Some like it hot
By MICHAEL HARRIS -- For the Ottawa Sun
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
-- T.S. Eliot
When it rained in Pincher Creek, Alta., like the world was ending, it was a weather story.
It was the same thing when the residents of Lunenburg County got 502 millimeters of rain in May and 100 families had to evacuate their homes near Fancy Lake.
It is always the same whether the news item is a flood, a drought, or "the storm of the century" -- notable but disconnected vignettes, dramatic video on the laundry list of the evening news, weather stories.
But in a few weeks time, the high and mighty of this world will be reduced to weathermen. As the United Kingdom assumed the presidency of the G-8 in 2005, Prime Minister Tony Blair decided that global climate change is the most important subject in the world for the big boys when they gather at Gleneagles in Scotland.
There is much to talk about. The warmest 10 years on record have all been since 1990. Over the last 100 years, the temperature of the planet has risen .6 degrees Celsius. In the next century, the train really gets rolling. Earth's temperature will rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius as carbon dioxide emissions build. The experts not working for the fossil fuel industry all agree --the cause of this planetary fever is greenhouse gases produced by human beings burning fossil fuels for light, heat and the drive to work.
Although the U.S. signed on to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change that spawned Kyoto in 1995, it never adopted the Kyoto Accord. The results have been disastrous. Over a 12-year period beginning in 1990, carbon dioxide emissions in the United States have risen by 13%. That is more than the combined cut in emissions from countries that did ratify Kyoto, assuming that they actually hit their targets. With the G-8 countries benefiting from 65% of global Gross Domestic Product and responsible for 47% of world-wide CO2 emissions, Tony Blair is trying to make the U.S. hear the clarion call for universal action against global warming.
The United States once had a president who posed the prosaic question: "Has anyone seen acid rain?" It now has one who says that the science on global warming is unclear. It is weapons of mass destruction all over again, except this time the facts are truly humiliating for the president and the folks back home aren't shy about expressing them.
The national science academies of all G-8 nations, as well as those of Brazil, India and China, have issued a pre-Gleneagles statement calling on President Bush and his G-8 colleagues to take urgent action to avoid a global catastrophe caused by climate change. The fact that the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences has signed the statement is unprecedented (they declined to do so in 2001) and leaves the president's assertions about the uncertainty of the scientific evidence begging the question.
If the president isn't getting his facts from the world scientific community, where is he getting them from? Recently released documents from the state department -- briefing notes to U.S. under-secretary of state, Paula Dobriansky, between 2001 and 2004, reveal the Bush Administration thanking Exxon executives for the company's "active involvement" in helping to determine climate change policy. In fact, the documents show that hydro-carbon giant ExxonMobil, the largest U.S. corporation with a value of $379 billion, told the Administration that joining Kyoto "would be unjustifiably drastic and premature."
Shaping energy policy by siding with the world's largest producer of fossil fuels may be good power politics and good short-term economics but it is hardly scientific. Here's what the scientists have found. Ironically, the first scientist to measure the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide around planet Earth was an American. In 1958, Charles Keeling found 315 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere. Just after Russia ratified Kyoto in 2004, a mere 48 years after Keeling's measurements atop an extinct volcano in Hawaii, that number had increased to 377 ppm.
To the scientists, the writing is in the atmosphere. Lord May of Oxford, the president of Britain's Royal Society, wasn't angling for a trip to Crawford Ranch with his take on what George Bush must do next month. "The current U.S. policy on climate change is misguided ... Never before have we faced such a global threat ... President Bush has an opportunity at Gleneagles to signal that his administration will no longer ignore the scientific evidence and act to cut emissions."
On the other hand, ExxonMobil is busy making other calculations and besides, who has seen parts per million of anything? Getting greenhouse gassed is surely death by whimper rather than bang, a very easy thing to ignore, like the sea rising an inch per century. Between the highland grouse, the whisky-tastings, a joint of Angus beef finished off with Dundee cake, and maybe even a few holes on the "Wee Course," it will be very tempting to talk about the weather rather than do anything about it.
There's always tomorrow, right?
