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Collectively we possess astonishing intelligence.
We build Large Hadron Colliders to peer into the very structure of matter. We launch space probes and telescopes such as the Hubble Telescope which permit us to gaze out upon the edges of the visible universe. We watch stars being born and observe galaxies dying. We have mapped the human genome and are starting to understand how genes express themselves, in interaction with the environment, into making human life and the lives of all species. We have all manner of technologies to make our lives more and more comfortable and interesting.
The problem is that our very success is a danger.
This danger arises from having built our civilisation on an unsustainable energy source: fossil fuels. Furthermore it is now clear that the energy we have consumed in building our civilization - in conjunction with the energy we must consume in order to sustain it - have altered our atmosphere in such a way that our planet is warming along with our oceans which are also becoming more acidic as they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The problems caused by fossil fuel consumption manifest themselves in myriad ways.
The mean planetary temperature is on an upward trend. Glaciers are in retreat. The Greenland ice cap is melting faster than thought possible. Massive ice shelves in Antarctica are breaking-off from that continent, fracturing into icebergs and melting into warming oceans. More and more of the Arctic Ocean is becoming ice free during the Northern summers. The summertime Arctic Ocean is predicted to be icefree by 2020.
The habitats of species are altering. Trees are moving further northward as rising temperatures allow them to survive in areas where formerly it was too cold. Animal species are being forced to adapt by migrating north or by seeking higher altitudes or are being pushed into extinction if they cannot migrate. Unprecedented numbers of species are becoming extinct or are endangered. The writing is on the wall and in libraries and on the Internet for all those who in the mad rush of Western Civilisation have the time to heed the warnings. An accessible and readable work on the subject is Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert.
Consider for a moment the implications of global warming for ocean levels alone. It is clear that the glaciers and ice caps are melting. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that should we manage to melt all the world’s ice the ocean levels would rise about 80 meters or 260 feet. This would displace one third of the world’s population; roughly two billion people. The USGS also indicates that a lesser 10-meter rise in sea level would displace approximately 25 percent of America's population. Large parts of Washington D.C. would be under sea water. Even though this latter event is something that many would view as an improvement., we all live in one world and under such a scenario we all are “collateral damage”. As ocean levels rise people along coastlines everywhere will have to seek higher ground. We know from history that the rights to this higher ground will be disputed. Wars will result from this environmental catastrophe. How will the world and its health care systems cope with a constant flood of millions and hundreds of millions of environmental refugees?
These changes, while happening now, will continue to occur, if unaddressed, over centuries. By the end of this century for example ocean levels can easily rise by roughly one meter. The Dutch minister of public works opined that his nation can cope with such a rise by spending less money to mitigate this problem than they currently spend on maintaining their bicycle paths. But for less fortunate nations such as Bangladesh such an ocean level rise would be catastrophic. Already the cities of London, Venice and Bangkok, among others, are having to spend billions of dollars to cope with present-day ocean level rises. The Maldive government is holding cabinet meetings underwater to highlight their peril.
The first ice to disappear will be in the world’s glaciers. The populations in China and India that depend upon this glacier melt for their drinking water will be catastrophically affected. As the planet warms, weather patterns will change. We will see repeats of the European heat wave that killed thousands of people. Emergency care will be needed for the people injured and displaced in extreme weather events that will become more frequent. Those numbered among the world’s hungry, presently one billion people, will increase and famines will be supplemented by droughts. Today six million people are in danger of starving to death in Ethiopia and Kenya where rain hasn’t fallen for two years. This "shopping list" of bad news merely scratches the surface of the negative implications of this problem.
What can we do about it?
As in all human matters there is a wide range of response to these disturbing and challenging issues. As Elisabeth Kubler-Ross observed in her seminal book On Death and Dying the first reaction people have to bad news is to deny it. True to form, some people deny that these things are happening at all or that we are responsible for them while others think that it is already too late, that the genie is out of the bottle and that the best we can hope for is the survival on a radically altered planet of a few hundred million humans clustered nearer the poles and at higher elevations.
At the beginning of the Second World War a group of scientists headed by Albert Einstein approached then President Roosevelt and informed him that science and technology had progressed to the point where a bomb of unprecedented destructive power could be built and deployed. President Roosevelt, confronted with these scientists and that information launched the Manhattan Project. This project, combined with attacks on the German heavy water plant in Norway, enabled the Allies to develop atomic weapons before the Germans were able to.
Yet today when virtually the entire scientific community is raising the alarm, many people who elect the politicians still play armchair scientist and doubt the seriousness of the dangers with which we are confronted. It is usual for epoch-making scientific discoveries to be disputed. Even after Einstein’s Theory of Relativity successfully predicted the bending of space by gravity, many scientists, Michelson for example, denied the theory and clung to his old beliefs in “the luminiferous ether”. Fortunately for us today, the Germans, motivated by anti-Semitism, also attacked Einstein’s theories. Those scientists of today sceptical of global warming would be a lot more believable if their activities were not funded by the petrochemical industry. The author has talked to many seemingly intelligent people who solved the climate change problem on their own and know that it is caused by sunspots, perturbations in the earth’s magnetic field or by self-interested scientists who have created the problem simply to obtain research funding. According to these people the solution is simple: Don’t fund the research and the problem goes away!
The deniers and sceptics are counteracted by those who think that we are already past the tipping point and that we have already initiated irreversible changes into our ecosystem. These changes are fuelled by positive feedback systems on our planet such as changes in planetary albedo and melting of the permafrost with its concomitant release into the atmosphere of massive amounts of the highly potent greenhouse gas methane hitherto locked into the frozen tundra. For these people, remedial action is futile and thus they advocate that efforts be directed purely at mitigation. For the majority of people occupying the middle ground there is a sense of unease combined with an awareness that we must do something - but what exactly?
“Things are difficult to predict, particularly when it comes to the future.”
The first thing to realize is that it behoves us to err on the side of caution. There is no opportunity to repeat the human experiment. We will not have a second chance to get this right. Neither will we be given another planet to take care of if we somehow manage, through collective inaction, to ruin this one. If Albert Einstein is right as he appears to be about the speed of light being an absolute limit we will never be able to travel to another planet even if we are able to locate one through the remote sensing devices we presently are using to locate stars with planets similar to our own.
Our sun’s closest neighbour is Alpha Centauri which is four light years away. Even if it had habitable planets it would take us ten thousand years to get there. To build a spaceship capable of making this journey complete with a new earth colony, an ark if you will, would require that the economy of the entire planet be harnessed to this effort for centuries. Over the course of these centuries there would be enough time for all the adverse effects of unrestrained fossil fuel based economic activities to manifest themselves. The bottom line is that we must use the precautionary principle in making decisions about the direction in which to steer our civilisation.
Even if you don’t like the pure global warming argument and even if you don’t like the precautionary principle argument would you be moved by the conservation argument? It is clear that fossil fuels were formed over the course of millions of years and that if we manage to burn them in the next few centuries there will be nothing left for our descendants during the millennia that it is theoretically conceivable for the human race to exist.
What do we do?
The short answer is that we must do everything. The author submits that the problem is sufficiently serious that we must make sustainability the guiding principle for the reorganization of our civilization. At present the guiding principle for the organization of our civilisation is an ever-growing economy. At present, nearly all political decisions are made with respect to the economy. In the new social order, growth must take a back seat to sustainability. The author submits that we have the ability to create a highly advanced yet sustainable society. What we lack is the collective will. One difficulty with mobilising this will is that the threat is still relatively remote and diffuse and hence the majority of people are unaware or uninfluenced by it.
A short “To-Do” list.
Social policy needs to be re-engineered with respect to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The two leading contenders for discouraging greenhouse gas emissions are the carbon tax and the cap-and-trade system. In both of these systems a price is put on carbon and the consumer is charged that price. With a carbon tax the consumer directly pays the price for the carbon they consume (and emit) whereas with the cap-and-trade system the emissions of large emitters are capped and the expense of meeting those caps is borne by those who consume the products of the large final emitters (us). Those emitters who can bring their emissions down below their cap can sell their credits to those who cannot meet their targets, thus encouraging efficiency.
The advantage of the carbon tax is that it puts the burden directly on those who consume carbon while the disadvantage is that it is a highly visible tax distasteful to those who hate taxes and to those who feel that carbon consumption should be free. The advantage of the cap-and-trade system is that it is politically expedient in that it is a hidden tax. The disadvantages of this system are first that setting and regulating the caps will be a political nightmare fraught with regulatory loopholes and second that it does not make the consumer aware of their own unhealthy planetary habits.
Other items on the "To-Do" list would be building sustainable cities and energy efficient transportation systems, designing and building energy efficient building, cars, trucks, appliances - indeed re-thinking and re-designing everything. Consumer awareness items could include carbon footprint labelling of all products. (Calculating the carbon emissions embedded in products is an extremely difficult task.) Personal favourites are intelligent traffic systems, traffic-free downtowns, priority given to bicycling and foot traffic and one person cars (90% of trips are taken by one person surrounded by tons of steel and glass designed to transport several people).
How urgent is the problem?
People in the health care field are more aware than most about how fragile life truly is. If there is a tipping point and if we are not already past it, we must do everything we can not to pass it and preferably stay well away from the brink. As health care providers who have more influence and more affluence than most, you can help in at least four ways.
First, use your influence to catalyze social change. Millions, even hundreds of millions of people are aware that things must change yet we still have not reached critical mass. The healthcare system is one system that nearly everyone comes into contact with. Use your influence to make people more aware of the dangers we face. When politicians come to you for healthcare, use your face time with them to have discussions about the need for urgent change in our treatment of our fragile planet. Why wait until the polyp becomes cancer before we take the necessary actions?
Second, use your influence as opinion leaders to persuade sufficient numbers of people to demand change from their politicians. Winston Churchill opined that democracy is a terrible form of government until you try to find something better. One disadvantage of a democracy is that, however necessary social change is, given that politicians depend upon the people for their power, until the majority of voters support it, it cannot happen.
To couch the results of the last Canadian federal election in simplistic terms, a plurality of people in Canada would rather have two cents off of an unpopular consumption task than an increased probability that the planet will be habitable for future generations. Hence we have a federal government with the dullest and least imaginative possible policy toward climate change, namely, we will follow the American lead so that we can have an ever-growing economy linked to theirs.
Third, as people who are more affluent than most, you can impose on yourselves your own carbon tax and invest in products that reduce your own carbon footprint even though the investment may not necessarily make sense when measured purely in terms of money. By making such investments you will increase consumption of these products, thereby bringing the unit price of the product down thus making it more affordable for others to follow your lead.
Fourth, raise the profile of this problem. Demand that the institution you are part of become a zero emissions workplace. Educate your co-workers and the public with which you come into contact about the problem and its solutions.
Life on our planet is so beautiful and so fragile. We simply have to protect it and not take it for granted. If you don’t, who will?
What the author has done about it?
In 2004 the author began the study of law at the University of Ottawa and while there attended the lectures put on by the Institute of the Environment. Prior to this time he was largely unaware of what was happening to the planet as he was focussed on raising a family, making a living and doing what he had to do. What he learned in the ensuing years has really opened his eyes to the point that he felt that he had to do something - whatever he could.
In order to add his voice to the debate he ran as an Independent Candidate for Parliament in the 2008 federal election. His efforts attracted some media attention and his campaign was highlighted on national radio. You can listen to the show that was done about his candidacy at http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2009/200909/20090901.html at Part 2 of the show. This show has been played four times coast-to-coast-to-coast. As part of this campaign, he set up a website at http://www.myspace.com/threepromises and invited people to go and view it. He spoke on the topic at all-candidates meetings and the like.
We may not be given a warning until the CO2 loading is such that an appreciable climate change is inevitable.
These efforts seem so puny compared to the problem but we all have to do what we can to achieve critical mass so that real change can occur. The author realizes that he has come “late to the party” and that this problem has been recognized for a long time. For example in 1979 the Charney Commission set up by President Carter concluded: “We may not be given a warning until the CO2 loading is such that an appreciable climate change is inevitable.”
I am a lawyer, not a scientist. I have had the luxury of associating myself with the Institute of the Environment at the University of Ottawa. I have had the time to read widely on the climate change problem and to follow closely the media’s coverage of the problem. I think I have a pretty good overview of the problem and the evidence concerning it. To my mind, the evidence is overwhelming that we have a serious problem, one far more serious than that discovered by Molina and Rowland when they realized that Freon, a substance previously viewed as innocuous was attacking the ozone layer. Carbon dioxide is an innocuous gas - but only in the right concentrations and these concentrations have been steadily rising due to our economic activities.
People in healthcare know the importance of early intervention and how much harder it is to reverse a disease that has been allowed to progress. We all have to do what we can. Very few of us have the influence or access to resources of an Al Gore, very few of us have the time or the inclination to run for Parliament, make speeches or write articles but all of us have some influence and can use it to put our shoulders to the wheel and help make critically needed change happen.
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