Future Hope column, August 17, 2005
Needed: A Global Survival Movement
By Ted Glick

“Given the urgency and magnitude of the escalating pace of climate change, the only hope lies in a rapid and unprecedented mobilization of humanity around this issue. . . that some spark might ignite a massive uprising of popular will around a unifying movement for social survival and the promise it holds for a more prosperous, more equitable, and more peaceful world.”
            -Ross Gelbspan, Boiling Point

There is no cause, no issue, no crisis more significant and more immediate than the crisis of global warming. There is a very real prospect that, absent a deep and broad clean energy revolution, we will see within our lifetimes a massive disruption of human society throughout the world—above and beyond the widespread structural injustice and poverty that already exists—via floods, major storms, rising sea levels, large-scale refugee movements, droughts, deforestation and a major decline in food production. More and more people in the United States are coming to realize this.

Why, then, are the many different actions being taken in the U.S. about this crisis, important as they are, so minimal when compared to the urgency?

One reason is certainly the scope of the issue. With global warming we are dealing with a problem that is not just international in scope; it is also intertwined with the basic functioning of our economic system, currently dependent upon fossil fuels--oil, coal and natural gas--for the production of needed energy to power our cars and computers, to light our buildings and streets, to provide heat in the winter and to make possible a number of other products and processes that are essential to modern civilization as we know it. Absent the knowledge that there are many concrete steps that can be taken to dramatically reduce fossil fuel consumption and therefore greenhouse gas emissions without any significant effect on these social and economic processes, and absent the hope that our government is willing to seriously address this issue, it’s understandable that people feel helpless.

This is related, of course, to corporate control of our mass media and the influence within the corporatized economy of energy companies like Exxon Mobil. Information about the escalating seriousness of the climate crisis is underreported or underplayed, and there is even less information provided about the viability of clean energy alternatives like wind and solar and the potentially huge impact of serious energy conservation and energy efficiency standards if they were built into the way in which our economy functions. Much of the information that people get on this and other crucial issues comes via the internet, alternative media, word of mouth or other less-extensive sources.

Then there is the “competition” of issues like the war in Iraq, the health care crisis, problems with our schools, polluting sprawl and other environmental problems, police brutality and a racially-discriminatory legal system, violence against women and more. These issues are important, and they also tend to affect people more directly on a day-to-day basis, which makes them more immediate in people’s consciousness and therefore more natural focuses for popular organizing.

But probably the major reason why we have seen little overt activism--demonstrations in the streets, sit-ins, mass lobbying campaigns and the like—on global warming is because it has only been in the last few years that the scientists who have been studying this issue are realizing and reporting that there is an alarming increase in the rate at which global warming is taking place and that the window is closing during which time human action has a chance of averting a massive world catastrophe.

We are literally faced with a race against time, as indicated by these facts:

The Evidence
-Virtually every single glacier on the planet is receding noticeably and dramatically. According to Paul Epstein of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University, 43% of the Arctic sea ice has disappeared in the last 40 years. In a recent interview Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), spoke about the melting of the glaciers in the Himalayas on which 1 billion people are dependent for water. The IPCC is made up of approximately 2,000 scientists from around the world and has been studying this issue since 1989.

-The melting of the Arctic sea ice could lead to a shutting down of the Gulf Stream so that it no longer continues up the Atlantic coast and across the Atlantic Ocean to northwest Europe. This could lead to an average temperature drop in that area of 10 degrees and the devastation of European agriculture. And because the Gulf Stream is like an engine powering what is called the “Great Ocean Conveyor,” a current which winds through all the world’s oceans, its disruption would probably lead to additional weather havoc throughout the world.

-According to Ross Gelbspan in his book, Boiling Point: “In 2001, researchers at the Hadley Center, Britain’s main climate research institute, found that the climate will change 50 percent more quickly than was previously assumed. . . When they factored in the warming that has already taken place, they found that the rate of change is compounding. Their projections show that many of the world’s forests will begin to turn from sinks (vegetation that absorbs carbon dioxide) to source (vegetation that releases carbon dioxide). . . by around 2040.”

-According to an article in the August 11th, 2005 Guardian newspaper in England, “A vast expanse of western Siberia is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warn today. Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. . . The area is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying ‘tipping points’ – delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures.”

-A recent report indicates that, because of ocean warming, there has been a significant decrease in the number of fish and sea birds off the coast of the Pacific northwest due to an estimated reduction of ¾ of the plankton that is normally available for fish to feed on.

-Climate Change News, an email publication of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, reported that, “Retreat rates of Greenland’s glaciers are substantially increasing, according to a BBC video-interview of a NASA research team.  The team has been monitoring this area from Iceland and satellites.  NASA Scientist Jay Zwally said, ‘The alarming aspect of this is the increase in melting and the effect of warmer temperatures on the thinning ice.  It’s a really dramatic change and it’s picked up in the last 5 to 10 years.  Before that, things were relatively stable but now we’re seeing the effect of climate change kicking in.’ Daily, enough ice calves off of one large glacier in Greenland to supply water to New York City for a year. In the past five years, a section the size of a small city has melted from this glacier, contributing to sea level rise.”

-Taking these types of developments into account, an international task force reporting to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and co-chaired by his close ally, Stephen Byers, concluded in early 2005 that we could reach “the point of no return in a decade.”

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