Just you wait

Don't like the weather?

by Walter Crockett

As I write, on Friday morning April 10, this has been the most beautiful spring in memory. Five consecutive days of balmy weather forced the forsythias to flare yellow early and nudged the lilac leaves out of bud.

As you read this, sometime after Thursday morning, April 16, the streets may still be bursting with blossom, or a foot of snow may be trampling tulips, breaking branches, and launching TV news anchors into tedious rants about the horrible "white stuff."

Spring has never been normal in New England, but these days the weather is just plain wacky. Global warming is here -- and whether we do something about it or not, things are going to get worse. The only question is how much worse we're going to let them get.

"Global warming, global shwarming," you may reply. "Last year we had a major snowstorm on April Fools Day."

Snowstorms in April and hailstorms in July don't mean the world isn't overheating, but they sure make it hard for the public to take the problem seriously. When the global oven heats up, it doesn't cook you evenly like a tanning booth -- it bakes some people and chills others, scatters thunderstorms here, droughts there and tornadoes elsewhere. The weather, in short, becomes thoroughly unpredictable. And since the weather has always been relatively unpredictable, it takes most people a long time to sit up and notice.

But while the American public luxuriates in a state of denial of Hilary Clinton proportions, the scientists of the world know the score. They can't "prove" that the earth's surface is going to heat up dramatically in coming years, but a great majority of them believe it will. Now they're trying to figure out a way to make the best of a bad situation.

Global warming means the glaciers will shrink, the icecaps will melt, the seas will rise, the wetlands will diminish, the rivers will flood, the storms will become more violent, the deserts will spread, the birds and bugs and tropical diseases will migrate north, the forests will struggle to cope, and many more plant and animal species will face extinction. And that's the good news. The bad news is that if we can't find a way to reduce our use of fossil fuel drastically, all these things will happen in spades.

You may be one of those people happily misled by the abominable media coverage of global warming -- the kind of coverage that gives 15 seconds to the scientists who believe in it and 15 seconds to the scientists (or petroleum- industry flacks) who don't. But the preponderance of evidence is on the side of those who believe. The opinions of Holy Cross biology professor Robert Bertin are fairly typical of the reaction of the mainstream scientific community. Bertin's scientific training just won't permit him to say unequivocally that global warming is caused by the burning of fossil fuels -- or that the world's atmosphere is going to continue to heat up. But his "hunch" is that global warming is underway and that it's time to act.

"The strongest tool that scientists have to prove anything is the controlled experiment," Bertin says. "And if that's the standard of proof you want, we'll never have it. Because we only have one globe." The definitive work on the subject has been done by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the United Nations in 1988. More than 2500 of the world's leading climate scientists and related experts from 80 countries contributed to the IPCC's 1995 report, which pulls no punches on global warming. It's here and it's getting worse, the report says.

The science of global warming is pretty simple. First the sun warms the earth. Then the earth's greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide among them -- trap the heat in the atmosphere. Since the industrial revolution, we've been burning much more coal, oil, and gas and thus spewing out much more carbon dioxide. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by 30 percent since pre-industrial times and is expected to double in the next 100 years. Methane in the atmosphere, mostly from agricultural activities such as growing rice and raising cattle, has increased by 145 percent and is expected to double by 2098. Nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer are expected to double over the same time span. Along with this increase in greenhouse gases has come a rise in worldwide average surface temperature of about one degree Fahrenheit since 1860. In the next 100 years, the IPCC predicts, the average surface temperature will increase by between 1.8 and 6.3 degrees.

That doesn't sound like much, does it? Well, here's what the Union of Concerned Scientists has to say: "In the last 10,000 years, the earth's average temperature hasn't varied by more than 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures of only five to nine degrees cooler than those today resulted in the last Ice Age, in which the Northeast was covered by a kilometer of ice."

Now let's pour a few more facts on the fire: global population is expected to double within 60 years, with most of those people packed along the fragile coastlines of Third World countries. Global automobile population is expected to double in as little as 25 to 50 years. So if we found a way to get twice as much mileage out of each gallon of gas, we might still be putting out the same level of emissions. The average sea level has risen by about a foot along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts in the past century and is expected to rise another foot in 50 years and at least two feet in 100 years. And it will continue to rise for years after that, even if we freeze emissions now. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, which is by no means radical on the global-warming issue, "a two-foot rise in sea level could eliminate 17 to 43 percent of US wetlands."

In all, the rising seas would claim an area equal to the combined size of Massachusetts and Delaware. Changes in rainfall patterns would also dry up inland wetlands. Nobody can predict just which areas will get more rain and which will get less. For example, the EPA says reservoirs serving Boston may lose half their water or gain one-third more. Nor can scientists be sure that weather patterns will stabilize or that we're not in for a series of unpleasant surprises.

Of all living things, insects, birds, and affluent people will find it easiest to adapt. With the drying up of the wetlands and the erosion of coastal estuaries, however, the birds are going to have a hard time. While the birds are free to fly away, their habitats don't have wings. If the earth warms at the moderate prediction of about 3.5 degrees over 100 years, the trees of the North American forest would have to migrate north about two miles a year, says the EPA. But most kinds of trees can't spread by more than a few hundred feet per year. And, of course, the sprawl of modern civilization won't allow forests and their furry inhabitants to march north unimpeded. You won't see Yellowstone and Yosemite hiking up to Canada either. This list goes on and on. More daunting still is the task of turning our big ocean liner around. The nations of the world met at Kyoto, Japan, in December and reached only preliminary agreement on a bunch of short-term goals.

These goals are a) exceedingly hard to meet without causing major economic problems for the United States and other developed countries, and b) far short of the reductions in fossil fuels that will be needed to stabilize carbon dioxide levels at twice their current level. It is not at all clear that the nations will agree on a way to keep things from getting even worse than the "moderate" scenario described above. The world has a major addiction to gasoline, coal, and oil. As with any addiction, the first problem is getting people to admit there is a problem -- especially when there's no quick fix. Without popular support, there will be no action.

"This is a long-term problem," says Henry Lee, director of the environment and natural resource program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "We don't like these kinds of problems."

Hey, if you don't like these kinds of problems, just wait. The weather will change.