Warming Signs

The Age/Australia
Jun 04, 2006

TEN months before Hurricane Katrina left much of New Orleans under water, the Queen had a private conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair about US President George Bush. The Queen's tradition of meeting once a week with Britain's elected head of government to discuss matters of state goes back to 1952, the year she ascended the throne. In all that time, the contents of those chats rarely, if ever, leaked.

So it was extraordinary when London's Observer reported, on October 31, 2004, that the Queen had "made a rare intervention in world politics" by telling Blair of "her grave concerns over the White House's stance on global warming".

Press aides for both the Queen and the Prime Minister declined to comment on the meeting, as is their habit. But days after the Observer story appeared, the Queen indeed raised awareness by presiding over the opening of a British-German conference on climate change in Berlin. "I might just point out, that's a pretty unusual thing for her to do," says Sir David King, Britain's chief scientific adviser. "She doesn't take part in anything that would be overtly political." King, who has briefed the Queen on climate change, would not comment on the report except to say: "If it were true, it wouldn't surprise me."

Temperatures are rising, the Queen learned from King and other scientists, because greenhouse gases are trapping heat in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, the most prevalent of such gases, is released whenever fossil fuels are burned or forests catch fire. Global warming, the scientists explained, threatens to raise sea levels by almost a metre by the end of the 21st century, thanks to melting glaciers and swollen oceans. (Water expands when heated.)

It would also bring more heat waves like the one in the summer of 2003 that killed 31,000 people across Europe. It might even shut down the Gulf Stream, the flow of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico that gives Europe its mild climate. If the Gulf Stream were to halt — and it has already slowed 30 per cent since 1992 — Europe's temperatures would plunge and agriculture would collapse.

At the time of his meeting with the Queen, Blair was being attacked on climate change from all sides, with even the Conservatives charging that he was not doing enough. Yet Blair's statements on the issue went far beyond those of most world leaders. He had called the Kyoto Protocol, which has been ratified by 162 countries and requires industrial nations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 5 per cent below 1990 levels, "not radical enough". The world's climate scientists, Blair pointed out, had estimated that 60 per cent cuts in emissions were needed, and he committed Britain to reaching that goal by 2050.

But it wouldn't matter how much Britain cut its greenhouse-gas emissions if other nations didn't do the same. The US was key, not only because it was the world's largest emitter but because its refusal to reduce emissions led China, India, Brazil, and other large developing countries to ask why they should do so.

It was no secret that Bush opposed mandatory limits, but Blair, who had risked his political future to back the deeply unpopular war in Iraq, was uniquely positioned to lobby the President. Bush owed him one. At the same time, Blair needed to show his domestic audience that he could stand up to Bush, that he wasn't the presidential "poodle" his critics claimed.

To compel Bush to engage the issue, Blair made climate change a lead agenda item at the July 2005 meeting of the Group of 8, the alliance of the world's eight richest nations. A month before the meeting, which was held at Gleneagles, in Scotland, Blair flew to Washington to see Bush face-to-face. That same day, the national academies of science of all the G8 nations, as well as those of China, India and Brazil, released a joint statement declaring that climate change was a grave problem requiring immediate action.

But in the end, Bush held firm. Washington vetoed all references to mandatory emission cuts or timelines, and the issue was overshadowed by African debt relief.

"There were no tough targets at Gleneagles because we would not have got all signatures on the document," says King. "We might well have" got seven; that is, every nation but the US. The farthest the G8 leaders went — and even this was a battle, says King — was to include a sentence reading, in part, "While uncertainties remain in our understanding of climate science, we know enough to act now."

But seven weeks later, nature acted first, and it was the United States it hit.

No one can say for sure whether global warming caused Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. But it certainly fit the pattern. The scientific rule of thumb is that one can never blame any one weather event on any single cause. The earth's weather system is too complex for that. Most scientists agree, however, that global warming makes extra-strong hurricanes such as Katrina more likely because it encourages warmer oceans, a precondition of hurricane formation.

Just weeks before Katrina struck, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kerry Emanuel, published a paper in the scientific journal Nature demonstrating that hurricanes had grown more powerful as global temperatures rose in the 20th century. Now, he says, by adding more greenhouse gases to the earth's atmosphere, humans are "loading the climatic dice in favour of more powerful hurricanes in the future".

But most Americans heard nothing about Hurricane Katrina's association with global warming. Media coverage instead reflected the views of the Bush Administration — specifically, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which declared that the hurricane was the result of natural factors. An outcry from NOAA's scientists led the agency to backtrack from that statement in February 2006, but by then conventional wisdom was set in place.

Sad to say, Katrina was the perfect preview of what global warming might look like in the 21st century. First, it struck a city that was already below sea level, which is where rising waters could put many coastal dwellers in the years ahead. In 2001, the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a peer-reviewed, international collaboration among thousands of scientists that is the world's leading authority on climate change, predicted that sea levels could rise as much as 92 centimetres by 2100.

By coincidence, that is about how much New Orleans sank during the 20th century. That was because levees built to keep the Mississippi River from flooding also kept the river from depositing silt that would have replenished the underlying land mass, explains Mike Tidwell, author of Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast. "You could say that in New Orleans we brought the ocean to the people, which is pretty much what global warming will do to other cities in the future," says Tidwell.

What's more, Katrina was a Category 5 hurricane, the strongest there is. Such extreme weather events will likely become more frequent, says the IPCC.

Since roughly half the world's 6.5 billion people live near coastlines, a 92 centimetre sea-level rise would be even more punishing elsewhere. Amsterdam, Venice, Cairo, Shanghai, Manila and Calcutta are some of the cities most threatened. Many countries are too poor to erect adequate barriers — in low-lying Bangladesh, an estimated 18 million people are at risk — so experts fear they will migrate, raising the prospect of armed conflict.

These are just some of the reasons why David King wrote in Science in 2004: "Climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today — more serious even than the threat of terrorism." King's comment raised hackles in Washington and led a top press aide to Tony Blair to try to muzzle him. But the science adviser says he "absolutely" stands by his statement.

The worst scenarios of global warming might still be avoided, scientists say, if humanity reduces its greenhouse-gas emissions dramatically, and very soon. The IPCC has estimated that emissions must fall to 60 per cent below 1990 levels before 2050, over a period when global population is expected to increase by 37 per cent and per-capita energy consumption will surely rise as billions of people in Asia, Africa and South America strive to ascend from poverty.

Yet even if such a reduction were achieved, a significant rise in sea levels may be unavoidable. "It's getting harder and harder to say we'll avoid a three-foot sea-level rise, though it won't necessarily happen in this century," says Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton. Oppenheimer's pessimism is rooted in the lag effects of the climate system: oceans store heat for a century or longer before releasing it; carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for decades or longer before dissipating.

According to King, even if humanity were to stop emitting carbon dioxide today, "temperatures will keep rising and all the impacts will keep changing for about 25 years".

It is now too late to prevent climate change; we can only adapt to it. Because humanity waited so long to take decisive action, we are stuck with a certain amount of global warming and the changes it will bring — rising seas, fiercer heat, deeper droughts, stronger storms.

The inevitability of global warming does not mean we should not act, King emphasises. That means doing all the things that were not done in New Orleans: building sound levees and seawalls, restoring coastal wetlands (which act like speed bumps to weaken hurricanes' storm surges), strengthening emergency-preparedness networks and health-care systems, and much more.

Beyond these crucial steps — which most governments have yet to consider — humanity can cushion the severity of future global warming by limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says we must stabilise emissions, which currently are rising 2 per cent a year by 2015, then reduce them. Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, a book based on a scientific conference convened by Tony Blair before the G8 summit, estimates that we may have until 2025 to peak and reduce.

Among the reasons climate change is a bigger problem than terrorism, David King says, is that it is rooted in humanity's burning of oil, coal and natural gas, "and people don't want to let that go". Which is understandable. These carbon-based fuels have powered civilisation since the dawn of the industrial era, delivering enormous wealth, convenience, and wellbeing even as they overheated the atmosphere.

Luckily, the idea that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions will wreck our economy, as Bush said in 2005 when defending his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, is disproved by experience. "In Britain," King told the environmental website Grist, "our economy since 1990 has grown by about 40 per cent, and our emissions have decreased by 14 per cent".

The opening move in this transition is to invest massively in energy efficiency. Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank that consults for corporations and governments around the world, has demonstrated that measures such as insulating buildings and driving more fuel-efficient vehicles could reduce the consumption of energy and natural resources by a factor of four. And efficiency investments have a demonstrated record of creating jobs and boosting profits, suggesting that emissions can be reduced without crippling economies.

While efficiency is no silver bullet, it can buy humanity time to further develop and deploy alternative-energy technologies. Solar and wind power have made enormous strides in recent years, but the technology to watch is carbon sequestration, a method of capturing and safely storing the carbon dioxide produced by the combustion of fossil fuels.

No one pretends that phasing out carbon-based fuels will be easy. The momentum of the climate system means that "a certain amount of pain is inevitable," says Michael Oppenheimer. "But we still have a choice between pain and disaster."

Call him the $US45 million ($A60 million) man. That's how much Dr Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, helped tobacco company R. J. Reynolds Industries, Inc, give away to fund medical research in the 1970s and '80s. The research avoided the central health issue facing Reynolds — "They didn't want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking," says Seitz, who is now 94 — but it nevertheless served the tobacco industry's purposes. Throughout those years, the industry frequently ran ads in newspapers and magazines citing its multi-million-dollar research program as proof of its commitment to science — and arguing that the evidence on the health effects of smoking was mixed.

In the 1990s, Seitz began arguing that the science behind global warming was likewise inconclusive and certainly didn't warrant imposing mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions.

Al Gore and others have said, but generally without offering evidence, that the people who deny the dangers of climate change are like the tobacco executives who denied the dangers of smoking. The example of Frederick Seitz shows that the two camps overlap in ways that are quite literal — and lucrative. Seitz earned approximately $US585,000 for his consulting work for R. J. Reynolds. Meanwhile, during the years he consulted for Reynolds, Seitz continued to draw a salary as president emeritus at Rockefeller University, an institution founded in 1901 and subsidised with oil company profits.

Seitz was the highest-ranking scientist among a band of doubters who, beginning in the early 1990s, resolutely disputed suggestions that climate change was a real and present danger. As a former president of the National Academy of Sciences and a winner of the National Medal of Science, Seitz gave such objections instant credibility. But most of the public argument was carried by lesser scientists and, above all, by lobbyists and paid spokesmen for the Global Climate Coalition. Created and funded by the energy and auto industries, the coalition spent millions spreading the message that global warming was an uncertain threat.

"The goal of the disinformation campaign wasn't to win the debate," says journalist Ross Gelbspan, author of the 1997 book The Heat Is On. "The goal was simply to keep the debate going. When the public hears the media report that some scientists believe warming is real but others don't, its reaction is 'Come back and tell us when you're really sure.' So no political action is taken."

The public discussion about climate change in the US is years behind that in Britain and the rest of Europe, and the deniers are a big reason why. "In the United States, the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers are deeply sceptical of climate-change science and the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions," says Fiona Harvey, the environment correspondent for the Financial Times. "In Britain, the equivalent body, the Confederation of British Industry, is absolutely behind the science and agrees on the need to cut emissions. The only differences are over how to do that."

America's media coverage is also well behind the curve, says Harvey. "In the United States you have lots of news stories that, in the name of balance, give equal credence to the sceptics. We don't do that here — not because we're not balanced but because we think it's unbalanced to give equal validity to a fringe few with no science behind them."

Paul O'Neill, who served nearly two years as George Bush's secretary of the Treasury, does not buy the common notion that Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney resist taking action on global warming because they are oil men. "I don't think either one of them is an oil man," insists O'Neill. "You have to have success to be an oil man. It's like saying you're a ball player, but you never got on the field."

In 1998, while running the aluminium giant Alcoa, O'Neill was among the first US business leaders to recognise the enormity of climate change. He says Bush asked him, early in the first term, to put together a plan of action, but it was ignored. Like Bush, O'Neill opposed Kyoto, so he proposed other ways to move forward. But instead, he says, the administration "cherry-picked" the science on climate change to justify taking no action, "just like it cherry-picked the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction" to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Bush Administration officials counter that they are doing more to fight global warming than anyone else — just with different tools than those favoured by supporters of the Kyoto Protocol. James Connaughton, the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, starts by pointing out that Bush has raised federal mileage standards for four-wheel-drives and light trucks. What's more, the administration recently provided $US10 billion in incentives for alternative-energy development and $US40 billion over 10 years to encourage farmers to plant trees and preserve grassland that can soak up carbon dioxide.

The administration opposes the Kyoto Protocol, Connaughton claims, because its mandatory emissions cuts would punish the American economy, costing as many as five million jobs. It would also dry up the capital needed to fund the technological research that will ultimately solve global warming.

The rest of the world is no longer waiting for the Bush Administration. At the international climate conference held in Montreal last year, European nations called the administration's bluff when it refused to commit even to the breathtakingly modest step of some day discussing what framework might follow the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. At past summits, the administration's stubbornness led other nations to back down in hopes of keeping America involved in the process. At Montreal, the world quit waiting for Godot and recognised, as Elliot Morley, Tony Blair's environment minister, says, "there are a lot of voices in the United States in addition to the Bush Administration, and we will work with all of them to address this problem".

The same thing is happening inside the US. "It is very clear that Congress will put mandatory greenhouse-gas-emission reductions in place, immediately after George Bush leaves office," says Philip Clapp of the National Environmental Trust, a non-profit group in Washington. "Even the Fortune 500 is positioning itself for the inevitable. There isn't one credible 2008 Republican presidential candidate who hasn't abandoned the president's do-nothing approach."

No matter what happens, the global warming that past human activity has already unleashed will make this a different planet in the years ahead. But it could still be a liveable, even hospitable, planet, if enough of us get smart in time. If we don't, a metre of water could be just the beginning.

This is an edited extract of an article that appeared in Vanity Fair.