Will We Stop the Hissing Before the Bang?

Reflections on Current Climate Science and the Need for Solutions

While the news about global warming continues to be a mixed bag - California’s new action plan, good; Texas’s plans to build a string of new coal plants, bad - the science on global warming continues to be nothing short of distressing.

The biggest bad news is about methane, a gas with more than 20 times the heat-trapping capacity of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent of the so-called “greenhouse” gases.  Two recent studies, one reported in March in Science from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and one reported in the current issue of Nature both pointed to higher amounts of methane being available to the atmosphere than previously expected.

This week, NASA scientists reported that an unprecedented retreat of Arctic sea ice over the last two summers is difficult to explain except as a result of global warming, caused by the accumulation of human-produced greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

All of these studies involve releases of greenhouse gases from “feedback cycles” – events triggered by global warming that then add to the warming.  The study reported in Science finds that increasing ocean temperatures may allow the release of huge deposits of methane currently held frozen by cold water on the bottom of the oceans.  The study in Nature looks at a phenomenon already understood – the release of methane from permafrost thawing as a result of warming in the Arctic region – and finds that the gas is being released at a rate five times what had been estimated. 

Finally, the NASA findings point to the possibility of increased heating of the Arctic region because the dark ocean waters exposed by melting ice will absorb the sun’s energy more readily than the ice, whose whiteness reflects the energy in an effect known as “albedo.”

The importance of these findings, beyond the direct implications for the presence of ever-greater concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, is that our contribution may be nothing more – extensive and climate changing though it is – than lighting a fuse.  These studies, and others like them, reveal that the bomb to which that fuse is attached is far greater than anything we’d expected. 

The Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment, working in conjunction with Clean Air-Cool Planet, UNH Climate Scientist Cameron Wake, and Environment Canada, has produced a new series of climate change indicators for the Northeast cross border region, from Pennsylvania and New Jersey through the Canadian Maritime Provinces, which will be released in October.  The findings, based on decades of records of climatic measurements like temperature, snowfall, ice-in/ice-out, and last-frost to first-frost growing season records, are not surprising.  The indicators in across the region show, in each of their records, a steady trend of changes consistent with what we would expect from global warming.

This fall, the Union of Concerned Scientists will release a new report on and assessment of likely climatic change and impacts for the Northeastern US.  We should not expect heartening news for our region from this exhaustive effort from scores of climate scientists.  It will almost certainly reinforce, right here at home, the need for action without delay.

The kinds of actions we need to take are well known, well understood, and we can begin immediately in ways that will have positive results for the economy in the region.  This is true because our first course if energy efficiency, energy conservation, and production of more energy from clean renewable sources.  All of these will make us more competitive and less reliant on foreign oil, more productive and economically vibrant, and healthier as a result of cleaner air and water.

But in order to step on the fuse and stop its incessant tttiiissss before the bomb goes off, we will have to be more culturally agile, more inventive in our thinking.  Reexamining and retooling our transportation system strategies and tactics is just one example.

There was a cultural crossover, somewhere in the first third of the last century, at which the automobile began its rise to predominance as the desired mode of transportation in this country.  Make no mistake: This was not accidental.  It was not an evil scheme.  It was a wise business decision, made by leading industrialists working in concert, to offer the American people a tremendous convenience and make a lot of money doing it.  Once the means were assured to meet demand for the vehicles, the materials to make them, and the fuel to power them, it only remained to convince people they were reliable and make them necessary and desirable.

It was part marketing and sales and part acquisition and merger, but by the time Dwight Eisenhower began the Interstate Highway system in the 1950s, Americans were ready to move to the suburbs, to drive those highways, and enjoy the freedom of the open road.  Entire municipal transportation systems were dismantled and communities created as part of the effort to sell the automobile.

This is a somewhat simplistic condensation of history; it is meant to convey the kind of effort, in reverse, we will need to be willing to mount if we are to keep the fire in the fuse from its inexorable conclusion.  Fortunately, many futurists, scientists, sociologists, and researchers are proposing ways in which that might happen.  But in addition to the policy and technology, imagination and effort, we will need to begin now to make simple choices about what we do.

Here are a few examples:  Will you continue to have your newspaper delivered to your home or buy it at a store near the bus or train station?  Will we continue to drive to “big box” stores to buy everything, or will we purchase more things by phone and internet – or use stores we can reach by public transportation – and allow existing delivery services get them to us?  Will we insist on driving our kids to school, or will we put them on the bus?  Will we subscribe to an internet service that requires packaging and delivery when we could just as well rent the product at a local store within walking distance of where we have to drive to shop?

Will Soccer Moms (and Dads) continue to drive, often individually, to games scores of miles from home every weekend, or will we seek alternatives to getting there and how far away it’s acceptable to go for a game? 

In other words, will we begin to take our use of resources seriously in our everyday lives?  Because until we at least begin to ask ourselves these questions, we have little hope of putting a stop to that curious hissing sound.

Bill Burtis is CA-CP's Communications Manager, and he also oversees many of our science outreach efforts. Bill