| Further, every delay in reducing emissions increases the likelihood of a worst case scenario at the high end of IPCC scientists' 2007 predictions. Those predictions themselves were based on older data that may have underestimated the rate of ocean temperature changes and expansion, with observed effects occurring as much as 30 years ahead of schedule. Emissions have begun rising so fast just since 2002 that the world would need to be carbon-neutral by mid-century in order to have a hope of stabilizing it within its current range.
A warming of 5.1°Celsius by the end of the century is likely, with one in eleven odds of 7°C (12.6°F) warming in the next ninety years. Why? Because we've already reached the 'bad' range of 450 parts per million of CO2 equivalents in the atmosphere and some scientists are worried that we might hit 1000 ppm and face truly unpredictable devastation.
Just the five degree scenario is no great shakes:
... A "five degree world" -- well within the range of IPCC predictions -- would cause an almost unimaginable level of disruption and suffering.
The last time Earth was four or five degree hotter than it is now, some 30 million years ago, alligator-like creatures navigated swampy primeval forests at the North Pole.
"Sea levels, in the long run, would rise by 50 meters. You would have to redraw the map of Europe," and every other continent, said John Schellnhuber, director of the Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
"The carrying capacity of the planet would fall to one billion people or less," Schellnhuber told the conference. ...
This is not a future where we'd get to wonder where to put 3 billion more people. We could end the century with only a sixth as many human beings as there are today.
Do you think it's possible, just a little bit, that this could have national security implications that go beyond Carafano's meanderings about "the impact of rules and regulations nations are adopting to combat green house gases"?
Well in any case, the military thinks so. In 2004, a flurry of sensationalist headlines obscured the very real point that the Pentagon under the Bush administration was war-gaming abrupt climate change out of concern for the implications of there being more natural disasters and less food.
That military analysis presupposed that the thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic would shut down in the event of warming, causing a minor Ice Age in Europe and significant disruption elsewhere. It might not happen like that. But more disasters, less food; locusts could be responsible and it wouldn't make it safer to be living on a planet with millions more hungry, sometimes well-armed people.
Did I mention that report was out in 2004? Carafano would have his readers believe that it's only last year that radicals in Congress directed the Pentagon to pay attention to climate change. That's not the only place where his history falls down.
... Trying to turn back the global thermostat may lead to wider, more destructive violence, making our national security problems worse, not better. Remember the lesson of 1973.
By 1973, he refers to the OPEC embargo as precipitated by the Arab-Israeli war of the same year. (I think he was mainly looking for an excuse to call scientists and activists "climate-change sheiks." Mission accomplished.) It's just that the actual war wasn't caused by a price spike that everyone understood to be artificial.
Carafano's cause-and-effect switch seems to lead him to point out altering the price of polluting fuel as the chief evil. This assessment isn't shared by the federally-funded Center for Naval Analyses, a public research group that's also previously examined security and climate issues, and whose work he's referenced before when it suited him better.
A panel of generals and admirals CNA worked with just released a report saying that the country has about a decade to get its act together on climate change and curbing emissions because the impacts of changing weather and resource scarcity pose a serious national security threat. Mr. Carafano would apparently prefer us to take his word over theirs, in spite of the fact that the military is already walking some of its talk and planning to cut its carbon emissions 30 percent by 2015.
It's fair to point out that the climate might not warm to 5 degrees Celsius, that we might not hit 1000 ppm of carbon dioxide equivalents, that the Earth's carrying capacity might not be reduced to less than a sixth of what it is now. We can't know what the future holds for sure.
Yet we can make reasonable guesses about the likely outcomes of a given behavior. Like this: if you put your hand on a hot stove, you'll get burned.
Are we smart enough to get ourselves out of this mess, to keep our hand off that stove? I hope so. If we're to avoid it, we need the best minds in every sector of society working on how to do so instead of saying, as Carafano would have it, 'That isn't my job.' |
STATE BLOGS
