion years the Sun will expand to nearly 200 times its present size and swallow up Mercury, Venus and probably Earth as it transforms into a "Red Giant." Maybe 4 billion years after that, it will collapse in on itself to become a "White Dwarf," bringing to an end the entire solar system as we know it.
We’ll all be dead by then, so this prospect is no cause for any real concern. However, the release of a report last week by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that our end may be much nearer.
Among its many conclusions, the IPCC declared that heat-waves, storms and droughts will continue to escalate in frequency and intensity; that the Gulf Stream that warms Europe will slow by as much as 25 per cent; that average global temperatures will be two to four degrees higher by 2100 than at present; and by that time, sea levels will have risen by maybe half a metre.
Perhaps more significant than all this, the IPPC concluded that there could no longer be any – well, much – doubt that we’ve brought all this upon ourselves. The changes in global climate that have occurred since the end of the Second World War were "very likely" the product of our collective polices and practices, specifically our dependence on fossil fuels.
Despite this unequivocal declaration, there will doubtless be those who resist the report’s findings. Already, die-hard skeptics of global warming hypotheses have picked up on the fact that these latest findings were less dire than the IPCC’s previous warnings. For example, the fact that the IPCC slightly scaled back its prediction for global temperature increases over the next century has led some doubters to argue that "the consequences of warmer worldwide weather will be minor and may be beneficial." In short, the sky is not falling after all, there’s no need to panic.
Ultimately, however, there is now little more point in dragging out the debate over climate change than there is in continuing to challenge the basic tenets of evolutionary theory. "No matter which way the dice fall," writes Gale Christianson in Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming, "it is science and not personal conviction that will have the last word."
In the event that debate is likely to continue, is it even possible to conduct an objective discussion of this subject? I think so, as long as some basic guidelines are established. For example, any such debate might begin by addressing the following four key propositions:
· that so-called "global warming" is a proven fact
· that past human actions contributed to – if not caused – global warming
· that present and future human actions can stop and even reverse the process of global warming
· that we should take such actions to reverse global warming
Obviously, if you deny the very existence of the subject under debate, then there’s no point in moving on to the next proposition. For what it’s worth, even former skeptic Stephen Harper now appears to accept global warming as proven. "I think the science is clear that these changes are occurring," he said last week, "they’re serious and we must act."
The precise role played by humans over the past 250 years in producing climate change is more open to question, I suspect, as any number of factors play a part in shaping the climate. But the IPCC is pretty certain, all the same, that there is a greater than 90 per cent certainty that all the fossil fuel burned in the cause of western industrialization led directly to global warming.
This leads to the third proposition. On the principle that if you’ve dug yourself into a hole, the first thing to do is to throw away the shovel, then it would seem obvious that lessening our dependency on carbon-based energy is a necessary first step to take. But is ceasing to contribute to a problem the same thing as finding a solution? In other words, will stopping what got us into this jam get us out of it?
Even if you do accept the first three propositions, does the fourth follow as a logical consequence? Countries in the industrialized west that have benefited from two centuries of unfettered economic growth could easily afford to impose an overall reduction in the standard of living on their populations in order to meet even the minimum recommendations of the decade-old Kyoto Accord. However, is it fair to impose such measures on other countries – that is, on the bulk of humanity – that have yet to reach western levels of production and consumption? From our advantage position, do we have the right, in 2007, to set a global agenda that forever more will freeze the fate of the relatively poor?
It’s a tough question. In the event that we do not, as a species, act sooner than later, there is already a growing body of literature that warns us of our immediate fate. In recent years, a number of books have spelled out the cost of inaction, such as Martin Rees’s Our Final Hour and Michael Boulton’s Extinction: Evolution and the End of Man.
Perhaps most chilling is Richard Moran’s Doomsday: End-of-the-World Scenarios, which includes graphic descriptions of the likely impact of global warming and an imminent new ice age. (In case such contrary prospects appear to be mutually exclusive, Moran provides a clear explanation of how they are part of the same historical pattern.)
For example, birds are highly vulnerable to climate change and associated loss of habitat. Each year birds consume trillions of insects; any dramatic decline in bird population would likely result in Biblical plagues of mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches, ants, bees, wasps and locusts swarming our homes and workplaces, rendering normal life impossible. Damage to crops would be immeasurable, triggering worldwide food shortages.
But such warnings are not new. More than a century ago, H.G. Wells depicted the ultimate fate of the Earth in his novel The Time Machine. At one point, the narrator flings himself millions of years into the future. What he finds is a world inhabited only by monster crab-like creatures and huge misshapen insects. Moving ahead further still, the crabs have gone leaving only green liverworts and lichens. "All the sounds of man," the traveller writes, "the bleating of sheep, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over."
If the scientists who penned last week’s IPCC report are wrong, then who knows what the future has in store. If they’re right, however, we can’t say that we haven’t been warned. |
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