The heat is on

Scientists are conjuring fire and brimstone, but where does the science end and the paranoia begin? Nyier Abdou traces the panic over global warming
In the last couple of years, it has increasingly seemed like the apocalypse is nearing: hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanoes wreak havoc with greater frequency. In November 1998, Hurricane Mitch took some 10,000 lives in Central America and deadly earthquakes have ravaged the globe. Turkey, India, Venezuela and Taiwan are just some of the countries that have suffered catastrophic earthquakes in the last two years resulting in significant loss of life. Flooding, from the Mississippi to the Yangtze, from England's Yorkshire, to Africa's Mozambique, has drawn a chilling picture of what reports on rising sea levels and melting ice caps may mean.
Fear of the unknown is a powerful thing, and it is this terrible uncertainty that has driven the global interchange on one of the more elusive issues of our time: climate change. Were it not for conservationists' and environmentalists' ability to paint global warming as a common foe it would have been near impossible to put climate change on the international agenda. But with world leaders pulled into the debate, politics has driven the science, rather than the other way around. The results have been both edifying and discontenting.
The landmark 1992 Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was the birthplace of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), signed by 153 nations swept up by the call to keep the earth a liveable place. Governments sounded the alarm about global warming and worrying predictions veered into view.
An increase in so-called greenhouse gases could spur a runaway "greenhouse effect," warming the earth in ways ecosystems cannot cope with. Increased levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxide combined with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which eat away at the earth's protective ozone layer, are the product of the industrial age. Concentrations of these gases allow sunlight through, but keep some of the subsequent radiation emmitted by the earth in. The greenhouse effect is what makes life as we know it possible on the planet, but it is a delicate balance. The burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas -- our main energy sources -- increases the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Models based on the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions (GGEs) portend global warming running out of control.
Because emissions do not distribute themselves evenly, they are denser in some areas, forcing warmer weather patterns. The difference in temperature then creates turbulence in the atmosphere. The basics of global warming are straightforward: more GGEs mean more trapped heat, which means more violent weather patterns. Warmer overall temperatures means the melting of polar ice caps, glaciers and permafrost. Ice traps CO2, but once melted, more CO2 is released into the air, in a vicious cycle. The warming of surface waters causes the seas to expand, encroaching on coastal cities and possibly sinking small island nations.
The UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up to monitor policy development and produce an informed body of knowledge on the slippery topic of global warming, has repeatedly issued dire predictions of accelerated heating of the atmosphere and the possible repercussions we face: severer weather extremes, lengthened periods of drought in some areas and increased rainfall in others. A report on climate change released in February by an IPCC working group warns that we can expect more "freak" weather conditions and pointed to strong evidence for human culpability.
It has been widely noted that the 20th century was the hottest stretching back a millennium, and numerous reports, including a joint US Department of Energy and UK Natural Environmental Research Council study issued in May of 1999, and a London Imperial College study comparing satellite data from around the globe released in March of this year, claim strong evidence that the warming trend will continue. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) tagged 2000 as the fifth warmest year on record.
Warmer weather year round might seem a bonus for cooler climates, but when you consider that this would also allow insects and rodents to survive the winters and multiply, you can begin to imagine mosquito-borne diseases like malaria infiltrating countries like England and Canada. Countries already suffering the drying of lands, like the countries of southern Africa, could become uninhabitable. China is already losing thousands of square kilometres of cultivated lands and marshlands each year to desiccation. Meanwhile, the erosion of coastal areas and natural barriers would leave coastal populations open to storm surges. No country is immune: the United States -- the world's largest producer of GGEs -- has been reluctant to implement emissions reducing policies, but scientists have warned that the country's eastern and western seaboards would be hard hit. Manhattan could become Atlantis.
The greatest impact will beset the developing world, particularly in densely populated coastal areas (Egypt is one of the countries the IPCC thinks is in danger). Already, more people are dying of natural disasters (the world's largest re-insurance company, Munich Re, says that its figures indicate a three-fold increase in natural disasters in the last quarter century) and, of course, more people are pushed into disaster-prone areas by economic hardship. A University College in London study estimates that a staggering 120,000 people a year are killed by earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes, floods and the like. The annual World Disasters Report for 1999, issued by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, noted that natural disasters were the leading cause of refugee crises, more so than armed conflicts.
Prodded by instant coverage of natural disasters by international news channels, these tragedies seem more real to us than they have in the past. And this may be leading us to think things are worse than they are. As the dissemination of information becomes increasingly advanced and immediate, we are prone to believe that the world is collapsing around us. It becomes easy to assume that extreme weather is rising, and the next logical step is to finger global warming as the cause. But most scientists agree that events such as earthquakes, volcanoes and other such phenomena are not connected to global warming. Rather, increased awareness, coinciding with heavy coverage of the climate change issue, has brought the two together.
Russell Schnell, director of observatory operations at the Climate Monitoring and Diagnostic Laboratory (CMDL) in Boulder, Colorado -- an arm of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) -- notes that a change in the intensity of severe storms "would have to be large and persistent over long time scales to be detectable." But Schnell argues that recordings of storm intensity before a few decades ago are insufficient to make this kind of judgment. He suggests that sharp population increases over the last half-century have pushed people into places more susceptible to weather hazards, like flooding and tornadoes, and hence, "storm detection and storm fatalities are both going up -- when in reality, storm numbers and intensity are probably changing little."
Which is to say, the layman's perception is one thing, and scientific data are quite another. Herein lies the heart of the debate about climate change.
Since the Rio Earth Summit, worst-case scenarios issued by the IPCC and other scientific studies have been steadily worsening. With the UNFCCC already in place, and the threat of global warming burning a hole in international convention agendas, it would seem that a mechanism for reducing GGEs will soon follow. But policies are not set by scientists; they are agreed on by politicians and ministers, who have to answer to angry taxpayers if fuel prices go up and powerful companies, like the oil industry players who poured money into the campaign of US President George W Bush.
Once the glow of collective do-goodism wore off, governments became less enthusiastic about the reality of cutting down CO2 emissions and commitments were stretched and carefully worded. Two meetings of the countries party to the UNFCCC (in Berlin, in 1995, and in Geneva, in 1996) stressed the importance of action, but quibbled over the means to the end. And yet, despite tough negotiations and the highly charged atmosphere of the third conference of parties (COP3), in Kyoto, Japan, the only document on the table about climate change -- the Kyoto Protocol -- was adopted.
It was at the Kyoto summit that the main bargaining points of an international agreement were delineated -- and they remain today. The US introduced the highly controversial concept of "flexibility mechanisms" (FMs), which treat the amount of carbon emissions allotted to a country under the protocol like currency. A country over its GGE limit can trade emissions or promote projects believed to "absorb" CO2 emissions (so-called carbon sinks), like forests or grasslands, in other countries. They might also fund projects in developing countries that would eventually decrease their emissions (known as clean development mechanisms). Negotiations over FMs dissolved the COP6 talks in The Hague in November 2000, and threatened to do the same when the Conference of Parties met again last month in Bonn, Germany. But a tightly crafted deal saved the last remnants of the Kyoto Protocol, despite significant watering down of the original deal and the US's refusal to sign.
Though it is a pale shadow of the original UNFCCC, most scientists feel that a weak agreement is better than no agreement, even without the US. The CMDL's Russ Schnell was pragmatic on the subject. "Something is better than nothing in this case, if one accepts that we have a major problem with CO2," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. "Agreements and treaties can be amended and modified. What one calls a treaty is not as important as what it does or where it could lead to. When it is in its economic interests, the US will do more on CO2 control."
Given the claims of so-called skeptics, one has to wonder if the doomsday scenarios are a way of provoking lethargic governments into action for a cause that is undeniably noble, even without global warming: a reduction of pollutants and a shift to cleaner energy sources. David R Easterling, principal scientist at the NOAA's North Carolina-based National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), goes a step further. "The end goal is an admirable one -- to reduce pollution and dependence on a fossil fuels, since these are a finite resource," he told the Weekly, noting that since there will be warming, it is a matter of how much we are willing to risk. "The question is how much it will warm and how fast. The issue is, we don't know how sensitive the climate is, and it is just as likely that we will have significant warming than little warming."
Others are even less equivocal. In her State of the World 2001 chapter, "Averting Unnatural Disasters," Janet Abramovitz, senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, DC, wryly notes that although the United Nations had earmarked the 1990s as the "International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction," this period "may go down in history as the International Decade of Disasters."
"Not every natural disturbance is a disaster, and not every disaster is completely natural," writes Abramovitz. "We have altered so many natural systems so dramatically that their ability to bounce back from disturbance has been greatly diminished." The idea that Abramovitz drives home is that we cannot wait until the disaster strikes, we must consider not having a "disaster" at all.
This point is stressed by Aubrey Meyer, director of the UK group the Global Commons Institute (GCI) and author of Contraction and Convergence: the Global Solution to Climate Change (Green Books). Without a feasible and binding plan for dealing with global warming, Meyer predicts climate change will wreak havoc on the developing world. Talking to the Weekly, Meyer noted that population increases will inevitably increase the number of people affected by natural -- and, indeed, "unnatural" disasters. "If these occur [in places] where there are already local conflicts over the use of land and other resources -- as with storms in Orissa or droughts in the Middle East, for example -- these impacts can only aggravate such conflicts."
With more and more parties pulled into the debate, it seems that more questions are generated, more data is ammassed and more agendas are plugged, while inaction remains constant. How to pin down a goal so elusive? This is a question the political establishment has never been able to answer.
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