A rchive Date
[ 19-08-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Ecology ]
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[Global warming: We need some now
By CONNIE WOODCOCK
Toronto Sun
August 19, 2000
On a chilly August morning, when the thermometer outside the back door reads 10 degrees and you're wondering whether it's too early to turn on the furnace, it is awfully hard to believe in global warming.
When the CNE starts and you still haven't gotten around to putting away last winter's sweaters, the thought of a little more warmth isn't hard to take.
When you've put up with so much rain, there's mildew growing in your laundry hamper, global warming begins to sound like a darn good idea.
Still, I was a little surprised last week at the lack of attention given to a story saying the scientist who first alerted us to the whole idea of global warming is now backtracking a tad. Not that he's giving up entirely, but Dr. James Hansen has admitted that perhaps carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels was not the main cause of the Earth's recent rapid warming.
This is the same Dr. James Hansen who in 1988 warned a U.S. congressional committee that it was "time to stop waffling ... the greenhouse effect is here."
Furthermore, the scientist who works for NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, now believes global warming can be prevented without "economically wrenching actions."
SECOND THOUGHTS
And he isn't the only one having second thoughts. All over the scientific world, they're backing off on earlier predictions of calamity and finding reasons to believe that for many people on Earth, particularly North Americans, global warming may actually prove to be both useful and good. And there have even been reports that some of the satellite data used over the years to bolster the global warming story were in error.
Oops.
You'd wonder how a story of this magnitude could receive such little attention in the media, but only a couple of smallish stories appeared in Canada's major newspapers. Prime ministerial pieings, lost submariners, cloned pigs and the like were just too important, I guess.
This is no small turnaround. Global warming was the big topic of the late 20th century and there were all kinds of scare stories. Sea levels were going to rise and whole islands were going to disappear. The polar ice caps would melt. Elderly people would die in droves from the effects of too much heat.
The 1997 Kyoto Convention on global climate change tried to establish limits on greenhouse gas emissions by industrialized countries while creating incentives for developing nations to control theirs.
RISING SEA LEVELS
A recent British government study said the cost of defending the U.K. against its effects over the next 30 to 50 years would be $2.4 billion to reinforce coastal and flood defences to withstand the storms and rising sea levels expected. And that was only the beginning, the report said. Britons would have to spend another $30 billion to make new homes sturdier to face the worsening weather.
Global warming was already being blamed for all kinds of things such as increased levels of disease around world. A Cornell University professor has claimed it's happening already.
"Right now the evidence of significant global climate change is minimal," says Dr. David Pimental, an ecologist. "But there are already noticeable increases in human diseases worldwide. We're seeing the first signs that global climate change can influence the incidences of human disease. This change, combined with population growth and environmental degradation, will probably intensify world malnutrition and increases in other diseases as well."
Pimental has said global warming is behind all kinds of unattractive trends - the growth in the number of children who die from wood smoke every year, for instance, now at 4 million. (There's something I hadn't even thought of.) It also gets the blame for the 37% of annual deaths worldwide caused by infectious diseases. (Bugs of all kinds like warm temperatures.) In fact, it would be easier, and shorter, to list the things Pimental does not blame on global warming. But now, it seems, all that is up in the air and there are even doubts that controlling greenhouse gases will be worth the expense.
Luckily, I'm a skeptic and never really believed in global warming anyway. I was prepared to believe it only when palm trees appeared in my backyard and I started the spring gardening in January.
But lots of people have believed in it at great expense to their peace of mind. What calamitous future event will they be able to cling to now? The coming ice age? Only 10 million more years to go before humanity freezes to death? Well, why not? It has been a cold summer - and that must mean something.
Veteran journalist Woodcock appears Saturdays Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA]
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