Paul Watson: We need to prepare for life in a warmer world

Paul Watson

At the last Sierra Club Conservation Governing Committee meeting, there was a discussion about supporting hybrid cars to help prevent global warming.

Although I believe that hybrid and alternative cars and transportation should be promoted, I am wary of sending out a message of false hope.

Instead of tackling the impossible to try to prevent global warming, we should be focusing attention on how to live on a warmer planet. The Sierra Club could provide some leadership here. No one else is, to the best of my knowledge.

There is no preventing global warming. Global warming is a process we are currently experiencing and well into.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 governments in Mauritius last month that he personally believes the world has "already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon

dioxide in the atmosphere" and called for immediate and "very deep" cuts in the pollution if humanity is to "survive".

Of course that isn't going to happen. Humanity is incapable of putting on the brakes on industrialisation and as long as there is oil in the ground, it will be exploited. To think otherwise is unrealistically utopian.

The point is, however, that global warning has already hit the danger point that international attempts to curb it are designed to avoid, according to the world's top climate watchdog.

Dr Pachauri's comments angered the Bush administration - which immediately tried to discredit him. The Administration was embarrassed because the White House had placed Pachauri in his post after Exxon complained that his predecessor was too "aggressive" on the issue.

A memorandum from Exxon to the White House in early 2001 specifically requested the removal of the previous chairman, Dr Robert Watson, the chief scientist of the World Bank. Watson was removed at the request of the United States.

The Bush administration then lobbied other countries in favour of Dr Pachauri - a man whom former vice-president Al Gore called the "let's drag our feet" candidate. The White House succeeded in getting Pachauri posted to replace Dr Watson, who had repeatedly called for urgent action.

But Pachauri, being a scientist, changed his mind when confronted by the evidence.

Last month, at a conference of Small Island Developing States on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, Dr Pauchauri, the former head of India's Tata Energy Research Institute, himself issued what top United Nations officials described as a "very courageous" challenge.

He told delegates: "Climate change is for real. We have just a small window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to

lose."

Pachauri also stated that the widespread death of coral reefs and rapid melting of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic had led him to the conclusion that the danger point the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been set up to avoid had already been reached.

Reefs throughout the world are perishing as the seas warm up: as water temperatures rise, they lose their colours and turn a ghostly white. Partly

as a result, up to a quarter of the world's corals have been destroyed.

And in November, a multi-year study by 300 scientists warned that the Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, noting that the

ice cap had shrunk by up to 20 per cent in the past three decades.

They also reported that the ice is 40 per cent thinner than it was in the 1970s and is expected to disappear altogether by 2070. And, while Dr Pachauri was speaking, parts of the Arctic were having a January "heatwave" with temperatures eight to nine degrees higher than normal.

Dr Pachauri also cited alarming increases in levels of carbon dioxide in just the last two years. He suggested that this indicates that climate change is accelerating.

He added that, because of inertia built into the Earth's natural systems, the world was now only experiencing the result of pollution emitted in the 1960s, and much greater effects would occur as the increased pollution of later decades worked its way through. He concluded: "We are risking the ability of the human race to survive."

So what we have is a highly distinguished scientist who took the post as a sceptic on the seriousness of global warming, who after reviewing the evidence is convinced that we have a crisis.

The question is: what do we do about it?

I don't think hybrid cars are the answer and since no one is really serious about population reduction, perhaps we should seriously investigate just what we need to do to survive on a warmer planet.


* Paul Watson is a director of the Sierra Club, and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.