Global Warming: The Scientific Lowdown
Signs of the Times?
The end of the world. Everywhere, there is waft speculation about it. We can’t get horrified enough of it, and perhaps during these times, rightly so. Is it coming? Even the most haunting blockbusters can’t compare to the urgent slate of headlines that jolt us back to reality every morning. This time, the most disastrous tragedies are materializing right before our eyes, and this is no creative Hollywood stint. This is frighteningly real.
One calamity has come rocking our boat one after the other. A slingshot view of the past few years alone should be telling enough. There was the great Iranian earthquake of 2003 that took at least 15,000 unsuspecting lives. Exactly a year later came the tsunami off the coast of Indonesia that consumed more than 120,000 and rendered even greater numbers homeless and orphaned. Entire cities built in the course of decades and centuries were reduced to crumble in a few fleeting moments. Tropical storms have been surging in intensity, the ultimate illustration being the sheer immensity of destruction left behind by Hurricane Katrina in the southeastern U.S. In October 2005, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake shook Pakistan and claimed over 18,000 more lives. More recently was the earthquake in Indonesia with a death toll topping 5,400, a deadly incidence tied to the impending volcanic activity of Mt. Merapi. What with the sudden onset of the SARS outbreak and now the threat of bird flu – -pestilence, calamity, catastrophe – -the air of impending death hangs eerily over our reality. We can’t help but be haunted by a morose sense of helplessness as the grandeur of nature’s wrath comes crashing onto the human spirit. This time, we are tellingly vulnerable, and we know it. Did we spell our own doom?
Mother Nature could not have made her pleas better heard and finally, the world is paying attention. And so we have an unlikely movie with an unlikely star on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival: slick runner-up to George W. Bush’s 2000 U.S. electoral upset, Al Gore. Defying expectations, the global-warming centered documentary An Inconvenient Truth is raking in audiences, winning sympathizers to his cause and showing initial signs of success in converting an oil-obsessed, greenhouse-gas-emitting culture into an energy-smart, earth-conscious one. Indeed, the long-standing crusade against global warming has come a long way.
Warming Up The Ecological Skillet
Scientists have long suggested that the emergence of bizarre weather patterns and its encroaching consequences are linked to the phenomenon of global warming. In the face of disastrous times, people have only recently begun to believe that this global warming issue may actually be at the hinges of our modern tragedy. Since the 1970s for example, ocean and atmospheric temperatures have gone up by 0.5Ã?°C. If that doesn’t sound so alarming to you, think again. Warm waters are the breeding ground of hurricanes and tropical depressions, and the higher the temperatures, the more water vapor in the atmosphere to fuel a killer storm. A study published in the journal Nature late last year found that while there is no considerable upsurge in the total number of hurricanes spawned in the North Atlantic and North Pacific for the past 56 years, their intensities have spiked by a whooping 50% since the 1970s. It doesn’t take an expert to scale the damage inflicted by unforgiving storms and monsoons of late. Monstrous floods have crept up ‘most everywhere around the globe and yet it is ironic that surface areas ravaged by abnormally hot spells and droughts have jumped more than two-fold since the 1970s, as reported by the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. The more frequent and severe incidence of El NiÃ?±o-the flow of warm ocean currents that formerly took place every 5 years-has meant droughts in Australia and Papua New Guinea, delayed monsoons in Southeast Asia, threatening floods in parts of North and South America, and savage wildfires in Asia and the Americas.
Surely, the rapid firing of CO2 levels in the atmosphere has played a vital hand in accelerating global warming. CO2 is carbon dioxide, a colorless greenhouse gas that traps atmospheric heat, responsible for warming the earth’s surface and making the planet habitable. In recent years though, human activity-the burning of fossil fuels bearing the brunt-has caused atmospheric CO2 to spike up to dangerously noxious levels. Today, it stands at 381 parts per million (ppm), a hefty 100 ppm above pre-industrial levels. Last year alone accounted for a record rise of 2.6 ppm and the rate of increase is accelerating, doubling from only 30 years ago. Already, the Arctic region is registering record increases in temperature and since 1979, the summer polar ice cap area has shrunk by 20%. If this holds up, summers in the Arctic pole would be ice-free at the close of the century. The International Panel on Climate Change estimates that the sea will rise anywhere between 6 to 37 inches by 2100 due to thermal expansion of the ocean and the melting of ice sheets. If this does happen, the consequences would be catastrophic, with entire nations like the Maldives and the Netherlands and low-lying cities like Shanghai, Lagos and coastal parts of the U.S. obliterated from the map. While the earth’s frozen poles have been found to reflect over 90% of incident sunlight, keeping the surface cool, ocean waters, by contrast, absorb just as much heat, further feeding the voracious cycle of warming. Heat waves are more ubiquitous and the last decade holds the five warmest years ever recorded since the late 19th century, with the hottest being 2005.
As the environment changes, habitats are destroyed. A 2004 study published by the journal Nature predicted that climate change could drive upwards of a million species of plants and animals to extinction by 2050. Already, the signs are evident. Polar bears in the Arctic cap are resorting to cannibalistic behavior, hunting down smaller bears for food because the drastic thawing of Arctic ice has rendered regular sources of food-primarily ringed seals-inaccessible. Many migratory bird species are dwindling in numbers. These birds fly back to their nesting areas at precise time periods but the premature onset of spring in these places caused by global warming means that when the hatchlings are finally born, their food supply is already significantly gone. Rising temperatures, on the other hand, have made some species abnormally successful, rupturing nature’s delicate ecological balance. The spruce bark beetle is reproducing so rapidly that from 1993-2003, it has chewed up an alarming 3.4 million acres of Alaskan forests.
Global Warming and You
Aside from the massive economic loss inflicted by global warming, we humans pay a dearer price for the destruction of nature’s rhythms: our health. A study published in Nature in 2004 suggests that global warming is tied to the European killer heat wave of 2003 that netted a death toll of over 50,000. Higher temperatures increase the risk for those with heart ailments, overworking the cardiovascular system to cool down the body. Warmer air also increases ozone concentrations in the lower atmosphere with hazardous implications. At high altitudes, ozone is a protective blanket from the sun’s ultraviolet rays but direct exposure to ozone damages lung tissue and inflicts respiratory diseases. Massive flooding also threatens to adulterate the water quality of cities. Sewage waters can overflow into reservoirs and waterborne diseases are apt to become more prevalent. A study at the University of Michigan has suggested a correlation between the severity of outbreaks of such diseases as cholera to rising surface water temperatures of the Pacific. In 1991, cholera surfaced in South America for the first time in the last century.
As highlands in Africa, the Andes in South America and the Alps in Europe warm up at aggressive rates, mosquitoes and other disease-carrying pests are now starting to invade these higher altitudes. This has by far accelerated the spread of diseases once unheard of in certain areas. The West Nile virus, for one, was virtually unheard of in North America until it struck seven years ago, its death toll considerably spiking up during warmer years. Dengue-carrying Asian tiger mosquitoes can now be found all the way in the Netherlands and the World Health Organization has found that warming induced the dramatic spread of malaria from a mere 3 to 13 western districts in Kenya, including the capital city of Nairobi, 1,680 m well above sea level. Paul Epstein, a Harvard Medical School faculty pines over an initial lack of concern about the effects of climate change: “Things we projected to occur in 2080 are happening in 2006. What we didn’t get is how fast and how big it is, and the degree to which the biological systems would respond. Our mistake was in underestimation.”
The impacts of global warming have never been felt as resoundingly as they are now. Climate crusaders have been reaching successes at heights they’ve never dreamt of-calling awareness to the enormity of the problem, pressuring governments and private firms to cut back on emissions, lobbying for the development of cleaner and more efficient energy sources, and pushing for the advancement of greener technologies. The sheer destructive power of human greed has looted the earth and ravaged it at such a grand scale that it only took less than a century to devastate what took Mother Nature millions of years to painstakingly grow and nurture.
Who are we to think that we can restore the damage we inflicted in a few years, or even a few decades? Maybe now, as our world edges closer to the finish line, we’d realize that it’s not a ring of rumbling volcanoes or a wave of imminent meteor showers that are the biggest threat to our existence-we are. After all, where would we be without the one planet in the universe that we can call home?
