Tuesday, February 21, 2012

The Upper Amazon: February 21, 2012



The Upper Amazon: February 21, 2012


            The following is a brief word from Foster Brown, the WHRC’s staff member and decades-long resident of Rio Branco in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon Basin. He offers a glimpse into the future of climatic disruption’s ramifications. GMW

Here in the southwestern Amazon we are undergoing floods of historic proportions.   Already more than five thousand displaced persons are living in public shelters.  The flooding in the Peruvian border town of Inapari extended more than an kilometer from the normal banks,  a flood exceeding all previous floods in living or recounted memories.   I had the strange experience of cruising up main street in a civil defense boat, watching our wake lap against shopping windows.

We are anticipating that the flood crest of the Acre River should peak today in Rio Branco, which is already at the second highest level in 40 years.    My job has been to help implant a early warning system for flooding; the system  worked but needs improvements.   However, since everyone in the region has been hit with the metaphorical two-by-four to get our attention,  my guess is that we will have a better system working shortly, just in time for the fires of the dry season.

About 200 Haitians in Inapari have suffered a double whammy of being barred from entering Brasil and then flooded out of their temporary refuge in a Catholic church.  I  have met several who manage one meal a day, if they are lucky."


 ---------
            It is becoming virtually impossible to write realistically, or to report honestly, the details of  systematic global disruption now underway without appearing to be slipping into hyperbole. The statement below on “Adaptation” for instance  was rejected recently by Bruce Alberts, Editor of Science, as “unbalanced”. One wonders what “balance” might be and just how objective perspectives are even at Science.GMW


Monday, February 6, 2012

ADAPTATION: Adrift in a Cloud of Fantasy



________________________________






ADAPTATION: Adrift in a Cloud of Fantasy

January 2012


            There is virtually no aspect of human affairs that is not affected by the cloud of uncertainty enveloping the earth as the climatic disruption proceeds. The density of the cloud varies with the beholder. At one end there is imaginative and vigorous denial based  on financial interests in the commerce of  energy. Among  scientists, too, there is a range of views from skepticism to hyper-objectivity bordering on denial, to deep concern. Many of these latter recognize that changing climate out from under all life, including oceans, forests and agriculture, presents a lethal threat to this civilization in the short term of years to decades. They understand that the current slide can easily become a cascade into a chaos that will reduce the human population to a fraction of its current  seven billion. That slide may be anticipated as the large pools of carbon stored in the Arctic peats and in the trees and soils of the Boreal Forest are mobilized by the warming and cook the planet. The fuse of the potential carbon bomb of high latitudes in the northern hemisphere is now lit.  The only sure cure is stabilizing, and then reducing, the temperature of the earth.

           
            The most common response appears to be exasperated cries for “realism” and for simply adapting to the changes as they occur: business as usual.  “Realism” as envisioned by economists and an increasing number of scientists asserts no chance of success in abandoning fossil fuels. In that view there is the necessity for adaptation, accepting the changes already experienced and anticipating more. That process becomes the policy, sustained by the hope of muddling through.  But the “policy of adaptation” is blind to the lethal feedbacks that take the climatic disruption to new and unacceptable extremes.  A limit on the extent of the warming has already been established in the public eye as a two degree C rise in the average temperature of the earth. That limit was a compromise established as a political and economic convenience, not a scientific consensus. The possibility of allowing the earth to warm to that level and not higher has never been established, only asserted on the basis of dreams supported by wishful thinking. The warming that has already occurred is at least marginally controllable by bold action now.  Would control still be possible after an average change in the temperature of the earth of two degrees and the Arctic warmed by as much as 4-6 degrees?  Almost certainly not.



            Despite the success of the Framework Convention on Climate Change signed in Rio in 1992 and subsequently ratified universally, seventeen Conferences of the Parties have failed to produce progress.  Progress would constitute effective action toward  stabilizing the composition of the atmosphere with respect to the heat trapping gases, especially carbon dioxide.  Over the years immediately following such a success, emissions from fossil fuels would have to be reduced further to maintain the equilibrium and, if the concentration in air were to be lowered further as it should be, fossil fuels would have to be substantially abandoned over several years.



            While an honest judgment may require skepticism as to the possibility of political action in abandoning fossil fuels, this skepticism should not be confused with skepticism  towards the evolving facts of climate science.  Basing policy on political or corporate opposition and the myth of adaptation amounts to an abandonment of hope and is a commitment to runaway climatic disruption. The response to such an assertion is, of course, denial: “we shall take every opportunity to reduce emissions and deflect the course of the warming”. Meanwhile, that policy accedes to the skeptics’ position and reduces substantially to zero any possibility of success in deflection. It assures the economic, social and political chaos of environmental collapse.



            The only viable stance for scientists and politicians is persistent, relentless optimism supported by imaginative and equally relentless efforts in research  and public affairs: insistence that the remaining primary forests globally be conserved as is, that 1-2 million square kilometers of  normally naturally forested land  be reforested with natural forests, and that fossil fuels be systematically abandoned within the decade before 2020. The transition can be to a new world, one our children can, and will want to live in. It will not be the analog of Haiti and Somalia of this moment, but  a variant of  new “green cities” and “transitional towns” set in an environment  wherein forests and fertile soils and all other life are as protected as in a park. We must envision, design and start building them now. There is no other way.



                                                                                    George M. Woodwell
                                                                                    Woods Hole, Massachusetts
                                                                                    January 2012