by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
Author’s program note. Future historians, if any of Clio’s ranks
remain, will scrutinize this period of our planet as the days when Earth
reached its tipping point and began its descent to the unimaginable
horrors of the Apocalypse. At least this is the sobering prediction of
the International Panel on Climate Change, founded in 1988 by the United
Nations. This article highlights this panel, its work, its dire
predictions… and asks you not only to contemplate what is happening to
us all… but what you can do to save yourself, your family and the pied a
terre in the Cosmos for our vulnerable species.
But first, go to any search engine and smile. For not all weather
predictions are cataclysmic. Take the one made in 1982 by The Weather
Girls, also known as Two Tons o’ Fun. Their hit — their one and only hit
— was called “It’s Raining Men” and featured two plus-size
African-American women cavorting with scantily clad boy toys falling
from a beneficent heaven. It was cheeky, irreverent… and a superbly good
dance song. When this ancient body was much younger and more limber, I
cut the rug with it myself. Listen to it now…. because it’s the last
thing in this article that gives you absolutely nothing to worry about.
About the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
March 28, 2012 this Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists
released its latest bomb shell, in the form of a 594-page report. This
report represents an important development in its work. Up until now,
the panel has focused on the slow, inexorable rise of temperatures and
oceans as part of global warning. Their work, while important and
telling to anyone who could read between the lines, didn’t attract much
notice. Indeed, since it was the work of scientists and climate wonks
who never met a somnifacient phrase they didn’t like, their important
work went largely unread.
But this year and this report are very different.
This report is the first to examine the less common but far more
noticeable extreme weather changes, which in recent years have been
causing $80 billion annually in damage. As Stanford University climate
scientist Chris Field, one of the report’s top editors, says, “We mostly
experience weather and climate change through the extreme. That’s where
we have the losses. That’s where we have the insurance payments. That’s
where things have the potential to fall apart.”
“There is disaster risk almost everywhere.”
The conclusion of Field and fellow panelists is stark and cannot be
misunderstood. Thus, you can almost hear the instructions given to
participants at the start of their important work…
“Friends and colleagues. Our many previous endeavors reported facts
in a calm, deliberative fashion. We knew what the findings meant… but
because we were not explicit in our conclusions almost no one else did.
Thus we assuaged our consciences by reassuring ourselves that we had
done our work… and it was for others to draw the implications and do the
necessary follow-up work to make sure that the science we knew became
the basis for necessary policy changes. But this is no longer enough. We
must not only be accurate fact finders, but absolutely clear on what
this means and what must be done. In other words, we must go beyond the
usual role of scientist and behave as a citizen of the world committed
to saving our planet by doing what is necessary before it is too late.”
On this basis, the panel has produced what is to date their most important and influential work.
Item: Some places, particularly parts of Mumbai in India could become
uninhabitable from floods, storms, and rising seas. In 2005, over 24
hours nearly 3 feet of rain fell on the city, killing more than 1000
people at once and causing massive damage. Roughly 2.7 million people
live in areas at risk of flooding.
Item: Many other cities are also at high risk including Miami,
Shanghai, Bangkok, Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, Myanmar’s Yangon
(formerly Rangoon), and India’s Kolkata (formerly Calcutta).
Item: Entire countries like the Maldives are at risk, facing submersion because of rising seas and fierce storms.
Said Field, “The decision about whether or not to move is achingly
difficult, and I think it’s one that the world community will have to
face with increasing frequency in the future.”
At risk.
This report is unique because it emphasizes managing risks and how
taking precautions can work. In other words, it not only highlights
risks but is explicit in its recommendations about how to handle them.
In fact, the panel report uses the word “risk” 4,387 times… and gives
examples of how various cities and countries have learned from them,
thereby providing solutions and models for other challenged entities.
Item: Field pointed to storm-and-flood-prone Bangladesh, an
impoverished nation that has learned from past disasters. In 1970, a
Category 3 tropical cyclone named Bhola killed more than 300,000 people.
In 2007, a stronger cyclone killed just 4,200 people. Despite the loss
of life, the country is reckoned a success story because it was better
prepared and invested in warning and disaster prevention.
By comparison, a country that was not so prepared, Myanmar, was hit
with a similar-size storm in 2008, which killed over 138,000 people.
This avoidable disaster makes it clear why the work of this panel is so
important. Over 138,000 people might well be alive if the repressive
government of Myanmar focused less time and money crushing its people
and more on the early warning and other tools needed to diminish the
horrific weather effects that batter them so often and which this report
makes clear will worsen in the years ahead.
The worst is yet to come… unless…
The study — all 594 pages of it — is a Pandora’s box of looming
catastrophes. Tropical cyclones — including hurricanes in the United
States — will get stronger because of present-day and worse-to-come
climate changes. Heat waves and record hot temperatures worldwide will
increase with increased downpours in Alaska, Canada, northern and
central Europe, East Africa, and north Asia.
Action now… or worldwide grief later.
In the face of so much alarming news, all supported by exact science,
it is easy to opt out, confident there is nothing the average person
can do but wait and hope. Such a conclusion is not only wrong but
calamitous. Here’s what you can do:
1) Urge school officials to disseminate these findings so that young people, who have so much to lose, can be informed.
2) Ask your elected representatives what they are doing to stem the
tide and give us meaningful measures, not just partisan rhetoric that is
so out-of-place in solving this problem.
3) Make every day “Earth Day”, a top priority. For there can be no
progressive change of any kind if the very Earth is threatened, at risk,
and increasingly vulnerable.
And I tell you this: when all the water is polluted, when all the air
is toxic, when every once fertile acre is arid, we shall still have
money. For unlike all the other elements, God-made, money is man made;
so let’s spend what is necessary to ensure that our one and only home —
Earth — remains as secure as possible, as verdant and productive… a
place not of lamentation and anxieties but where all the crucial weather
information can be sung by Weather Girls who tell you, “According to
our sources, the street’s the place to go/ Cause tonight for the first
time/ Just about half past ten/ For the first time in history/ It’s
gonna start raining men!” And that’s a fact.
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