A tap on the shoulder

You don’t need to be a climatologist to see which way the weather is heading. It’s getting warmer. Glaciers around the world are vanishing into the sky; if the current warming trend continues, Glacier National Park will be without glaciers by 2030. The Greenland ice sheet is melting at 250 percent the rate it was 10 years ago, according to a report just published in Science magazine. The Antarctic ice sheet is also shrinking, which came as a surprise to experts. In Canada, the mountain pine beetle — no longer controlled by cold winters — is expected to destroy most of the forests of British Columbia. The Canadian Forest Service says it is the largest insect epidemic in North American history and expects it to continue to spread.

But will this matter to us? Eugene Linden, a former science writer for Time, fears it will. In a just-published book called “The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations,” he looks at how climate has devastated civilizations in the past, and connects that to the recent discovery, based on eons-old ice records, that “in the past, climate made many large, sudden shifts from warm to cold and cold to warm.” This he calls a “flickering climate.”

For decades scientists thought climate was like a dial that could be turned up or down without causing chaos. Now, studies of Greenland ice cores have convinced scientists it’s more like a switch, and that, if thrown, the basic structure of the climate could change hugely and rapidly, with potentially extreme winds and drops in average temperatures of as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few years. This is what Linden is trying to bring to our attention. He discussed it recently in an interview:

According to the White House, the president focuses every day on the hazards facing the American people. In ignoring global warming, is he ignoring a threat as great as or greater than Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein?

The weather is a weapon of mass destruction. I think Bush was blindsided by Katrina because he somehow has been convinced that climate is a non-issue that doesn’t involve national security. But the fact is that Katrina did more damage than 9/11; there was less loss of life, but much greater economic damage, and we were warned about Katrina. I agree with Sir David King [the scientific adviser to Great Britain], who argues that global warming poses a greater threat to humanity than terrorism.

Regarding the dangers of a flickering climate, you write the cities would be hard pressed to maintain their infrastructure, that FEMA would be bankrupted, and that businesses would struggle to show profits. This would mean that “Governments would find tax receipts drastically reduced, and in the world’s tightly coupled markets, financial tsunamis would rocket through the system, leaving banks and corporations insolvent. Financial panics, largely absent for over 70 years, would return with a vengeance.” Could this be worse than the Great Depression?

Yeah. It would be. I put a lot of thought into that paragraph; I was very measured. And I don’t even think that’s the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is simply unimaginable: mass starvation. We had one little hurricane last year that played a big role in knocking two points off the GDP in the fourth quarter, but we’re not talking about one little hurricane; we’re talking about lots of different events happening around the world simultaneously. Not to act to reduce the risk is lunacy.

When did you first become interested in climate change?

I’ve followed this issue forever, but back in l988 we had that incredibly hot summer in Washington during which [Sen.] Tim Wirth [D-Colo.] held hearings that put the issue on the map. Scientists first started speculating about this issue decades earlier, and George Woodwell and Roger Revelle started to raise alarms about loading the atmosphere with carbon, and accurately predicted that without action on greenhouse gases, the weather would be changing by 2000. If we’d listened back then, we might not be seeing the effects we’re beginning to see now.

You quote Wallace Broecker of Columbia University on Greenland ice: “Through the record kept in Greenland ice, a disturbing characteristic of the Earth’s climate system has been revealed, that is, its capability to undergo abrupt switches to very different states of operation ... ” Could such an “abrupt switch” lead to a decades-long El Niño?

That would be one of the possibilities. I’m hedging on El Niño because there are still a lot of unknowns about how El Niño links with other climate cycles, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Some speculate that El Niño might be a delivery system for global warming ... if you change the geometry of atmospheric circulation over the Pacific, for instance, it might lead to a shutdown of the California Current, and in short order you’d have no more redwoods.

A prominent climatologist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bill Patzert, jokes that El Niño has always been part of our climatic pattern and ought to be called “El Niñcompoop,” for people who aren’t prepared for its effects. Is it possible that a decades-long El Niño wouldn’t be so bad?

El Niño barely budges the needle as a climate change event. Even the big l998 El Niño that caused $100 billion damage represented a global temperate change on the order of one degree. The threat is change many times that magnitude.

What reaction do you hear from scientists on this?

Enormous frustration. They feel they’ve done all they can do, but no one seems to be listening. Thomas Karl in a 2003 paper in Science wrote that we are now entering the unknown, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

In your book, you write that the coverage of global warming has been “fitful” and “timid.” Can you talk a little about the reporting on this issue?

You used to see the same four naysayers trotted out in every story to supply the contrarian view, long after the scientific consensus was settled. It never seemed to dawn on anybody that it was the same four guys dismissing it, whereas any number of scientists are eager to talk about the threat. I’d like to believe the media is getting over that. When you see a story about the dangers of smoking, you don’t see a reporter on a story about tobacco searching out someone to say that smoking is good for you, but even though the consensus on global warming rivals the consensus on the dangers of smoking, reporters still feel that obligation.

But it’s not just reporters who are at fault, is it?

A lot of the confusion is the result of a well-organized effort to mau-mau editors by fossil fuel companies who did not want to see the US join the international effort [to control C02 emissions]. And the attention-span of editors is like an 8-year-old’s: they’re always looking for the next story. The media and the public look at the story as something far off in the future, but what happens if the future comes up and taps you on the shoulder?

Some of the facts of climate change are, as you say, very complex and even paradoxical. Is it too complex for the average citizen to understand?

It’s not complexity. It’s that in the 17 years since global warming was first explained, the issue has been muddied by disinformation. If people think this is something that’s far off in the future and a matter of debate, they’ll wait for the scientists to sort it out. But if people realize that the scientists agree, then I think they’ll be perfectly capable of understanding the threat.