But that is not the way some countries look at global warming –
China is building more power plants and producing more energy-
intensive commodities, India is building more power plants and
1
producing small cars that more of its people will be able to afford to
buy and use, American TV soon will become large enough to be able
to depict real life-size objects on the screen and which will consume
enormous amounts of power, etc.
2
The question arises why we should care whether the coral reefs grow
or not. They cover only about 0.1% of the earth’s surface. Compared
to the world’s rain forests, that is miniscule. But several very
significant considerations are involved in the survival of the corals:
1. Biodiversity – in this context, the coral reefs are the rain forests of
the ocean. Nobody knows for sure, but scientists conjecture that
there are about 1 million to 9 million species that reside in the coral.
If the reefs disappear, about half the species that live there may also
disappear.
3
The cascading effects of global warming on the natural world have
already been put into action. It has been found that global climate
change in Yellowstone National Park has affected the park’s animals
and plants in ways that raise questions about their survival. As an
example, consider the whitebark pine beetles. Before bears start their
hibernation phase, they attempt to fatten themselves up by
consuming the nuts or seeds from whitebark pines.
This is not all. As the drought and the early snowpack melting create
abnormally hot summertime conditions, the chances of intense
megafires increase, along with its frequency of occurrence.
Another warning from Mother Nature again comes from the sea.
There exists a mysterious oyster blight in which the young are dying
as the water along the Pacific Coast of the U.S. gets warmer.
4
For decades, the hatcheries on the Pacific Coast have enjoyed a
tremendous crop of delicious oysters – such oysters resulting from
the genetic modification and selection by scientists. The oyster
bonanza that followed led it to be the number one aquaculture crop
in the world, 4.5 million tons a year valued at about 3 billion dollars.
With selective breeding and genetic ‘fingerprinting’, the scientists
were working hard to develop a super species of oysters resistant to
the summer mortality, trying to keep one step ahead of a warmer and
more polluted planet.
5
nutrients. When oysters disappear, as they did in Chesapeake Bay,
an estuary’s water can turn murky and foul.
A few months ago, a mysterious ailment wiped out almost all of the
harvest for Europe’s biggest producer and consumer of oysters, the
French. Oysters generally live 2 to 3 years, which means that the
French will have oysters this winter and the next, but it will be a
different story in the year 2010.
6
person; for example, last February about 150 square miles of
Antarctica’s Wilkens Ice Shelf disintegrated. In this context,
comments by NASA’s principal scientist James Hansen are highly
significant: “Our home planet is dangerously near a tipping point
where human-made greenhouse gases reach a level where major
climate changes can proceed mostly under their own momentum…
the upshot of the combination of inertia and feedbacks is that
additional climate change is already in the pipeline; even if we stop
increasing greenhouse gases today, more warming will occur.” The
present CO2 level in the atmosphere, about 385 ppm, may already
induce the atmosphere to cross into dangerous territory. The inertia
is primarily endemic to the system. However, if the feedback
parameters could be controlled via controlling the injection rate of
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, then it is perhaps likely that
one may be able to prevent the system from reaching the irreversible
tipping point.
The Future
But let us not forget the pursuing Coyote! Powerful forces have to
come into play to turn the Coyote, the political juggernaut, around.
7
Many experts have indicated a number of vital steps, which at the
very least are absolutely necessary in the short run. We mention
some of these essential steps:
All this is very possible. But in the U.S., with the highest per capita
consumption in the world, how much can we do, especially during a
time when the president of the country is urging more oil digging in
ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), where the word ‘sacrifice’
reminds one of ‘sucker’, where words like ‘gas-tax holiday’ have
entered the popular vocabulary, where power consumption is not
only high but getting higher every year (an average family of 4 in San
Diego today uses about 500 KWH of electricity per month!), and
where the sense of happiness is directly proportional to the diagonal
dimension of the TV screen. In such a situation, what can one do?
We can do a lot. But we have to have a collective movement – we
don’t have enough time to consider the “one bulb at a time”
approach. And there is no one magic solution that will cure all. On
the contrary, all solutions and approaches that can be meaningful
must be used.
8
develop a “collective consciousness”, a grass-roots universal effort.
Perhaps this is our best hope, but do you think there will be time for
such things, maybe between video games and watching porn on the
internet?
D. K. Bhadra
8/22/08