The UN’s big climate conference ended Saturday in Cancún, with claims
of modest victory. "The UN climate talks are off the life-support
machine," said Tim Gore of Oxfam. “Not as rancorous as last year’s train
wreck in Copenhagen,” wrote the
Guardian. Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican foreign minister who brokered the final compromise, described it as "
the best we could achieve at this point in a long process."
The conference did indeed make progress on a few important issues: the outlines of financial aid for developing countries to help them deal with climate change, and some ideas on how to monitor greenhouse
gas emissions in China and India. But it basically ignored the two
crucial questions: How much carbon will we cut, and how fast?
On those topics, one voice spoke more eloquently than all the 9,000 delegates, reporters, and activists gathered in Cancún.
And he wasn’t even there. And he wasn’t even talking about climate.
Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Why Obama and Cancún Miss the Point
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: At the
edge of the holidays, as everyone suddenly launches that familiar,
desperate search for the right gift at the last moment, let me recommend
a few books that have featured prominently at the site this year:
Andrew Bacevich’s bestselling Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (whose introductory chapter appeared here); the late Chalmers Johnson’s final great book in a remarkable career, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, significant parts of which were first written for TomDispatch; TD Associate Editor Nick Turse’s The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan, the only book out there making the case for getting out of the worst of all wars; Michelle Alexander’s sensational The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness; and Ann Jones’s powerful testament to women in the gun sights, War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War.
Two other books you don't want to miss: award-winning author John Dower’s newest work, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq,
which contains at almost book length the single most brilliant history
of terror bombing from World War II through 9/11 that will ever be
written; and for those of you who live in the San Francisco Bay Area or,
like me, simply miss it, Rebecca Solnit’s well reviewed delight of a new atlas, Infinite City.
And don’t forget my own new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, which has received superb reviews from both The Nation and American Conservative Magazine, a reminder of what a new world we’re actually in. If you’re interested in my past writing life, check out The End of Victory Culture, my
idiosyncratic history of the Cold War (updated through the Bush era)
which the inimitable Studs Terkel once called “as powerful as a Joe
Louis jab to the solar plexus,” or my novel about my long-time work
world of choice, The Last Days of Publishing,
which all these years later couldn’t be less dated. And keep in mind
that anything you buy after you’ve arrived at Amazon via one of TD’s
book links will contribute a little money to this site at no extra cost
to you. Tom]
At the moment, if you live in the American Midwest, where part of the roof of a football stadium just collapsed under the weight of a massive snowfall, or in Europe in the grips of a frigid cold spell, it may seem strange to be talking about warming, global or otherwise, no less vanishing ice. But the long-term trends seem
ever clearer as 2010 threatens to be the warmest year on record. With
the Midwest blizzarded in, it doesn’t seem as if melting ice should be
the story of the hour and yet the ice-face of the planet is morphing and
shrinking remarkably rapidly and global ice melt turns out to be -- if
you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor -- the canary in the mineshaft of
climate change, and so a leading indicator of problems to come.
In the Himalayas, which contain the largest non-polar ice mass on the
planet and whose run-off waters feed 10 major rivers in Asia, the
glaciers are receding and scientists, according to expert
Orville Schell, fear a “43% percent decrease in land mass covered with
ice in these mountains by 2070”; in Argentina, a Greenpeace expedition
has just presented evidence that the Ameghino glacier has receded by
four kilometers in the past 80 years; of the 150 glaciers that existed
in 1850 in what is now Montana’s Glacier National Park, only 25 remain today (and they, too, are melting away); in Greenland, where a 250-square-kilometer island of ice broke off a glacier this summer, fears about the “rapid disintegration” of the southern part of its vast ice sheet are rising; in the Arctic Sea, recent years have seen the rapid summertime melting of its year-round ice cover, leading toward seasonally ice-free waters; in northern Canada, Hudson Bay was basically ice-free this
November, a historical oddity; and even in the Antarctic, covered with
ice to a depth of up to three miles in some locations, the melting seems
to have begun.
Beyond the vision of rising ocean waters inundating coastal areas (in
or near which a significant portion of humanity lives), it’s hard even
to take in what this means for us, other than increasingly severe
weather and disruptions of every sort, potentially staggering migrations
of destitute populations, and the sort of future possibilities that
once were restricted to science fiction. It’s in this context that the
just concluded global warming conference in Cancún, enmeshed as it was
in the usual politics, has proven so expectably disappointing, as
TomDispatch regular Bill McKibben indicates below. The author most
recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, creator of the remarkable 350.org, and winner of the prestigious Puffin Prize,
McKibben understands that while almost anything on this planet is
theoretically negotiable, the rate of ice melt can’t be negotiated with
glaciers, nor the rise in sea levels with the oceans of the planet. If
only our politicians grasped the same. (To catch a TomCast audio
interview in which McKibben discusses various kinds of global-warming
denial, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
Everything Is Negotiable, Except with Nature
You Can’t Bargain About Global Warming with Chemistry and Physics
by Bill McKibben
Barack Obama was in Washington, holding a press conference
to discuss the liberal insurgency against his taxation agreement with
the Republicans. He said he’d fought hard for a deal and resented the
criticism. He harked back to the health-care fight when what his press
secretary had called the “professional left” (and Rahm Emanuel had
called “retards”) scorned him for not winning a “public option.” They
were worse than wrong, he said; they were contemptible, people who
wanted to “be able to feel good about ourselves, and sanctimonious about
how pure our intentions are and how tough we are.” Consider Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, he continued: when he started Social Security it only
covered widows and orphans. Medicare, at its start, only helped a
relative few. Sanctimonious purists would have considered them
“betrayals of some abstract ideal.” And yet they grew.
It was powerful and interesting stuff, especially coming from a man
who ran on abstract ideals. (I have t-shirts on which are printed
nothing but his name and abstract ideals.)
I don’t know enough about health-care policy or tax policy to be sure
whether he’s making a good call or not, though after listening to much
of Bernie Sanders's nearly nine-hour near-filibuster I have my doubts.
I do know the one place where the president’s reasonable compromises
simply won’t work -- a place where we have absolutely no choice but to
steer by abstract ideals. That place is the climate.
The
terms of the climate change conundrum aren’t set by contending
ideologies, whose adherents can argue till the end of time about whether
tax cuts create jobs or kill them. In the case of global warming,
chemistry rules, which means there are lines, hard and fast. Those of
you who remember your periodic table will recall how neat that can be.
There’s no shading between one element and the next. It’s either gallium
or it’s zinc. There’s no zallium, no ginc. You might say that the
elements are, in that sense, abstract ideals.
So are the molecules those elements combine to form. Take carbon
dioxide (CO2), the most politically charged molecule on Earth. As the encyclopedia says: “At standard pressure and temperature the density of carbon dioxide is around 1.98 kg/m3,
about 1.5 times that of air. The carbon dioxide molecule (O=C=O)
contains two double bonds and has a linear shape.” Oh, and that
particular molecular structure traps heat near the planet that would
otherwise radiate back out into space, giving rise to what we call the
greenhouse effect.
As of January 2008, our best climatologists gave us a number for how
much carbon in the atmosphere is too much. At concentrations above 350
parts per million (ppm), a NASA team insisted,
we can’t have a planet “similar to the one on which civilization
developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” We’re already past
that; we’re at 390 ppm. Which is why 2010 will be the warmest year on record, almost a degree Celsius above the planet’s natural average, according to federal researchers. Which is why the Arctic melted again this summer, and Russia caught fire, and Pakistan drowned.
So here’s the thing: Just as in Copenhagen, Obama’s delegation in
Cancún has been arguing for an agreement that would limit atmospheric
concentrations of CO2 to 450 parts per million, and the cuts they’ve
been proposing might actually produce a world of about 550 parts per
million.
Why have they been defying the science? The answer isn’t complicated:
because it’s politically difficult. As chief negotiator Todd Stern said
last year in Copenhagen, “We’re very, very mindful of the importance of
our domestic legislation. That’s a core principle for me and everyone
else working on this. You can’t jeopardize that.”
In other words, if we push too hard the Senate will say no, and the
oil companies will be really, really pissed. So we’ll take the easy way.
We’ll negotiate with nature, and with the rest of the world, the same
way we negotiate with the Republicans.
It’s completely understandable; in fact, it’s even more
understandable now that the GOP has increased its muscle in Congress. In
that context, even the tepid text drafted in Cancún goes too far. Four
Republican Senators sent Obama a letter
earlier this month telling him to stop using any foreign aid funds to
tackle climate change. If I were Obama I’d want to make some kind of
deal, and consider any deal as the start down a path to better things.
The problem, again, is the chemistry and the physics. They don’t give
us much time, and they’re bad at haggling. If we let this planet warm
much longer, scientists tell us that we’ll lose forever the chance of
getting back to 350. That means we’ll lose forever the basic
architecture of our planet with its frozen poles. Already the ocean is turning steadily more acidic; already the atmosphere is growing steadily wetter, which means desertifying evaporation in arid areas and downpour and deluge elsewhere.
