David Suzuki

by David Suzuki

  Throughout my visit, my emphasis was not that the people should stay frozen in the past. They must decide on the importance of their traditions and the attraction of economic growth. One of the pilots of a small plane Nick had arranged for me on my first visit had huge holes in his nose and ears, where he clearly wore large plugs in his off time. In the pilot's seat, his appearance seemed rather incongruous, but Papua New Guineans have computers, video cams, and all the other accoutrements of modern society. The question is whether they will slavishly follow the path of globalization, which is reducing cultural and biological diversity all over the world, or whether they will keep their culture and knowledge as the basis for finding a sustainable future.

  William Takaku, environmental activist, artist, and actor,

  who starred in the movie Friday with Pierce Brosnan

  In my talks, I reiterated the priceless nature of their traditional knowledge, lore painstakingly acquired over thousands of years and, once lost, never recoverable. My message resonated strongly with the young activists I met, but not with the non-Papua New Guineans, who were there for the economic opportunities.

  I was scheduled to meet various businesspeople, politicians, and other important folks for a breakfast on my last day. I was placed next to the governor general, a physically imposing Papua New Guinean who had no pretensions and was down to earth in his conversation with me. While he was eating, I looked at his profile and realized I could see through the cartilage of his nose between his nostrils. He must at some time have worn a nosepiece.

  I was also scheduled to give a talk that would be broadcast live across Papua New Guinea, a terrific opportunity, because radio was (and is) still the principal means of communication. I gave what must have been an unusual, even radical, speech about the need for the people to decide for themselves what matters most to them and to protect that above all else. They shouldn't allow officials like the World Bank people to set the agenda for them. My talk was met with great enthusiasm.

  Unknown to us, as my speech began, an Australian who was in mining in Papua New Guinea became so incensed that he drove to the radio station that was beaming my speech, walked in, and pulled the wires out of the console, stopping the broadcast! Blithely ignorant of this, I went to the airport after the broadcast and left the country. I heard only later that inflamed listeners called in, many saying the expat should be killed, and that he was subsequently kicked out of the country. In April 2005, I attended a conference of Pacific countries on tourism, held in Macao, where a Papua New Guinean came up to me and said, “I was there at your speech that morning.” Apparently it has become legendary.

  chapter FIFTEEN

  KYOTO AND CLIMATE CHANGE

  HUMAN BEINGS HAVE become so powerful that we are altering the chemistry of the very atmosphere that sustains us. Scientists have speculated on this possibility since the nineteenth century, but for the average person, it has only recently become a matter of concern.

  We tend to assume that the atmosphere reaches the heavens. But air within which life can exist is only five or six miles deep; many of us can easily run that distance. When I interviewed Canadian astronaut Julie Payette for the film series The Sacred Balance, she said that each time she circled the planet on her voyage in space she could see with every sunrise and sunset the thin layer just above the earth—the atmosphere. “We were way above it,” she said. “Below that thin layer is where life flourishes and above it, there is nothing; it's a vacuum.”

  If we were to reduce the planet to the size of a basketball, the atmosphere would be thinner than a layer of plastic we use to wrap sandwiches. And that is what we pour our effluents into every time we drive a car and every time our factories send pollutants through their smokestacks.

  More than three billion years ago, plants appeared and began to photosynthesize, taking up carbon dioxide and combining it with water and energy from the sun to begin the process of carbon chain formation, which generates all of the molecules necessary for life. A byproduct of the chemical reactions in this process was oxygen. Before there were plants, the atmosphere was toxic for animals like us, since it was heavily laden with carbon dioxide and devoid of oxygen. Plants created the oxygen-rich atmosphere on which we depend and removed the carbon dioxide generated as part of respiration to keep the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at about 280 parts per million (ppm). But for more than a century, modern industrial activities have generated so much carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels that all the plants on land and in the oceans can't keep up with it, and carbon dioxide has been accumulating in the atmosphere.

  The fundamental mechanism of global warming is not contentious. Naturally occurring molecules such as water, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide reflect infrared or heat waves. These molecules in the atmosphere act in the way glass on a greenhouse behaves, allowing sunlight to pass through but reflecting heat; hence these molecules are called greenhouse gases. On Mars, which has a very thin atmosphere, temperatures ricochet between the boiling heat of day and the freezing cold of night because there is no blanket of greenhouse gases to keep the heat on the planet. In contrast, Venus is permanently covered with a thick cloud of carbon dioxide, so surface temperatures are in the hundreds of degrees. Earth has had just the right combination of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to stabilize temperatures between day and night and enable life to evolve and flourish.

  Careful studies conducted in Hawaii for over fifty years have registered the unequivocal rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 280 ppm in preindustrial times to the present 362 ppm, a 32 percent increase. The upward curve in the rate of increase suggests that if we carry on with business as usual, we will double the concentration long before the end of the century. These studies also suggest that if we were to cut all our emissions by half overnight, thereby bringing our annual emissions to a level that can be reabsorbed by all photo-synthetic activity within the biosphere, it will still take hundreds of years before the temperature changes from what we have already added to the atmosphere will level out, first in the air, then on land, and finally in the oceans. In other words, we have already set in motion an experiment with Earth that will not be fully played out for many, many more generations of humans.

  Since the mid-1980s, I had known that the buildup of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide might be on a scale sufficient to affect our climate. But I thought there were far more pressing immediate issues, like toxic pollution, deforestation, and species extinction, and that climate change was a slow-motion disaster that would not really kick in for generations. It was only in 1988, when I first visited Australia, that Phil Noyce, my host, convinced me it was an urgent issue that needed action now. In the autumn of that year, climate experts from all parts of the world, who were gathered in Toronto for a major conference on the atmosphere, warned that the threat of global warming was real and called for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 20 percent in fifteen years.

  That year, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of hundreds of climatologists from many countries, to monitor the state of global climate. Sadly, hindsight reveals that had governments responded and met that challenge beginning in 1988, the air today would be cleaner, people healthier, and fossil fuels more plentiful, and we would be saving hundreds of billions of dollars and be well along the path to achieving an emission level that could be absorbed by the biosphere.

  At the height of global concern about the environment, governments and nongovernmental organizations planned the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The countries attending the summit agreed to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at the 1990 levels by 2000, but most countries, including Canada, merely called for “voluntary compliance” with the targets. In the meantime, the fossil fuel industry launched an aggressive campaign to discredit the very idea that human activity was influencing climate, and the use of fossil fuels and
thus greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise.

  In 1995, to film for The Nature of Things, I attended a conference on climate organized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Geneva. Hundreds of IPCC climatologists from more than seventy nations had painstakingly assessed thousands of scientific papers on weather and climate, and they concluded in 1990 in their first major assessment that global climate was warming, and that the change was not part of a natural cycle. In 1995, the IPCC's second assessment concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” Though it seemed to me a pretty tepid conclusion—in the global arena, delegates are under enormous scrutiny and pressure from groups like governments and industries—this was a powerful warning. The IPCC's third assessment, released in 2001, was even stronger.

  In Geneva, I was deeply moved by two delegates I met there. One was a Kenyan farmer who said traditional farmers used the cyclical appearance and disappearance of different plants as the cues to start plowing, planting, and harvesting, but they were having difficulty because these wild indicator plants seemed to be out of phase. Here was a scientifically uneducated farmer, dependent on external signals for his livelihood, reporting signs that climate was changing. I also encountered a South American Indian who told me that even on the equator, where there are not the traditional seasons that we know, plants were behaving in strange, never-before-seen ways.

  Unfortunately, these traditional people did not have PhDs and were not fluent in the jargon of science, and like the people living on tropical coral atolls threatened by rising waters and the Inuit of the Arctic reporting on melting permafrost, they were paid little heed.

  The IPCC continues its work, especially refining computer models and carefully refuting the arcane objections (satellite readings fail to confirm ground level measurements, sunspots are the primary cause of warming, models have no basis in reality, et cetera) of a handful of nay-sayers, most of whom are funded by the fossil fuel industry. Overall, the enormous undertaking by the IPCC has merely made the warnings of 1988 stronger and more urgent.

  Most climatologists believe the evidence is overwhelming that the atmosphere is warming unnaturally, that humans are the major contributor to this warming, and that immediate action is needed to counter the effects. Sadly, the renowned science-fiction writer Michael Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, has recently published a sci-fi thriller, State of Fear, based on the premise that environmental extremists are creating ecological crises to frighten people into supporting them. It is a preposterous thesis that seems to legitimate the idea that climate change is not real and does not require action.

  There have been other books that purport to disprove climate change, many of them written by ideologues who dismiss environ-mentalists out of hand or who have a vested interest in industry. Gregg Easterbrook was an environmental writer for Newsweek and other publications, so his suggestion that environmentalists had been so successful that they had achieved most of their goals was taken very seriously, though it was refuted by many eminent ecologists and experts. Academic Bjørn Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist has been embraced by right-wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute in Vancouver and business organizations. Again, a great deal of effort has had to be made to counter Lomborg's claim that the state of the environment is far better than environmentalists acknowledge.

  One of the remarkable aspects of the IPCC work is the consensus of all but a handful of climatologists. Very few new ideas in science achieve such agreement among the overwhelming majority of experts. Consider biology—evolution is the fundamental basis on which our interpretation of life on Earth rests, yet there are hundreds of people with PhDs in biology who believe in the biblical version of Creation and deny evolution. Complete, 100 percent agreement is seldom achieved in science, so when most climatologists agree about something, their conclusions must be considered compelling.

  Crichton ends his novel with a rant of his personal opinions, complete with references and footnotes that give the illusion he is writing a scientific treatise. He argues from examples in the history of medicine where consensus has proved to be wrong to discredit the IPCC conclusions. For example, doctors once universally believed that pellagra was the result of bacterial infection when it was actually a dietary deficiency. Physicians used to believe that deliberate bleeding cured a variety of problems and that ulcers could not be caused by bacteria. But in the world of medicine, as Harvard Medical School director Eric Chivian points out, doctors are trained to intervene when the evidence may not be absolute but where the dangers of not acting become too perilous. For example, one cannot be absolutely sure of a diagnosis of appendicitis before operating, because the risks of peritonitis and fatal septicemia from a ruptured appendix are too great. This is comparable to the need to act on global warming—except that here, as Chivian says, “we're dealing with the lives of billions of people.”

  Some opponents of reducing greenhouse gas emissions accept that the climate is changing, but they argue that we need a higher level of certainty that we are the cause, and that until we are completely convinced, we can't afford to act. The Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider asks how much certainty is necessary to act. He believes the evidence of human-induced climate change is at least 70 percent certain, a figure that skeptics pounce on as far too uncertain for action. Schneider responds by asking rhetorically, if we were told a sandwich had a 70 percent chance of containing a deadly poison, would we eat it? Of course not. So if we are performing an experiment on the only home we have, planet Earth, what level of certainty do we require, especially if the warnings of scientists are accurate and the consequences of not doing anything will be catastrophic? Even if those scientists are wrong, taking action will lead to enormous benefits in health, greater energy supplies, cleaner environment, and vast economic savings.

  The projected effects of rising greenhouse gas levels are based on the amount of fossil fuels burned, methane liberated from landfills, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCS) released, and so on. But it is known that there are massive deposits of methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, frozen beneath the permafrost in the Arctic and on the ocean floor. Inuit people in the circumpolar countries have been warning for years that permafrost is melting, something even the rabidly anti-climate-change senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, has finally acknowledged is happening in his state as dozens of villages report their buildings are sinking. As permafrost melts, it will liberate massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere, accelerating the warming process far beyond the predictions of current computer models in what is called a positive feedback loop: rising levels of greenhouse gases induce warming, which melts permafrost, which in turn releases more greenhouse gas, which accelerates the warming even more.

  In addition, the well-documented melting of polar ice sheets may have catastrophic effects on the movement of heat through ocean currents. There are enormous movements of water masses through the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In the North Atlantic, water from the equator absorbs heat, which is moved by currents northward along the coast of Europe, raising the winter temperature above the levels expected for that latitude. As that water mass releases its heat and cools on its passage along the coast of Europe, it curves around and sinks at its northernmost point, slowly making its way south deep in the ocean. It is like a continuous stream of water through the ocean.

  As ice sheets and glaciers melt more rapidly, fresh water floods the ocean and interferes with the current. This flooding can happen rapidly and has occurred in the past, shutting down the ocean currents and thereby bringing about a colder period or ice age in Europe. It seems counterintuitive that global warming might shut down the “heat engine” of this current and cause a catastrophic cooling of Europe, but in November 2005, scientists reported in Nature that currents appear to have slowed by 30 percent.

  EVEN AS THE SKEPTICS persist in their claim that the IPCC scientis
ts are missing or ignoring bits of evidence that “disprove” climate change, there are two types of evidence I find overwhelming. One comes from nature itself. If warming occurs, animals and plants that live within a certain temperature range will be forced to move to stay within that range. For organisms on mountainsides, that can be achieved by moving up. In a Nature of Things program entitled “Warnings from Nature,” scientists documented that very kind of movement. In another case, a bird-watcher in the American Midwest has carefully recorded the comings and goings of birds through the seasons for fifty years. Her records clearly show that migratory birds are now arriving in her backyard up to two weeks earlier and leaving up to two weeks later. It's hard to believe that observational biases could be responsible for these results.

  For me, the most powerful data are the annual atmospheric carbon dioxide levels extracted from the Antarctic ice sheets. In the topmost layers recording the most recent years, the carbon dioxide signature inflects sharply upward, rises steeply over the past decade and a half out of the background “noise,” and now reaches a height beyond anything ever seen.

  BY 1997, GLOBAL CONCERN about climate change had grown enough to warrant a gathering of delegates from most countries in the world at Kyoto, Japan. They were meeting to discuss a protocol for reducing emissions, with a goal of reaching a balance between emissions and the absorptive capacity of the biosphere. Collectively, humans were producing twice as much greenhouse gas, especially carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, as Earth could reabsorb, so overall emissions had to be reduced by 50 percent. But since countries like Canada, Australia, and the United States were disproportionately high emitters, our targets would eventually have to be reduced by 85 to 90 percent.