Global Warming
No decision is a decision. This axiom of policy-making could have been created with global warming in mind.
First of all, global warming is real— real like a rising sea, real like receding ice cover, real like changing weather patterns. Global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change informs us, is fact.
- The global average surface temperature increased by more than one degree Fahrenheit over the 20th century.
Nature noticed. Snow cover and ice extent decreased over the past 100 years, with a widespread retreat of mountain glaciers in non-polar regions. Global average sea level rose between 4 and 8 inches over the past century. (Global warming causes sea levels to rise through thermal expansion of water as well as melting of land ice.) Other changes likely due to global warming include increases in overall precipitation, in "heavy precipitation events," and in cloud cover.
Second, global warming is bad. Losing land as water rises (and storms probably increase) may be the least of it. The warming is changing weather patterns in ways that bring more harm than good. For instance, "global warming is likely to lead to greater extremes of drying and heavy rainfall and increase the risk of droughts and floods" in many different regions. Climate change will cause plants and animals to go extinct as the weather conditions necessary for their survival shift or disappear. In one recent instance, a type of butterfly living in a certain altitude went extinct when rising average temperatures pushed the belt it could inhabit up and up the mountain until there was no mountain left. The very rate of climate change also threatens plant and animal species that cannot keep up as climate zones trend northward. Perhaps more than anything else, climate change is uncertain. The only certain thing is that greenhouse gasses will lead to climate change and that rapid change is hard for both human societies and biodiversity.
Third, we are the cause of global warming.
- Most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.
The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased by 31% since 1750 to a level likely not seen during the past 20 million years. The concentration of methane has increased 151% and nitrous oxide 17%. All are greenhouse gasses and all increases are due to actions by people. Because we know that our actions The principle source of global warming is carbon dioxide. About three-quarters of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions during the past 20 years is due to fossil fuel burning; most of the rest is due to land-use changes, especially deforestation.
Fourth, we have control over global warming. Because we are causing global warming, we have the ability to stop doing the things that cause it. The way we would go about doing this is where it gets interesting.
Global warming is a global phenomenon, and as such every person theoretically bears some of the costs of global warming (such as in flooded land that no one will be able to use and species of plants and animals lost to the world). People who do things that contribute to the warming bear an infinitesimal fraction of these costs, which are shared by everyone, while they get to keep the full benefits of their actions to themselves. Driving off to get a burger, for example, costs more than the $1.39 paid to the gas station and the restaurant. The carbon dioxide (from burning gasoline) and methane (from producing cattle) put into the atmosphere will contribute, however slightly, to global warming. One person enjoys the burger and everyone suffers the climate change. From the perspective of the burger eater, the action was worthwhile. Making people pay closer to the full cost of their actions would decrease emissions of greenhouse gasses and is the first step toward lessening climate change.
Many actions, however, are not the outcome of individual choices but of societal choices. For instance, driving to the grocery store. For many people, buying several bags of groceries without an automobile is not a realistic option. If alternate forms of transportation are not available, people will not use them. Conversely, most city planners and highway engineers now understand that if a new parking lot or highway is built, people will use it— and congestion is often not eased. Pollution, of course, goes up. The building of a transportation system is always a society-level decision. Fifty years ago, the choice was made to build highways as the core of our transportation system. Public money is continuously being spent on transportation; this money must be spent on energy efficient non-greenhouse gas producing transportation systems.
Finally, it’s not ‘too late’ to do something about global warming. The more warming we have, the worse—and more unknowable—the results are likely to be. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions will always decrease overall global warming. The sooner and greater these cuts the less the world will heat up and, equally important, the slower the climate will change.
Some environmentalists, to describe our environmental actions, use the metaphor of a car hurtling toward a cliff so that the car needs to make a full U-turn. This aptly expresses the urgency with which we must act, but it wrongly implies a point of no return. It is true that the planet has already warmed and will warm for centuries even if people stopped pouring greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere this instant. This means only that the past is the ideal time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This is of course impossible, but the future becomes the past every moment. The time to act is now.
Make changes in your life to reduce energy use. Make sacrifices. More important, start getting ticked off. Why should someone else’s irresponsible behavior be subsidized with cheap fuel? Why is the geographical set-up of where we live, work, shop, and recreate so energy intensive? Why is the modest goal of living without making the world worse off seemingly impossible to achieve? You need to get angry and demand public action. Global warming is a problem we created as a society, and we can only fix it as one.
The world is warming. The results are bad. Global warming is our fault. That’s the good news, because we can stop causing warming by making different choices as a society.
‘No decision’ is a decision, and we’re making the wrong one.
(This column uses data from the IPCC Third Assessment Report’s “Summary for Policymakers,” available on the internet at www.ipcc.ch.)
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