WASHINGTON D.C., October 2008: “Standing before the United Nations General Assembly in October 1987, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, President of the Maldives, made an appeal representing ‘an endangered nation.’ That year for the first time, ‘unusual high waves’ in the Indian Ocean inundated a quarter of the urban area on the capital island of Male’, flooded farms, and washed away reclaimed land,” says Janet Larsen, Director of Research at the Earth Policy Institute, in a recent release, “Rising Seas and Powerful Storms Threaten Global Security”. “Gayoom cited scientific evidence that human activities were releasing greenhouse gases that warm the planet, ultimately raising global sea level as glaciers melt and warmer water expands. The trouble extended beyond small islands; studies showed that rising seas would wreak havoc on the U.S. Gulf Coast, the Netherlands, and the river deltas of Egypt and Bangladesh.”
Fast-forward through two decades of swelling seas and more powerful storms and the call has moved from the need to study global warming to the necessity of dramatic action to stabilize climate. With small island nations in peril, these days President Gayoom evokes the vision of a United Nations where “name plates are gone; seats are empty.” He does not speak alone: this fall, some 50 countries, including a number of small island nations along with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the European Union, are planning to put a resolution before the U.N. General Assembly requesting that the U.N. Security Council address “the threat posed by climate change to international peace and security.” As Ambassador Stuart Beck of Palau has asked, “Would any nation facing an invading army not do the same?”
Without a dramatic reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, the global average temperature is projected to increase by up to 12 degrees Fahrenheit (6.4 degrees Celsius) and sea level could rise some 3 feet (1 meter) by the end of this century. Alarmingly, recent accelerated melting on the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets – which together contain enough ice to raise global sea level by 39 feet – means that seas could rise even faster than predicted.
There is but one problem with this continuing claim made by the Earth Policy Institute about the projected increase of global temperatures and that is that, according to finding from an Australian scientific research, the Earth has stopped warming up and that the temperatures have plateaued out about six to seven years ago and have not risen by even a minute fraction ever since.
In fact other source predict that we are entering a period of global cooling and the possibility of mini ice ages in the next decades.
The warming of the globe also provides more energy to fuel stronger storms. More-powerful storms can combine with even a modest rise in sea level in a dangerous synergy, allowing for ever larger storm surges that can flatten coastal communities. Because much of humanity, including many residents of the world’s major cities like Kolkata (Calcutta), London, Shanghai, and Washington, DC, are located in vulnerable coastal areas, hundreds of millions of people are directly at risk. A large part of the New York metropolitan area is less than 15 feet above sea level; a Category-3 hurricane could easily swamp a third of lower Manhattan.
The fact is that the Earth is going through one of its cyclic changes in climate as She has done ever since she has been in existence and that this is, more than likely, not man-made at all. This is not to say that we are not harming Mother Earth and causing irreparable damage in our exploitation of Her resources and in the way we pollute the world. However, as far as things look for just looking at millennia past Mother is having one of her periods and while she will recover from if we may not.
The problem lies that we, presently, are being told that we must cut carbon dioxide emissions and such and that this might stop the global warming which has now been renamed into “climate change”.
If, as some of us believe, that this is a natural cycle of the Earth and not made by man then we will be very hard pressed to change anything by cutting CO2 or whatever. What we must do is to prepare for the inevitable, namely the changed in climate that will come.
This is not to say that we must not stop polluting the Planet as we do. Far from it. Never has it been more pressing to clean up the air, the water and the land; to stop filling up holes in the ground with rubbish of all sorts that are a ticking time bomb; and to get away from the dependence on oil (which may be running out now) by getting away from the infernal combustion engine.
All together, one out of every 10 people on the planet lives in a coastal zone less than 33 feet above sea level. If higher seas and extreme weather render these areas uninhabitable, more than 630 million people could be left searching for safer ground. Yet no place in the world is equipped to deal with mass population movements or can accommodate millions of climate refugees. Fragile countries already stretched to their limits could be pushed past the breaking point into complete state failure. As British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett warned the U.N. Security Council, the risk of massive economic disruption and “migration on an unprecedented scale” make climate change a true security threat.
Only recently the British government and agencies has to back pedal as to the estimate to any rises in the level of the Thames and as to the predicted floods that would be a result of climate change and how it would affect London adversely.
Anyone who has lived in the UK long enough before the Thames Barrier was built will remember the way the Thames would flood nigh on annually and how the Embankment has been under several feet of water every now and then. Not to speak from other areas less well protected. Ever since the Thames Barrier was put in place and operation this is something that those that have come after that time have never ever seen. If you live in flood plains you must expect to get flooded some time, whatever.
Whatever the president of the Maldives said in 1987 so far his Island state, made up of mostly low lying islands, still exists and there are still streets in Male and not canals and rivers. Venice still exists as well, even though people had, nigh on, predicted that it would be gone soon, and that was years ago. Venice is not so much being swamped as that it is sinking into the lagoon in which it stands, built on wooden stilts. Shame no one seem to be telling the world that, however.
Most of the issue with people leaving their areas today has little to do with global warming, aka climate change, but with the fact that the land has been exploited to such an extent that it is turning into desert, such as in North Africa, or simply no longer bears any crops for a variety of reasons, whether in Africa or South and Central America.
When it comes to Australia, maybe one should look at the “records”, the verbal ones, of the Aborigines, for I am sure that they will tell us that that country always has had a very wobbly climate. The couple of hundreds of years that the while man has been there, though, has seen the country been destroyed and its fragile ecosystem, which always was fragile, has collapsed. Hence the problems faced by farmers in the outback and elsewhere in that country.
It is such a strange things that whenever modern methods have been introduced modern man, of whatever color, unless he is deeply rooted in a relationship with the land, has caused it to be exploited and in the end destroyed, whether in Europe, North America, or elsewhere. Remember the “dust bowl” of the 1930's of the American Prairies? Well, that was the cause of exploitation and today we have not improved upon this.
We are in severe problems but, while we must do all the things that have been spoken and written about, from reusing and recycling and reducing and so on, we also must come to terms with the fact that, more than likely, we will not be able to reverse anything as regards to change in the climate as it is a phenomenon of the Earth Herself and we must simply learn to live with it and prepare to survive it.
© M Smith (Veshengro), October 2008
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RISING SEAS AND POWERFUL STORMS THREATEN GLOBAL SECURITY
