The Climate Crisis

Worse, Sooner

The much anticipated Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is due to be released in early February. Early word on it was that this panel of several thousand climate scientists would scale back on earlier predictions. After all, there are bound to be a lot of differences among thousands of scientists, and the report is a consensus document.

But according to the Observer in the UK, based on a draft report, the conclusions are quite the opposite. The Climate Crisis is going to be worse, and sooner:

"...the frequency of devastating storms - like the ones that battered Britain last week - will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

The impact will be catastrophic, forcing hundreds of millions of people to flee their devastated homelands, particularly in tropical, low-lying areas, while creating waves of immigrants whose movements will strain the economies of even the most affluent countries."

The New York Times has a similiar story, adding that the report states "that it is more than 90 percent likely that global warming since 1950 has been driven mainly by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and that more warming and rising sea levels are on the way."

The report is likely to put the Climate Crisis on the front pages in February and high on the agendas of European governments, where weather effects have been stark and unrelenting. There's been some talk that Bush's State of the Union next week will offer new federal U.S. initiatives, and that such apparent new directions on the Climate Crisis, health care and other "domestic" issues will be used to deflect attention from Bush's universally condemned Iraq policy. But others believe Iraq will still dominate the speech, the coverage and the political debate.

The Observer article quotes one scientist as saying there is still time to act. But the time is getting shorter to effectively organize responses to inevitable effects in this decade and the next several decades, and to stop the causes that will lead to catastrophic and perhaps civilization-ending effects a little further in the future. We're playing from behind, where apparently we've been keeping our heads.