by BILL MCKIBBEN
The New York Times
September 4, 1999
JOHNSBURG, N.Y. -- As the hot sun sets on this long, odd summer, you might
try staring into the nighttime sky. Several times in the last few months,
observers in the lower 48 have seen "noctilucent clouds,"
which develop
about 50 miles above the earth's surface -- clouds so high that they reflect
the sun's rays long after nightfall.
They're spectacular -- and they're also out of place. These odd clouds
belong in far northern and southern latitudes, but global warming
seems to
be driving them toward the Equator. The same carbon dioxide that
warms the
lower atmosphere cools the next layer -- the mesosphere -- causing the
clouds to form.
Sightings as far south as Colorado are a big event, according to Gary
Thomas, a professor at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for
Atmospheric and Space Physics. "While they are a beautiful phenomenon,"
Professor Thomas told National Geographic's on-line magazine,
"these clouds
may be a message from Mother Nature that we are upsetting the
equilibrium of
the atmosphere."
Ten years ago, global warming was a strong hypothesis. Now, after a decade
of intensive research, scientists around the world have formed an ironclad
consensus that we are heating the planet. Almost daily some new piece of
evidence appears; the weekly editions of the journals Science and Nature
make "The Blair Witch Project" look like "The
Baby-Sitters Club." Forget the
piddling drought and heat wave that withered lawns and fields across the
Northeast this summer. Consider the real
news:
Spring comes a week earlier across the Northern Hemisphere than it
did just
30 years ago. Severe rainstorms have grown by almost 20 percent, precisely
what you'd expect on a planet where warmer air can carry more water
vapor. A
Navy sonar survey conducted this summer shows that the Arctic ice
sheet is
in many places 40 inches thinner than its normal 10 feet. Warmer
waters have
bleached coral reefs around the globe. Glaciers are melting. Sea
levels are
rising.
The question is not what we should do. Though it's far too late to prevent
global warming, it takes no special insight to deduce the policies that
would slow it down. Stiff increases in the price of fossil fuels would
quickly bring a new generation of renewable energy technologies to
the fore.
Raising fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks would end the
trend to
ever-bigger sport utility vehicles. And focused diplomacy and foreign aid
could keep developing nations from sliding into our
bad habits.
No, the question is why we've done so little. In 1992, President
George Bush
promised the world that the United States would emit no more carbon dioxide
in 2000 than it had in 1990. The Clinton
Administration instead watched with little apparent concern as our emissions
surged more than 10 percent. Congress refuses even to consider the
baby step
represented by the 1997 Kyoto accords, which would return us to 1990 levels
by 2010. The issue barely even crops up in the Presidential
campaigns.
The reason, I think, is that we don't yet feel viscerally the
wrongness of
what we're doing -- not just the very rational fears about what it
will be
like to live in a superheated world but, even more, the simple shock that
we've grown so large we can dominate everything. Earthquakes and
volcanoes are the only "natural disasters" left. Everything
that happens
above the surface comes at least in part from us, from our appetites
and our
economies.
I used to wonder why my parents' generation had been so blind to the
wrongness of segregation; they were people of good conscience, so why had
inertia ruled for so long? Now I think I understand better. It took the
emotional shock of seeing police dogs rip the flesh of protesters for white
people to really understand the day-to-day corrosiveness of Jim Crow.
We need that same gut understanding of our environmental situation if
we are
to take the giant steps we must take soon. Go outside: try to understand
that the sun beating down, the rain pouring down, the wind blowing by are
all now human artifacts. We don't live on the planet we were born on. We
live on a new, poorer, simpler planet, and we continue to impoverish
it with
every ounce of oil and pound of coal that we burn.
In retrospect it will be clear. A hundred years from now, people may well
remember the 1990's not as the decade of the Internet's spread or the Dow's
ascension but as the years when global temperatures began spiking
upward --
as the years when rain and wind and ice and sea water began
irrefutably to
reflect the power and heedlessness of our species. But how bad it
will get
depends on how deeply and how quickly we can feel.
It depends on whether we're still capable of shock.
Bill McKibben is the author of "The End of Nature," which
will be reissued
this month in an updated 10th-anniversary edition.
This selection is provided as a courtesy to interested parties.
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