Global Warming is
The Environmental Disaster

Global warming is an environmental disaster in the making, isn't it? The problem is: disaster implies something that happens suddenly, but "human-forced" global warming (that's how scientists refer to it) has been in the process of happening over the past 150 years (at least), and won't have really catastrophic effects for another 25 to 50 years. Further, while it is an environmental disaster in the making, only those people and creatures living at the margins of our human world are dramatically affected right now: the Inuit in northern Canada, Greenland and Alaska, polar bears, coral reefs, krill. We don't ever see any of them.

Humans are pretty well equipped to deal with environmental disasters of the sudden kind, like hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods; we've heroically survived them and gone on. But global warming is different. This year, where I live, our December and January were the warmest on record, and while people were disturbed by the strange weather, and acknowledging that this 'global warming business' must be for real, they were also pleased with the warm days, and not so pleased when in February and March our weather reverted to normal; it seemed very cold, given the earlier balmy temperatures.

Yet, in order to deal with global warming, an environmental disaster that will make the effects of a tsunami or an earthquake look puny by comparison, everyone will have to make major changes in their lifestyles. Substituting compact fluorescent lightbulbs for incandescents will be only a tiny first step, since scientists now estimate that globally we will have to reduce our global CO2 emissions by 90%. Our path will be relatively easier than the Europeans, because up until now Americans have been energy hogs, Europeans have been more restrained--by high gas taxes, more compact settlement patterns and already restrictive legislation.

The question: is it even possible to reduce emissions by that much?

The whole "American way of life" is going to have to change dramatically. Strip malls, suburbs, sprawl, and commuting by car will become more and more unsustainable. So will shipping anything and everything across the country, or across the world--the contribution to global warming by maritime shipping is huge, and yet carrying by ship is probably the most efficient transport method of any.

The list of things that would have to change dramatically is almost endless, yet humans have never been very good at responding to environmental disaster before it happens, or when its immediate effects are not here, but far away, over there. Further, in line with the theme of this website, it is the people with the most power and wealth who are the best able to shrug off the effects of global warming. Until it's too late. For example, in my book, The Selfish Class I write about the "Hummer Syndrome." While ordinary folks were hard-pressed to pay for $3 gas for their daily commutes, the Hummer drivers didn't care: gas still seemed inexpensive to them. The same could be said for the people living in 125,000 square foot homes; so, heating and cooling costs go up a little; what's a thousand or so more a month!

These are the challenges of this looming environmental disaster: its early effects are niggling and minor, so the elite can ignore them, and so can most other people.

Why change your whole settlement pattern, why regulate your emissions in ways they never have been before, why completely revamp how we get and use energy, when, so far, the evidence of global warming is still only at the edges of our consciousness--like those warm January days? Yet, if there isn't a mass movement to respond to global warming--because it will take radical responses even to slow it down--its cumulative effects down the road will be an environmental disaster of unprecedented proportions. By that time all human responses will be quite literally too little and too late.

We are like the frog in a pot of water: put heat under it and he won't try to jump out until he's boiled alive.