Is
It Too Late To Stop
Global Warming?
By Seth Borenstein
04 April, 2006
The Associated Press
A
man stands on a railroad track as a train rumbles closer.
"Global warming?"
he says. "Some say irreversible consequences are 30 years away.
Thirty years. That won't affect me."
He steps off the tracks -- just in time. But behind him is a little
girl, left in front of the roaring train.
The screen goes black. A
message appears: "There's still time."
It's just an ad, part of
a campaign from the advocacy group Environmental Defense, which hopes
to convince Americans they can do something about global warming, that
there's still time.
But many scientists are not
so sure that the oncoming train of global warming can be avoided. Temperatures
are going to rise for decades to come because the chief gas that causes
global warming lingers in the atmosphere for about a century.
"In the short term,
I'm not sure that anyone can stop it," said John Walsh, director
of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research at the University
of Alaska in Fairbanks.
There are limits, experts
say, to how much individuals can do. The best we can hope for is to
prevent the worst -- world-altering disasters such as catastrophic climate
change and a drastic rise in sea levels, say 10 leading climate scientists
interviewed by The Associated Press. They pull out ominous phrases such
as "point of no return."
The big disasters are thought
to be just decades away. Stopping or delaying them would require bold
changes by people and government.
"The big payoff is going
to be for our children," said Tim Barnett, a senior scientist at
the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. "Together,
if we take a concentrated action as a people, we might be able to slow
it down enough to avoid these surprises."
But he and other scientists
say it's too late to stop people from feeling the heat. Nearly two dozen
computer models agree that by 2100, the average global temperature will
be 3 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit higher than now, according to Gerald Meehl,
a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Even if today the world suddenly
stops producing greenhouse gases, temperatures will rise 1 degree by
2050, according to the center.
A British conference on "avoiding
dangerous climate change" last year concluded that a rise of just
3 degrees would probably lead to some catastrophic events, especially
the melting of the Greenland's polar ice. A study in the journal Science
last month said the melting, which is happening faster than originally
thought, could trigger a rise of 1 to 3 feet in global ocean levels.
Stephen Schneider of Stanford
University put the odds of a massive Greenland melt at 50-50.
But Environmental Defense
chief scientist Bill Chameides is more hopeful: "There's a certain
amount of warming that's inevitable, but that doesn't mean that we can't
avoid the really dangerous things that are happening."
Those dangerous things include:
multi-century melts of polar ice sheets and an accompanying major sea
level rise, abrupt climate change from a dramatic slowing of the ocean
current systems, and the permanent loss of glacier-fed ancient water
supplies for China, India and parts of South America.
Despite what scientists say,
70 percent of Americans think it's possible to reduce the effects of
global warming, and 59 percent think their individual actions can help,
according to a poll commissioned by Environmental Defense as part of
its public service campaign.
Climate scientists find themselves
in the delicate position of trying to balance calculations that lead
to scientific despair with an optimistic public's hope.
"You don't give up,"
said Schneider, co-director of Stanford's Center for Environmental Science
Policy. "If you have high blood pressure, do you sit there till
you die or do you take Lasix," the blood pressure medicine.
Both Barnett and Walsh said
the question they get most from the public is: What can I do personally
about global warming? They tell people to drive less and drive fuel-miserly
cars, be more efficient about heating their homes.
But those efforts "are
not going to change us from an irreversible course to a reversible one,"
said Walsh. "What you really want to say is: 'You can't go on like
this. We can't go on like this."'
Robert Correll, a top scientist
in charge of an eight-country research program into arctic problems
caused by global warming, recognizes the contradictions, especially
since developing nations such as China, India and those in Africa will
play bigger roles in greenhouse gas pollution in the future.
The individual effort, Correll
said, "is damn important, but you're not going to make much difference."
That requires group or governmental action, he said.
© 2006 Associated Press