DISCUSSION : HISTORY IN FOCUS
Climate Change
William J Burroughs.
A guide to our knowledge of climate change, and its implications for our society.
Global Issues
John Seitz.
The updated second edition of this book is intended as an introductory guide for beginning students.
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Global Warming
What's The Story?
Even the right wing press, normally so quick to diminish the credibility of any ‘green’ issue, gave their front pages over to global warming in the wake of the recent storms and floods in England. The History Channel charts the progress of this problem over the last 100 years.
The storms engulfing large swathes of England have dramatically revived the increasingly ominous global warming debate. Today there is no escaping the facts: the vast majority of the country’s, indeed the world’s scientists (so rarely in accord over any issue) agree that the temperature of the earth has been rising for at least a century. “Global warming” is the basic term used to describe this effect. Confusingly, though, the cause of this warming is something that scientists do not agree on. Believers of the greenhouse effect offer the following explanation: heat from the sun enters the Earth’s atmosphere, and is trapped by gases including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and water vapour. The sun’s heat is absorbed by these gases, preventing them from escaping our atmosphere, as they normally would. Simultaneously, there is an increase in the global average temperature.
The most threatening of the greenhouses gases is carbon dioxide, because it is the most abundant, and also takes an extremely long time to break down. But omissions of all of them have been accumulating since the industrial revolution, owing to human practices: the coal, gas and oil industries, the razing of forests, numerous agricultural practices and a myriad of other disturbances. At the moment, the rate of carbon emissions is so high that the world’s plants and marine matter are unable to absorb all of it. Concurrently, there is an increase in world temperature. And more and more of the groups and organisations that were initially sceptical, are being swayed towards to the notion that these two occurrences are related.
But still as vociferous are the arguments of the greenhouse effect detractors, who point out that from about 800 AD to 1200 AD, the earth's average climate was warmer than it is today - exactly one degree C warmer. Adding to this argument, the point out that there is no evidence of great flooding during this period, or of continents being submerged in water. More persuasive still is the suggestion by some scientists that this period of time is considered a “climactic optimum” – in other words, a fruitful, wonderful moment in the world’s ecology, and not a disaster at all.
Global warming is an extremely broad term, however – and the idea that all we’re facing is hotter weather is considered self-deluding. Amongst the possible effects of global warming are an increase in the severity of droughts, extremes of weather, an increase in crop damage by insects, and too high a temperature for many crops to grow in the first place. Furthermore – and this we were given a foretaste of during the floods – vast tracts of land could disappear under water, and mountainous areas effectively lose entire ecosystems.
Voices on either side of the argument have been getting steadily louder for over a hundred years, but those of the greenhouse effect theory have arguably been becoming more and more plausible, and harder to shrug off. Droughts and famine in India, starting in 1835 and lasting for four years, led to the very first connections established between environmental damage (in this case deforestation), and change in climate. In 1896, a chemist from Sweden proposed the theory that carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the burning of coal might enhance the greenhouse effect, and cause long-term global warming.
However, 20th century thinking on the matter has been far more confusing and disparate. In 1925 an American physicist, Lotka, estimated that industry would cause carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to double in the space of 500 years. A few years after this, however, the public was told to relax – the solution had been found. This ‘solution’ was the invention of chlorofluorocarbons, which were promoted as a panacea to the problem – cheap, non-flammable, and not in any way harmful to the environment. All the worry could be forgotten. The world was completely invincible once again, thanks to these marvellous creations.
By the 1940s, however, reports emerged that between 1850 and 1940 amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had risen by around ten per cent. There was a single voice of warming - one British scientist linked this increase to the warming in parts of northern Europe and North America that had been observed since the 1880s.
Deforestation
Deforestation became an issue of minor prominence only by the following decade, when an American study suggested that it would result in increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. By now, the United Nations had formed a special environmental agency, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a sign that the public mood was becoming less apathetic, and less sceptical. This change of attitude was accelerated in England by the massive smogs in London during 1952, which killed an incredible 4,000 people, and sparked the country’s first form of clean-air legislation.
Oceanographers added their two cents soon afterwards. In 1957, scientists affiliated with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography burst another of the nay-sayers’ bubbles. They declared that much of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide was not being absorbed by oceans, as had always been argued.
The report went on to explain that there were significant enough amounts of CO2 trapped in the atmosphere to cause the eventual increase of the Earth’s warmth. Carbon dioxide emissions were, they concluded darkly, “a large-scale geophysical experiment” with the climate of the world. The following year, a scientist – from the same institute – undertook the first serious measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide in an observatory in Hawaii.
Friends of the Earth was formed in America in 1969, a comparatively radical splinter group that had broken away from the Sierra Club, considering that organisation too conservative. This precipitated the emergence of several further environmental action groups – and for the first time, an environmental movement was visibly building strength. It was now predicted that once CO2 levels had doubled those during pre-industrial times, the world’s temperature would rise, in accordance, by over four degrees.
The start of the seventies saw a sharp increase in scientific theorisation – all abundantly conflicting and confusing. Firstly, it was proposed that coal burning actually cooled the earth, and that this might fight - cancel out even – the warming effects of greenhouse gases. This bit of false hope lingered for five years, before it was discovered that the ‘friendly' CFCs, supposedly so benign to the environment, were in fact contributing to the greenhouse effect. Methane and nitrous oxide were also added to the list of culprits.
The supposed cooling effect caused by particulates from coal burning was dismissed as negligible in 1976 by US and Swedish scientists. The same decade saw the first indication that the protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere was being progressively eroded by CFCs. Environmental issues were finally embraced – however gingerly – by mainstream politics, when US president Jimmy Carter commissioned the Global 2000 report.
Weather Forecasts
Predictions were increasingly gloomy: by 1983, reports emerged that the doubling of carbon dioxide levels would warm the global temperature by a possible eight degrees Fahrenheit. The political climate was getting equally warm – Germany’s leading green party won five per cent of the vote in 1983, securing 27 seats in the Bundestag. Worldwide, opinions clashed, sometimes violently. In 1985, the Greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior, part of a protest against French nuclear testing in Polynesia, was sunk by French intelligence agents in New Zealand, killing one crew member.
Meanwhile, NASA confirmed which side of the argument it was on; one of its leading scientists, James Hansen, issued a statement to congress, part of which read, “The greenhouse effect is here”. The United Nations Environment Program confirmed these words, along with the World Meteorological Organsation and the International Council of Scientific Unions, effectively forming a consensus (hotly disputed from other quarters). They now warned that continued warming was inevitable, even if a solution was put into action.
In preparation for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change undertook a new program, drawing up plans for an international climate change policy. 49 Nobel Prize winners and a number of scientific luminaries signed an appeal, reading, “there is broad agreement within the scientific community that amplification of the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect by the build-up of various gases introduced by human activity has the potential to produce dramatic changes in the climate. Only by taking action now can we insure that future generations will not be put at risk.”
When the United Nations Earth Summit rolled around in 1992, there was a wave of media interest, but a pitifully small amount of actual change – primarily because so many of the countries involved feared possible effects on trade if any conditions were imposed upon industries that bore responsibility for the CO2 increase. However, 155 nations did sign the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that was proposed during the summit.
These positive signs of change, though, were still constantly under threat from powerful organisations. For example, in 1996 the London headquarters of Greenpeace were raided by the Ministry of Defence, who removed all files and computer disks from the premises without explanation. At the same time, a new activitist group, Real World, formed by a coalition of 32 charities and pressure groups sprung up. It was becoming harder for government agencies to silence and stifle these voices or make them conveniently ‘disappear’.
The second Earth Summit took place in New York in 1997, reporting progress since the Rio summit, but – again – further agreements proved scarce, and no new deals were struck to deal with the escalating crisis. At a Framework Convention meeting in Kyoto, Japan, obligations to limit greenhouse gas emissions were finally agreed on. Parties agreed that they would cut gas emissions by 5.2 per cent, but not until 2008, and even then, they only promised to impose this reduction for four years, and reconvene to see if any effect was noticeable.
Today, it’s suggested that none of the small, painless measures already in place will do anything to solve global warming – and that the only solution is to end entirely our dependence on fossil fuels. This is a challenge that it is possible to meet within the next 30 years. Of course, the oil, motor, energy and coal industries have enormous muscle, and are prepared to flex it in a variety of hideous ways. In the meantime, the flooding of dozens of coastal areas is just one of the predictions in store.
And if the theorising is correct, then the blame cannot be laid solely at the doors of these industries. After all, we contribute to global warming every time we use a computer, every time we turn on a light, or draw a bath. Anything that uses energy derived from fossil fuels increases greenhouse gas emissions every time it is used.
Voices of dissent are no meeker than before. Indeed, one organisation – the Greening Earth Society – exists to promote the wonders of excess CO2, explaining “it is a benign gas required for life on earth. Our use of fossil fuels is helping give plants the extra CO2 they need to grow more lush and green worldwide. Animals will benefit as their habitat grows more abundant. Cattle and sheep will have more to eat.” For an increasingly bewildered public, the hardest part of the whole issue is to know where or who to get the truth from.