Apocalypse now
Toolbox
Published: June 28, 2006
Apocalyptic thinking became familiar during the Cold War when Americans understood that a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union could end civilized life, or all human life. We learned the phrase "nuclear winter," the near lifeless condition that would prevail following a nuclear war when grasses and cockroaches might be among the only surviving species of life.
The threat of nuclear apocalypse was real and believable. It was real enough that both superpowers built up powerful arsenals as deterrents, in the hoping of averting disaster. And it was believable because rockets and bombs were tangible threats whose destructiveness was well understood.
Once again we are confronting a potential apocalypse, but we have been slow to understand the threat. Global warming has the potential to destroy civilizations and to effect the extinction of life on a massive scale. It would not happen in an instant, and it would not arrive in the nose cone of a rocket. But the process is under way, and in a decade's time it may be too late to reverse it.
This is the conclusion one draws from an article by Jim Hansen in the latest New York Review of Books. Hansen is the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University's Earth Institute. In the 1970s he was one of the first to predict the process of global warming, and his predictions have been more than borne out by the facts. He is one of the most highly respected scientists studying the question, and he continues to speak out despite efforts of the Bush administration to silence him.
He notes that there have been several mass extinctions in periods when the climate warmed by 10 degrees. By mass extinctions he means an occasion when 50 to 90 percent of all species of life was wiped out. The last one occurred 55 million years ago.
The warming of the earth now threatens many species of animals and plants. Plants and animals are migrating north and south in order to stay within a climate that will support them. But warming climate is spreading north and south away from the equator faster than many species are able to migrate. Hansen says that if mankind continues its present course, we may be facing a mass extinction like the one 55 million years ago.
Who can predict what would happen to human civilization if the web of plant and animal life upon which we depended were disrupted to that extent? What would happen to crops? What if bees became extinct? There would be no more apples, perhaps no more fruit.
Hansen says that mankind's present course would raise the atmosphere by five degrees Fahrenheit during this century. He says the last time the earth was that warm was 3 million years ago, and because the polar glaciers had melted, and for other reasons, the oceans were 80 feet higher than at present.
In that event, the United States would lose Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Miami, and most of the East Coast. Fifty million people in the United States now live below that higher sea level. In China there would be 250 million displaced people, he says. Almost all of Bangladesh would be lost, creating 120 million refugees.
It is impossible to conceive of such upheavals without acknowledging the likelihood of terrible wars as overstressed societies compete for resources and respond to trauma by resort to tyranny. If this upheaval were accompanied by failing agriculture, who knows what kind of apocalyptic scenario might ensue?
These are not fantasies. These are projections based on hard data by the best scientists in the world. Hansen says there is an alternative to what he calls the business-as-usual strategy. It is possible for human society to decrease reliance on fossil fuels and to impose new efficiencies on utilities, factories and homes, and to develop new technologies that will decrease the emission of gases that are causing the atmosphere to warm. If the alternative strategy were adopted, the atmosphere would warm by less than 2 degrees. The mass disintegration of the polar glaciers could be averted. He says we have about 10 years to put this alternative scenario into place. We are not doing it yet. But we had better start.
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