Originally published 24 April 2001
I own a house on a beach in the Bahamas. It’s a great place to hole up and write. No heat, no air conditioning, no television. Warmed by the sun, cooled by breezes, entertained by sunrises and sunsets.
If worse-case predictions for global warming turn out to be true, my little house is threatened. A 1‑meter rise in sea level would submerge the beach. A 2‑meter rise would lap at the foundations. A 10-meter rise would put most of the Bahamas under water.
But it won’t happen while I’m in residence. The consequences of global warming are something my children and grandchildren will face. For the time being, I’m more worried about hurricanes.
Of course, the chances that a devastating hurricane will sweep our island are slim. Hurricane Lili in 1996 did a lot of damage, but mostly to homes that were built before modern codes. The most recent storm that might have taken my roof off was in the 1920s.
Nevertheless, like most home and business owners, I’m a prudent man. I spend about 1 percent of the value of the house each year on hurricane insurance. And no one thinks I’m a fool.
Which brings me back to global warming.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas; it traps the sun’s heat at the Earth’s surface like glass in a greenhouse. Currently, we are spewing about 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually by burning fossil fuels. Unless steps are taken to control emissions, we could be emitting 35 to 40 billion tons of CO2 by the end of the century.
What will this mean?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause average global temperatures to rise as much as 6 degrees centigrade above present levels. Possible consequences are a significant rise in sea level, crop failures, and extreme weather. All continents will suffer economic losses, the panel stated, but the developing and island nations will be most affected.
Reduction of crop yields in warm countries, decreased water resources in dry regions, widespread starvation and disease are other possible concerns. In the worst-case, doomsday scenarios, ice sheets melt in the Arctic and Antarctic, causing massive coastal flooding.
It was as a hedge against these potential disasters that 174 nations signed the Kyoto Protocol, drawn up in Japan in 1997, which commits signatories to collective cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to a modest 5.2 percent of 1990 levels over the next decade.
The United States is a signatory to the Protocol, but the Bush administration walked away from it, reversing a campaign promise to reduce greenhouse emissions, and embarrassing his head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christine Whitman. The move is widely interpreted as a sop to the coal and oil industries.
But Bush is not without supporters. Opponents of the Kyoto Protocol imagine crippling economic effects if the United States commits itself to the proposed greenhouse gas reductions. In spite of an increasingly strong scientific consensus that global warming is a real and present danger, protocol opponents point out that the predictions by the climate change panel are based on incomplete knowledge of climate systems. The Earth may be better able to compensate for artificial atmospheric changes than scientists realize, they contend.
The key word here is “may.” No one knows with certainty what will be the consequences of the billions of tons of greenhouse gases we pour into the atmosphere. The effects may be relatively minor (as conservative think tanks insist), or even more devastating than the panel predicts (as green doomsayers contend).
Which brings us to the appropriate response.
The Panel on Climate Change estimates that industrialized countries could achieve the Kyoto Protocol’s emissions target at a cost of no more than 2 percent of gross domestic product, and perhaps much less. In other words, we can protect ourselves against potentially severe economic and environmental consequences of global warming for the equivalent of what I pay for hurricane insurance on my Bahamian house. This should not be a matter of political or scientific debate. It is simple prudence.
There is another key word in the discussion — global. The United States is the world’s most prolific source of greenhouse emissions, but the consequences of global warming will not be confined to our national borders. If we make the wrong political decision, based upon scientific uncertainty or economic conservatism, the entire planet will suffer the consequences.
Bush justified walking away from the Kyoto Protocol by saying, “We must be very careful not to take actions that could harm [American] consumers.” If his conservatism was a bit more compassionate, he might think about taking actions that could harm the billions of people worldwide who even now have little to consume.
