“Let me give you one example; recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy, a very distinguished journal in the United States, a refereed journal, they took two climate models that bracket most of the climate models we have and they applied them to California.
They found in the least alarmist climate model the amount of Sierra snow pack in this century will decrease from 30% to 70% and the Alpine forest will decrease by a factor of two or three. In the most alarmist model it goes from 70% to 93%. Well, California can't even sustain at 20% decrease in snow pack. When we have a 20% decrease in snow pack two years in a row our lawns die because it's water rationing. That's 20%. So let's take the middle bracket, 30% to 70%, say 50% decrease of average snow pack in California in the least alarmist model...that's a disaster. That is an unmitigated disaster. At 50%, 80% this is going to be migration out of California. Forget about drinking water, forget about agriculture, forget about the ski season.
Okay, so wouldn't it be prudent risk management to do something about this? Not only that, it's not just California's problem; the Himalayas are melting more than a metre per year on average. The Himalayas supply rivers-the Ganges, the Yellow River, they supply ten major river basins-and they are partial supply to about half the people of the world. Already Northern China is facing droughts over the last ten years and the projections are that as the Himalayas melt, this slow, steady source of water will go away. So what you get, just like in California, you get rainy seasons and dry seasons, so you get floods in the rainy seasons and then drought. Just like in California; it rains three or four months, rest of it doesn't rain, beautiful weather. That's because we've got this natural storage system.
The glaciers and snow pack and forests are wonderful natural storage systems. Climate change will disrupt that massively, and because we now have geographical borders that took centuries to millennia to establish, you can't just migrate to where there's water and sun, there's going to be political upheaval. So this is what the world is facing. The appreciation of these problems and the magnitude of these problems, the fact that if you stick that much CO2 in the air...there is a debate; how long will it take to get back to the original state? Well, scientists aren't sure. Some say 200 years, some say 3,000 years. No one is saying 10 years or 50 years. It's hundreds of years to millennia, okay? So this is a problem. So at this point I'm saying to myself if I can do something to help get people to acknowledge the problem and to inspire scientists to think about the problem, maybe I should be doing that.”
- Steve Chu, who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for physics and is now director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, part of the University of California
1 comment:
But what's a country or even a planet to do? Even if these estimates turn out right, Kyoto doesn't do nearly enough to prevent this. Anything that does is bound to be significantly more expensive than Kyoto, and it might be cheaper to just move everyone to someplace with more stable rainfall.
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