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Global Warning - Mar 3, 2008 - Printable Version
- Unanticipated Consequences of Global Warming
by Robin Buckallew
By now, everyone has heard of global warming, at least everyone who hasn’t been hiding under their bed or frozen in suspended animation for the past several years. Most of the people are familiar with at least a part of the list of consequences that have been predicted to accompany global warming – melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, drowning polar bears, diseases expanding their ranges, species extinctions – the list goes on and on. At the bottom of the ever expanding list of consequences, there is the fine print – “unanticipated consequences”. Unanticipated consequences is sort of like that catchall in your job description, “other duties as assigned”, that means your boss can ask you to do anything and everything, and you can’t say it isn’t in your job description. Unanticipated consequences means that there are a lot of things that might go wrong that we don’t have any evidence for, we’re not sure whether it will be a problem, or we simply haven’t thought of it yet in context of global warming. In other words, it’s a gray area, an “unknown unknown”, as Donald Rumsfeld would say. How big is this gray area? I wish I could say, but unfortunately, when you have an unknown unknown, you simply can’t even know for sure how serious your unknown is. It may be microscopic in scope, or it may be universal. I would like to talk, however, about one “unanticipated consequence” that is already occurring, though largely under the radar, posing a substantial threat to the future of the planet as we know it. This threat has gone largely unnoticed by the general public, the mainstream media, the alternative media, the politicians, and the environmental specialists. It has not been commented on in any public forum I’m aware of, and no one seems to be worried at all. I find this most unfortunate, since, of all the consequences, anticipated or unanticipated, that global warming will likely bring, this is probably the easiest one for us to do something about. I’m talking about our awareness. You see, what could turn out to be one of the worst of all negative impacts of global warming isn’t being caused so much by the warming phenomenon itself. It’s being caused by our awareness of it. I’m talking about our attitude. Our attitude as a society, our attitude as a species, is one of the most important factors right now in determining what will become of the future. Right now, our attitude is dangerous, and it isn’t the lack of attention we are paying to global warming that is the problem, it is actually the fact that we are paying so much attention to global warming that is the problem.
Global warming is the hottest fashion on the block right now, and everybody who is anybody is trying to wrap themselves in the latest colors (green, at this point, I believe). Websites are alive with global warming discussion boards and blogs. Children are doing assignments and posters on global warming in school. Corporations are touting the latest in their “new and improved, climate friendly” whatever. Politicians have included the words in their platform for the first time, and Al Gore has won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming awareness. Everybody wants their next SUV to be a hybrid, and compact fluorescent bulbs are selling like hotcakes. Global warming is “in” – so in, in fact, that the very fashionability of it could threaten to destroy the very fabric of the natural world, as it drowns out other concerns that are equally serious, equally globally threatening, and much, much more imminent. The sound of global warming has risen to such an incredible roar that it threatens to drown out every other possible sound that might seek to be heard over the din. These are all things we can deal with later – or so I’m told. I agree that there are many things threatening our world that can be dealt with once we’ve finally tamed global warming (which we’re not likely to do with any of the proposals yet on the table). There are many issues that can wait. There is one issue that cannot wait, and in fact is much more pressing and urgent even than global warming, because it is happening, it has been happening, and it has reached a momentum that is potentially catastrophic. I’m talking about species extinctions from habitat fragmentation.
Much has been written about the harmony with nature that we see in early civilizations – the so-called “noble savage”. We all know how our earliest ancestors lived in total peace with nature, destroying nothing, making only tiny footprints, until the western civilization spread around the world, bringing big guns, big machines, and big feet, spreading destruction in its wake. We all know about that harmonious early human time – but only because we are all so ignorant of our true historical heritage that we can fool ourselves all of the time. In fact, early man did quite a huge amount of damage to the world. On Easter Island, the entire flora and fauna of a flourishing ecosystem was denuded by early settlers who had a passion for large stone heads. In New Zealand, the extinction of the moa followed rapidly after the first primitive settlements. The moa was a large, flightless, tasty bird. It was so easy to catch and cook that much of it went to waste, with archeological sites revealing large portions of wasted meat still in the ovens from the once abundant moas. In North America, large herds of megafauna went extinct within a short period following the arrival of the first humans. Worldwide, entire species inventories were sacrificed to man’s hunger and ambition. Some of these species were eaten to death, but others suffered extinction in spite of not being at all useful to humans. Most of these went extinct from habitat fragmentation caused by the increasing population pressures of a growing human society. The true scope of this devastation will likely never be known, for many species will have perished unnoticed and unnamed, voiceless in a world that suddenly had no more room for them.
Now, as global warming lurches ever nearer, as the temperatures around the globe begin to creep inexorably upward, the tragedy of habitat fragmentation becomes even more critical. Throughout the history of the Earth, there have been numerous climatic cycles, with alternating ice ages and interglacial warming periods, placing different stresses on ecosystems and organisms to adapt to the fluidity of the turbulent world we live on. In the past, these climate cycles led to some species extinctions, but mostly they led to species rearrangements. Many species dealt with climate changes by migrating – southward as the glaciers crept down from the poles, then back northward again as the glaciers began to retreat again in the gradually warming world. Species often moved slowly (after all, a tree can’t run very fast, and has to rely on simply letting its seeds spread gradually into a new area), but move they did. If they couldn’t move, they died off. As a result of all this dynamic motion, the world we live in has been populated with a dizzying array of species, spanning a spectrum of diversity from the smallest bacteria to the largest whale or redwood. Motion, not stability, has been the history of this planet. Now, in a global warming world, the species will need to migrate again in order to survive. The main problem with this scenario is the fact that there is simply no way for them to migrate, in a world that has been plowed, paved, pesticided, and parched. Most species will find themselves unable to cross human cities, human farms, and human roads to get to a more equitable climate, and will simply perish in their old habitat that is no longer favorable for their survival. Many species have already been pushed to the brink of extinction by the relentless onslaught of bulldozers, plows, and other heavy equipment that scrapes the land barren of any sort of life in an effort to make it attractive to humans. Only small islands of habitat remain, often unable to support adequate populations to allow a species to thrive; now, as the world heats up, those islands will become even more inadequate, and the species will be unable to relocate. Meanwhile, humans will not likely notice, preoccupied as they are by their own world, the world inside their air conditioned houses and cars, the world inside their offices and shopping malls, the only world that matters enough to be noticed by the majority of the people I talk with about this problem. The issue of other species seems so abstract, so foreign to us, that we are unable to notice them even as they die off, even as they disappear forever from a newly unfriendly world, leaving it much blander and less interesting than before.
In all the sound and fury surrounding global warming, I have seen little mention of this problem. It becomes evident, in fact, that this problem isn’t being paid much heed to even by the policy makers and environmental activists that are making the most noise of all. The solutions to global warming do nothing to deal with the issues of habitat fragmentation; in fact, the one certain thing is that, should the current crop of decision makers get their way, habitat fragmentation will become even worse than it is now. All of the global warming solutions involve “fixing” our technology so that we don’t emit as many gases, without ever considering the need to change or abandon those technologies that are simply inconsistent with a healthy planet. Driving a hybrid car may seem like a wonderful thing, and an electric or hydrogen car even better, if all you’re worried about is emissions. If you really care about the world, however, it is only marginally better than driving a Hummer. You see, hybrid cars, just like Hummers, require roads and parking lots. They require substantial mining of steel, drilling of petroleum for the plastic components, mining of the groundwater to provide cooling in the factories making the giant metal machines, rubber for the tires, pollutants that spew all over the roads, and, of course, enormous, paved car lots to showcase these magnificent, gleaming machines. Habitat fragmentation will continue at the same pace as before, in fact probably will become accelerated as the desire for decreased emissions drives people to purchase still more “stuff” to use in a “greener” world, as the “stuff” they now have reposes silently in the growing landfills because they are not considered acceptably emissions free. We will continue to drone endlessly on about emissions, clean technology, and state-of-the-art solutions as the world continues to die around us, unnoticed and unmourned, until it’s too late.
I would like to ask you for a somewhat unusual favor. Please, for the next few days, stop talking about global warming. Don’t say a word about it, don’t think about it. Stop thinking about emissions. Stop thinking about what technology you’re going to invest in to help make you feel better about your contributions to the problem. Tell your friends you don’t want to talk about global warming. Tell them you want to talk about habitat fragmentation. Tell them you want to talk about species extinctions. Tell them you want to talk about REAL solutions to the vast array of problems that surround us, rather than simply have your attention misdirected to a simple, linear formula of zero emissions. Tell them you want to talk about the actual changes that you can make that consider the whole world, not just the human world. Tell them you want to leave behind a world that has something in it besides just roads and parking lots. Then, when we are all finally asking the right questions, we’ll actually have a chance of finding the right answers.
There is no substitute for the immense diversity of life that surrounds us. There is no state-of-the-art substitute for a polar bear, or a blue whale, or a redwood tree. There is no alternative for a three-toed sloth, a grizzly bear, or a spotted owl. There is no one who can create a “new and improved” California condor, grey wolf, or Florida panther using “clean” technology. If we don’t notice soon, they will join the passenger pigeon and the great auk, the dodo and the moa, as one of life’s footnotes. This particular footnote, however, will contain an additional citation: “Killed by man, who couldn’t take time to notice”.
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