Special Report - Is The World Ending?

Is The World Ending?
April 19, 2002
by John Bloom

NEW YORK, April 19 (UPI) -- With bikinis in Central Park, mini-skirts on Fifth Avenue and shirtless hippies in Union Square, you could say that New York is celebrating the end of winter, except, actually, we never had a winter.

It's sort of the flip side of 1816, known to meteorologists as "the year without a summer," when New England had frost in July and virtually every crop in the country failed. The difference between that year and this one is that in 1816 everyone was panicked, spooked and wondering whether the world was ending.

This year, when some scientists believe that maybe the world is ending, we're fine with it. Break out the beer cooler. Global warming? Yeah, I've heard about that. Who's pitching for the Yankees tonight?

So my question is, based on the last 15 years of temperatures increasing faster than at any time since the Ice Age, with two 90-degree days in a row that were not just records for April but records for the whole history of recorded weather, why aren't people treating this like the third chapter of a Stephen King novel?

Among other things, New York state is in the midst of a two- month drought that's about this close to a state of emergency. And then there's the advent of West Nile virus season, when that deadly pest from Africa is expected to visit for the third year in a row, thriving in a climate that's supposed to be too cold for the mosquito carriers to breed.

If this were a novel, it would have to be set near the end of the Roman empire, when the emperor was tending his prize gardenias on the day the Vandals appeared at the city limits. Among the things we have to look forward to, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, are floods in areas that have never been underwater before, the disappearance of beaches, the sinking of several Pacific islands into the ocean, the almost total elimination of glaciers by the year 2100, the melting of the permafrost in Siberia and the Yukon, 50 to 80 million new cases of malaria, epidemics of dengue fever in areas that have never had it before, the extinction of several animal species because they can't figure out their migration patterns, the elimination of all wildlife that lives above the current snow line, vanishing forests, the bleaching of the coral reef in 32 countries, torrential downpours all over the United States, Russia, Japan, China and Australia, droughts, forest fires, pest infestations, thousands of heat stroke deaths each year even in wealthy countries, hantavirus, a massive increase in respiratory diseases, asthma and allergies, "desertification," crop failures, vast parts of the earth becoming uninhabitable, and Antarctica breaking up into hundreds of pieces.

Sure has been a nice pleasant winter, though.

There are several theories about why people just don't care about global warming, but the most convincing one I've heard is that the problem is so overwhelming it's just impossible to get your mind around it.

But I think people are also prejudiced against cold weather. If you assume that the perfect temperature is about, oh, 73, then the nerve endings are equally irritated if the temperature drops 25 degrees or rises 25 degrees. It's actually easier to deal with 48 degrees, because all you need is a jacket. You get that first stiff blast when you come up out of the subway, but then 30 seconds later your body has adjusted. But if you go in the other direction, to 98 degrees, your body doesn't adjust to it for a long long time, and even getting naked won't totally solve the problem.

Yet I think most people would prefer 98 to 48. They complain about it just the same, but they complain in a different way. At 48 they say "Too damn cold, I'm sick of this," but at 98 they say "How about this heat? It's a scorcher, isn't it?" They're beaming when they say it. They're basking in it. People are dropping dead in the middle of the New York Marathon, but as they go down they're saying, "Thank God for the nice warm weather."

But as scientists have been telling us for three decades now, the earth needs to be cold. It needs to be real cold at certain times of the year, and it needs to stay cold at certain places on the globe. The whole purpose of the ozone layer is to hold in the perfect amount of greenhouse gases so that everything breathes and thrives, but if you pump too much gas into the greenhouse you end up with wilted orchids and dry dust where the tulips used to be, not to mention the ocean rising so high that it takes back much of the land.

Remember the aerosol can scare of the seventies? There was a time when we thought most of our macro-environmental problems were caused by too many cans of deodorant and Windex. It never made that much sense to the average person. How could spraying your underarms result in damage to the ozone layer? And it had a kind of sinister political overtone, because the inventor of the aerosol can was Robert Abplanalp, a close friend of President Nixon who was manufacturing a billion aerosol cans a year. Was this just a bunch of loony tree-hugging liberals trying to crusade against big business under the guise of protecting the environment?

And yet that scare had a resolution. We acted. We moved against the aerosol cans. Aerosol cans using fluorocarbons were banned in 1978. To show you just how fast we acted, our laws were ahead of both Sweden and the Netherlands. Now that is fast.

And the economy adjusted. Precision Valve, Abplanalp's multi-national corporation based in Yonkers, N.Y., now makes four billion aerosol cans a year. They just figured out a way to use something other than fluorocarbons in deodorants, hair sprays, household cleaners, pesticides and all the other things that come in spray cans.

Now contrast that with what has happened since 1992, when it became obvious that global warming was not only real, but that it had taken off like a rocket around 1987. Ten of the hottest years in modern history have occurred since then. The temperature of the earth has risen more than a degree in less than 100 years. To put that in context, it only rose one degree between 10,000 B.C. and 1900 A.D., and in those rare cases where the average mean temperature was one degree higher for a single year--like 1816, when a volcano spewed so much ash that it affected the penetration of the sun's rays--there was massive chaos.

Now we're looking at some version of The End of Life As We Know It, and the reaction is, "Aw, it can't be that bad." Just a bunch of tree-hugging liberals crusading against big business again.

We made one huge effort that was similar to the crusade against aerosol cans. We went to the Kyoto conference on global warming in 1997. Since then President Bush has said we're not going to abide by the Kyoto Protocol because it was biased against rich countries and it's based on "junk science." But what he's forgetting is that everybody was at that conference, and everybody signed off on it. That includes the oil and coal companies. They bitched a little bit, and that's why the Kyoto goals were so modest. But sitting side by side with the Nobel Prize winners, they said, "Okay, we can do this."

Yet if all the Kyoto goals were achieved, the result would be just a 5.2 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases compared to 1990 levels. It's a tiny step. What we really need is a 50 per cent reduction if we're going to restore the planet to the levels of 1900. But it was something that industry said they could live with. They were probably more surprised than anyone when Bush told them they don't have to do it after all.

Since the United States is responsible for 36 per cent of all the emissions in the world, how could we be so selfish? And, more to the point, why aren't we scared out of our wits? The answer, of course, is that there are three things we will never give up: cars, oil-burning plants, and coal-burning plants. The level of denial is similar to the smoker who was still pooh- poohing cancer alerts as "junk medicine" in 1999. Aerosol cans were one thing, but Ford Explorers and the 600 fossil-fuel- burning power plants have become so sacrosanct that, not only do we not want to convert them, we don't even want to make them more efficient.

I once wrote an article speculating about what historians would say 500 years from now about this era, and I speculated that all the names of the world leaders would be forgotten and it would be called the Abplanalp Century. "Robert Abplanalp, the man who invented an industrial device that destroyed the ozone and created two centuries of ecological chaos, forcing civilization to convert from city-dwelling to geodesic-dome-dwelling peoples . . ."

But now I think historians might just indict the entire Industrial Revolution itself, treating it the way we treat the history of slavery. "For 300 years, a comfort-obsessed minority systematically destroyed . . ."

Last week the Bush administration replaced the chairman of the United Nations panel on global warming. It seems that the guy in office, atmospheric chemist Robert T. Watson, was too focused on cutting down the use of coal and oil--the only two things you can reduce in order to get rid of excess greenhouse gases. (You can also reduce cattle feedlots, to cut down on methane, but the savings there are even less significant than the aerosol cans.) Watson was replaced by Rajendra K. Pachauri, a New Delhi consultant who's more open-minded about the issue. After all, coal and oil can't be all bad. We've been using them non-stop for 150 years. What can a few more decades hurt?

This is the point in the Stephen King novel where we cut to the Nevada mountaintop, where a strange mosquito has appeared for the first time, and elk carcasses are strewn across the hillsides.

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