How Hot Is Too Hot?

June 24, 2002
By BOB HERBERT

One of the more startling stories in The Times recently was
Timothy Egan's article on the climate in Alaska, where the
average temperature has risen seven degrees in the last 30
years and mosquitoes have shown up in normally frigid
Barrow, the northernmost town in North America.

Large portions of Alaska are melting and other strange
things are happening. Just a few hours' drive from
Anchorage, a four-million-acre spruce forest has been
killed by beetles, a development that is both astonishing
and depressing. It is believed to be the largest loss of
trees to insects ever recorded in North America.

"Government scientists," wrote Mr. Egan, "tied the event to
rising temperatures, which allow the beetles to reproduce
at twice their normal rate."

Meanwhile, enormous wildfires have been raging in bone-dry
regions of the West and Southwest. Fires whipped by high
winds in the mountains of eastern Arizona have driven
thousands of residents from their homes. One local
official, Jim Paxon, said: "The forest is burning like
you're pouring gasoline on it. And the wind is like taking
a blow torch to it."

In Colorado, which is enduring its worst drought in
decades, residents have been trying to cope with at least
five major fires, including the so-called Hayman fire, the
largest in the state's history. Investigators believe it
was deliberately set by a U.S. Forest Service worker. The
long drought and continuing hot weather provided the
conditions that enabled this apparent act of arson to
explode into an unprecedented conflagration.

Big fires are becoming the rule. By late last week
authorities reported that in the first six months of this
year, nearly two million acres have burned or are currently
burning in the United States, which is almost twice the
average of the last 10 years.

Strange, indeed. Mosquitoes in northernmost Alaska. Much of
the West and Southwest ablaze. Extended droughts. Extreme
heat waves.

Can you say global warming?

The year 2001 was, globally, the second hottest on record.
The hottest was 1998.

Now imagine that just a few more years go by and the world
becomes hotter still, which will almost certainly be the
case. What then?

Do you think, maybe, we should be paying more attention to
this?

What is missing in most conversations in the U.S. about
global warming is a sense of urgency. A Bush administration
report earlier this month acknowledged that human activity
- the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping gases
into the atmosphere - was the primary cause of the recent
warming of the planet, and that the warming will result in
some extremely serious consequences in the U.S.

President Bush (who has distanced himself from his own
administration's report) wants to rely mostly on voluntary
- not mandatory - efforts to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. Under the president's strategy, it's estimated
that emissions will actually increase over the next decade.
We're speeding toward a wall and the president is not only
refusing to step on the brake, he's accelerating.

Ten years is too long to wait to do something real about
this problem. Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of
geosciences and international affairs at Princeton who is
an expert on climate change, has studied the imminent
threat that planetary warming poses to the world's coral
reefs. These are ecosystems so abundant in animal and plant
life that they are sometimes called the rain forests of the
oceans.

Dr. Oppenheimer noted that one of the essential questions
of the global warming debate is, "How warm is too warm?"

When you consider that the increased warming is already
threatening to decimate the world's coral reefs, and that
we're already seeing the melting of the tundra in Alaska,
and that alpine ecosystems are already being squeezed off
the tops of mountains, it's not too difficult to reach the
conclusion that "too warm," in Dr. Oppenheimer's words,
"isn't awfully far from where we already are."

Closing our eyes and pumping another decade's worth of
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at the current very
dangerous rate would not seem to be a very bright idea. The
gases remain in the atmosphere for centuries, and in some
cases millenniums, which means the damage cannot quickly be
undone.

What a miserable legacy for this generation to leave to its
children and grandchildren. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/24/opinion/24HERB.html?ex=1025914615&ei=1&en=126d6f23957be283