Spending winter 2013-2014 in sunny Los Angeles, watching the news from drought stricken California showing the mid-western, southern and northeastern states getting hammered with endless freezing snow storms, is just the latest expensive reminder that climate change, in addition to being a weather warning, is also a serious economic issue.
Billions of dollars of lost productivity, more than 75,000 flight cancellations that caused chaos at airports, hotels, car rental agencies and restaurants where people were forced to go and spend millions more of their hard earned savings on food, shelter and alternative transportation –and that’s not counting the people stranded in their cars on America’s highways sleeping wherever they could find shelter.
Is what America is experiencing on the weather front not only the beginning of the end of the environment as we know it, but our way of life economically and politically because of climate change?
Hurricane Sandy was the wake-up call America needed. It even got President Obama to acknowledge that climate change is an issue that must be addressed.
The reality is that the Arctic Ocean will probably be ice-free by 2030. This is not the main worry, however, as this is floating ice. When it melts it does not raise sea levels. The real worry is the Greenland ice shelf, which is also melting at an unprecedented rate. If this disappears too, the effects will be catastrophic.
Sea levels around the world will rise between six and seven meters, wiping out cities like New York, London and Shanghai. The addition of so much cold fresh water into the seas would also change ocean currents and weather patterns in ways we can’t even imagine. At the same time, rising temperatures in the northern hemisphere now risk melting much of the Siberian permafrost, which, like Greenland, will release vast clouds of trapped methane, accelerating the speed of climate change even more. This risks starting a chain reaction, which we could do nothing to stop.
When predictions were made a few years ago, scientists said it would all be more or less OK if we limited the rise in average global temperatures to two degrees celcius. We have missed that target.
“Without change, we are now heading for a four-degree rise, which will take the earth’s average temperature back to levels seen 40 million years ago. This will cause the Antarctic to melt too, with sea levels rising 60-70 meters. The droughts and floods we would experience along the way would make the planet virtually uninhabitable,” says Graeme Maxton, a fellow of the Club of Rome.
The biggest threat to our existence is not the lack of economic growth or terrorists – it is climate change. It is something I encounter frequently when I travel across the U.S., especially in winter. The thousands of travel advisories and flights canceled is a nightmare for frequent fliers like myself, as well as economic and financial nightmare for everyone.
I was delighted to read that one global warming skeptic, prominent physicist Richard Muller, who was on the payroll of the energy companies, had come clean and in from the cold, reluctantly admitting after two years of trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong that they were right and that temperatures really are rising. Muller’s study was partially funded by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of “Climategate,” a British scandal involving hacked e-mails of scientists.
Yet he found that the land is 1 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the 1950s. Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match those from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. He said he went even further back, studying readings from Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
What got everyone’s attention and raised a lot of eyebrows was the fact that one-quarter of the $600,000 to do the research came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a major funder of not only the Tea Party movement, but of skeptic groups. The Koch brothers, Charles and David, run a large private company involved in oil and other related industries.
The overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that the problem is very real and that climate change is man-made from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. “Greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world,” Muller concludes.
Isn’t it time we wake up to this economic nightmare instead of wasting any more time on political spin?