| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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California Futures Stephen Schneider
California Wild: Do you think that the Montreal Protocol limiting the use of fluorocarbons was a success? Stephen Schneider: Absolutely. It demonstrated that the international community, when sufficiently motivated, can actually get together and do something that might cost somebody some money. The other thing is that the Montreal Protocol itself wasn't enough, because there was still debate in the scientific community as to whether the ozone hole was due to human disturbances, as opposed to volcanoes as "Professor" [Rush] Limbaugh repeatedly asserts. Nothing in science is ever 100 percent – but the pollutants caused by human activities build up at a different altitude from those of volcanoes and have a whole different signature. As a result there was a "London Extension" [an amendment] two years later which took those chemicals from a 50 percent ban to a 90 percent ban, and the growth rate in the buildup of those chemicals in the atmosphere is now markedly down. CW: So volcanic eruptions, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo, don't dwarf human pollutants? SS: It's not that volcanoes aren't part of the story. They come and they go. You could find individual years where there'll be natural events that will be large relative to human events, but what's important is that the acute effects may be large in nature but the chronic effects tend to be where the accumulations really matter. The debates that I've heard seem open and shut that those, on the whole, are caused by us. CW: In a National Academy of Sciences report you acknowledged the possibility that there may be some manmade solution such as shooting massive amounts of dust into the stratosphere. SS: I'm not a lover of geo-engineering, but I'm certainly not going to say that we shouldn't study something. I've never been in that category of book burners. Suppose it turns out that people like me who've been blathering for 25 years about the possibility of human-induced climate change being potentially serious are right. And supposing, since we all talk in large ranges of uncertainty, that there is a five percent chance that it's catastrophic, and that actually happens or starts to become likely, and humans are now even further addicted to this carbon energy drug. Among the people who are addicted are the Indians, the Chinese, and others who are just beginning their industrial revolution. They look at us as if the attempt to control carbon emissions is the latest conspiracy of the colonialists to deprive them of their due. If that happens, we're not going to get sufficient reduction in greenhouse emissions on a planetary scale to prevent tripling of CO2 by the end of this century to the middle of the next. In that case, we may have almost no alternative than to turn to geo-engineering, the same way an unredeemed heroin addict is better off on methadone than on the streets on heroin. So on that logic I could not oppose the idea of studying its potential. What I don't like is that it becomes a palliative rather than curing the addiction and its cause. CW: Most developed countries seem to treat global warming more seriously than the United States does. SS: Indeed. CW: What are they doing about it? SS: That's a good question. Let me say that even though I said, "Indeed" to the United States, I was thinking of the United States government. And I was thinking of the United States government being the combination of Congress and the Executive. If the Executive Branch had their way they'd be doing a lot about it. They supported Vice President Gore when he departed from his text at the Kyoto climate change conference and agreed to a more stringent cut than anything they knew they could get through Congress. And still won't be able to get through. In fact, I had a conversation with the Vice President before he went. I said, "When you go to Kyoto, I know there's pressure from the Senate. Just remember, do the right thing for history. Senates come and Senates go.. He said, "That's not easy." But he did. There are two really fundamental principles that came out of Kyoto, and the U.S. had a lot to do with that. One is that you can't solve a global problem by nations alone. You have to have international agreements, and the U.S. has certainly been as supportive as the Europeans or anybody else about that. And the second thing is that it is legitimate to have differentiated responsibilities. The Congress has been using that as an excuse to avoid ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. All of a sudden members of the Congress have had this newfound religion of equity that all nations of the world must have equal penance at the bar of their use of the atmosphere as a free sewer. It's outrageous and unethical. Because we, we the rich, have produced 80 percent of the stuff that has accumulated in the atmosphere over the last hundred years. The poorer nations have absolutely every right to expect us to take the first step. The politicians are playing on xenophobia, playing on ignorance of the electorate to try to say that somehow we are going to be using this as a foreign aid program. Nevertheless, I do agree with the criticism in the Senate that Kyoto only makes sense as a first step. You. ve got to get meaningful participation. as the President called it. from developing countries. On the other hand, from the perspective of political possibility and fundamental ethics, it certainly matters who's primarily responsible and who has the capacity to pay. So, the bottom line is everybody has to play but not necessarily everybody has to pay. The countries of the developing world have to join but they don't have to pay the freight, at least not initially. That won't sell right now to the current xenophobia and convenient political manipulation by the U.S. Senate. We need a few more hurricanes and other weather events that become media-worthy and people will change their views. It's very sad, but that's the way it operates. Let me add one more thing. I think the area where the U.S. is fundamentally different from the Europeans is over the idea of short-term targets. And in this case I. m more with the U.S.. Much better, I argued in Kyoto, that we should announce a mechanism. We have to announce things like carbon taxes, specific projects, real things, not just hypothetical cuts that may not even be monitorable when you start dealing with carbon sinks and multiple gasses and other things. I want real action. CW: So you don't think the Europeans have really done that. They're just giving lip service? SS: No, I think they. ve done that somewhat but not for environmental reasons. I have to say that there's a little bit of disingenuousness there. The U.S. proposed a long-term technology program, which is, to me, the only answer. Europeans have had two political events, which have had nothing to do with the environment, that has allowed them to, as a bubble, reduce their emissions. Those two political events were the conservative government destruction of the coal unions [in the U.K.] through the access to lower carbon-emitting sources in the North Sea. The second event was the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the re-incorporation of the Eastern European economy into the EEC. In the process Europe gets credit. Why are they replacing those bad power plants in East Germany? They violate the law in Germany about health standards. There is a certain degree of piousness that was frankly pissing off a lot of people in the American delegation who had been pushing this issue for 20 years. Let's get technologies implemented. Let's transfer technology so that the Chinese, the Indians, and the Malaysians don't build the Victorian technology of internal combustion engines. Let's get them to leapfrog. Get them into fuel cells with help from western companies who get a profit out of it and get governments to help subsidize them to go over there. CW: Let' s go back to what you said about Congress perhaps seeing the light of day after we have a few more hurricanes. SS: When somebody asked me if I was disappointed when this terrible Hurricane Hugo went out to sea after it devastated North Carolina, I said, "No, if I had my finger on the button I would have steered it out to sea. I'm not going to start killing people for the cause. I'm not into that." On the other hand, when these things occur, if they motivate people to look long-term, that's fine, too. We're not going to claim that this hurricane is caused by global warming. That's a lie. But it would be equally absurd to say there's no possibility that any of it wasn't intensified by the fact that the ocean's a little warmer. CW: For there to be any significant sea-level rise, would the Antarctic ice sheet have to start to melt? SS: I wouldn't say that. I would say that even 20 centimeters, which is projected in the next several decades as a possibility, is quite significant. The hundred-year flood becomes the 50- or the 20-year flood. That totally changes what you can build where in the coastal zone. That's just from simply heating up the oceans, because water expands. We're already something like a recent 20-centimeter rise, which is very consistent with global warming. A little bit of that's caused by mountain glaciers but probably most of it is just thermal expansion of the oceans. If west Antarctica gets in the show, we're looking at a sea level rise of many meters, but we're also looking at hundreds of years for the many meters. Even though you may not see the bulk of sea level rise for centuries, you may trigger something in the next 15 years that you won't even know about for 50 years. Then you're going to have to live with it for five hundred or a thousand years. CW: What will be the likely changes in California over the next 20 years? SS: The main forecast is that it gets a little more intense. If the oceans get warmer, you would expect there to be a little more moisture in the air for those storm systems that come blowing off the Pacific. So you'd expect that California would probably have a little more winter water. You'd also expect, therefore, that it would have a little more flooding associated with that runoff. You also expect that if the weather's a little bit warmer then the runoff season will start a little earlier. Peter Gleick [of the Pacific Institute] first predicted this ten years ago with a series of analyses. He thought it was hard to invent a scenario for California where this doesn't happen. You end up with more intense spring flooding and more intense late summer drought, therefore fires. The melting season will be sooner so you have more intensity in the runoff, plus you have a little bit more winter moisture, and the little bit of extra heat dries the system out a little bit so there's a higher fire danger later on. CW: You'd have more vegetation. SS: Right. But what kind of vegetation? What a recent report (see reference #5, page 51) argues is that forests will start moving up mountains, and the shrubs and grassland will start moving up into the bottom ends of the forest, and the process by which these move is frequently after a fire. Because you don't just get rid of ecosystems that exist. If they find themselves stranded in an unhappy climate that doesn't mean they can't get by. What they tend to do after they burn down is get replaced by something else. There would be transitions, and those transitions would move things around. The main environmental problem, the threat to biodiversity from fragmenting nature into patches, which California is quite good at, is not going to stop. There's population pressure and people's use of the land to make money. And then there's the invasion of exotic species which is also not going to stop. You have exotic invaders; you've got fragmented habitats, you've got people using all kinds of chemicals in agriculture and industry that species have no experience with--these are the standard environmental issues. Now, you change the climate at relatively rapid rates, what do species want to do? They want to move. They either walk or their seeds disperse, and they find themselves growing where the climate is favorable and not growing where it's no longer favorable. That's the old way. But, how do you go across factories, farms, freeways, urban settlements, and deal with exotic invaders? So the real problem is the synergism, the collective joint action of these multiple disturbances that make the future of California ecosystems look stressful. It will require very careful management to make sure we don't lose species or ecosystems.
Keith Howell is Editor of California Wild. |
Winter 2000
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