Klimaatgekte: Al Gore zet tegenaanval in

[Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Bron:   New York Times
Datum:  27 februari 2010
Auteur: Al Gore
URL:    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html


We Can't Wish Away Climate Change
---------------------------------

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global 
warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity 
requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we 
know it. 

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our 
growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves 
in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending 
hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we 
would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar 
power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy - the most 
important sources of new jobs in the 21st century. 

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our 
grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that 
had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our 
hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted 
in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate 
change had simply made a huge mistake. 

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But 
unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed 
by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful 
scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing 
to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the 
atmosphere - as if it were an open sewer. 

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting 
rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about 
the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be 
partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of 
East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of 
hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately 
followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law. 

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is 
important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains 
unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists - acting in good 
faith on the best information then available to them - probably underestimated 
the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice 
cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in 
Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea. 

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, 
they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For 
example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. 
Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface 
temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several 
years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed 
last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern 
records have been kept. 

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by 
those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long 
pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of 
evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the 
atmosphere - thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in 
particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s 
important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the 
climate for the snowstorm. 

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made 
global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric 
temperatures. These pollutants - especially carbon dioxide - have been 
increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and 
forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of 
the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting - and seas are rising. 
Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their 
number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in 
many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The 
seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing 
serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to 
dangerous levels. 

Though there have been impressive efforts by many business leaders, 
hundreds of millions of individuals and families throughout the world and 
many national, regional and local governments, our civilization is still failing 
miserably to slow the rate at which these emissions are increasing - much less 
reduce them. 

And in spite of President Obama's efforts at the Copenhagen climate summit 
meeting in December, global leaders failed to muster anything more than a 
decision to 'take note' of an intention to act. 

Because the world still relies on leadership from the United States, the failure 
by the Senate to pass legislation intended to cap American emissions before 
the Copenhagen meeting guaranteed that the outcome would fall far short of 
even the minimum needed to build momentum toward a meaningful solution. 

The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus 
far prevented action by the Senate - not only on climate and energy 
legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a 
host of other pressing issues.

This comes with painful costs. China, now the world’s largest and fastest-
growing source of global-warming pollution, had privately signaled early last 
year that if the United States passed meaningful legislation, it would join in 
serious efforts to produce an effective treaty. When the Senate failed to follow 
the lead of the House of Representatives, forcing the president to go to 
Copenhagen without a new law in hand, the Chinese balked. With the two 
largest polluters refusing to act, the world community was paralyzed. 

Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the 
chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and 
difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that 
began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based 
solution. 

But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily 
apparent alternative that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to 
imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax or a coordinated multilateral 
regulatory effort. The flexibility of a global market-based policy - 
supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral tax policies - is the option 
that has by far the best chance of success. The fact that it is extremely 
difficult does not mean that we should simply give up. 

Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed 
to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach. The 
lags in the global climate system, including the buildup of heat in the oceans 
from which it is slowly reintroduced into the atmosphere, means that we can 
create conditions that make large and destructive consequences inevitable 
long before their awful manifestations become apparent: the displacement of 
hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse 
of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the 
spread of deadly diseases.

It's important to point out that the United States is not alone in its inaction. 
Global political paralysis has thus far stymied work not only on climate, but on 
trade and other pressing issues that require coordinated international action.

The reasons for this are primarily economic. The globalization of the 
economy, coupled with the outsourcing of jobs from industrial countries, has 
simultaneously heightened fears of further job losses in the industrial world 
and encouraged rising expectations in emerging economies. The result? 
Heightened opposition, in both the industrial and developing worlds, to any 
constraints on the use of carbon-based fuels, which remain our principal 
source of energy. 

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s 
led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide 
and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a 
hubristic 'bubble' of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of 
regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal 
boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, 
markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and 
regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of 
the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated. 

This period of market triumphalism coincided with confirmation by scientists 
that earlier fears about global warming had been grossly understated. But by 
then, the political context in which this debate took form was tilted heavily 
toward the views of market fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing 
constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be 
needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the 
atmosphere. 

Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some 
industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on 
unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more 
entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation - just 
as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for 
four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the 
lung and the heart.

Simultaneously, changes in America's political system - including the 
replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant 
medium of communication - conferred powerful advantages on wealthy 
advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and 
regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen 
masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as 
entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in 
the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label 
as 'socialist' any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the 
rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and 
so little done, the truth about the climate crisis - inconvenient as ever - must 
still be faced. 

The pathway to success is still open, though it tracks the outer boundary of 
what we are capable of doing. It begins with a choice by the United States to 
pass a law establishing a cost for global warming pollution. The House of 
Representatives has already passed legislation, with some Republican 
support, to take the first halting steps for pricing greenhouse gas emissions.

Later this week, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are 
expected to present for consideration similar cap-and-trade legislation.

I hope that it will place a true cap on carbon emissions and stimulate the rapid 
development of low-carbon sources of energy. 

We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely 
quoted as having said, 'Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. 
Sometimes, you must do what is required.' Now is that time. Public officials 
must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must 
demand that they do so - or must replace them. 

--------
Al Gore, the vice president from 1993 to 2001, is the founder of the Alliance 
for Climate Protection and the author of 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the 
Climate Crisis.' As a businessman, he is an investor in alternative energy 
companies.

--------
(c) 2010

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