Shantih Shantih Shantih

Global warming suggests future waste lands around the world

In the first line of his 1922 poem "The Waste Land," American poet T. S. Eliot famously declared that "April is the cruellest month."

That may be so, but May 2010 will go down as the warmest, so far.

"The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for May was the warmest on record, at 1.24°F (0.69°C) above the 20th century average of 58.6°F (14.8°C)," according to press release issued by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

"Worldwide average land surface temperature for May and March-May was the warmest on record while the global ocean surface temperatures for both May and March-May were second warmest on record, behind 1998."

As the world heats up, the race -- and perhaps the political will -- to find solutions to anthropogenic global warming is cooling off. The recent United Nations climate change negotiations in Bonn produced little but continued inaction and growing frustration.

"The U.N. talks made limited progress overall, but plenty of conflicts remain," said Annie Petsonk, international counsel for Environmental Defense Fund, in an EDF press release.

"The discouraging news is that even as the BP oil disaster continued to unfold in the Gulf of Mexico, some oil-exporting countries -- including Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait and Qatar -- were so desperate to protect the oil industry that they blocked efforts to expand studies of the climate change problem," Petsonk said.

According to Climate-L.org, "Many parties and civil society representatives expressed 'deep disappointment' at the outcome."

One of the most important poems of the 20th century, "The Waste Land" is a far-reaching exploration of the universal sense of disillusionment and despair that followed World War I. Its final line is "Shantih shantih shantih."

In Sanskrit, shantih means peace -- a word that is uttered three times at the end of every Shantih mantra. Each utterance, according to the scriptures of Hinduism, is an attempt to eliminate the barrier that exists in each of the three realms where trouble lie -- the physical, the internal and the divine, in order to achieve a sense of calm before a task is accomplished.

Perhaps the 2,900 Bonn participants might consider these three words before their next climate change meeting. Because if global temperatures continue their seemingly inexorable rise, the world will become a waste land, and it won't be just April that's the cruellest of the months.

image: T.S. Eliot photographed one Sunday afternoon in 1923 by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 16 June 1873 – 21 April 1938 (National Portrait Gallery)

Jimmy Carter Was Right

Barely two weeks into his presidency, Jimmy Carter called for a comprehensive, long-range energy policy that emphasized conservation. Too bad no one listened

"One of our most urgent projects is to develop a national energy policy," said President Jimmy Carter in a televised Oval Office address on February 2, 1977. It was his Report to the American People on Energy. He had been president for just 13 days.

Noting that America was "only major industrial country without a comprehensive, long-range energy policy," Carter championed a program that would "emphasize conservation."

"The amount of energy being wasted which could be saved is greater than the total energy that we are importing from foreign countries," Carter said. "We will also stress development of our rich coal reserves in an environmentally sound way; we will emphasize research on solar energy and other renewable energy sources; and we will maintain strict safeguards on necessary atomic energy production."

Just think for a moment where we might be today if Americans had answered Carter's call to action. But alas, for the ensuing three decades, at least when it came to energy -- our policy, our usage, our investments, our waste -- we were asleep at the wheel. And for a good lot of us, that wheel happened to be connected to a gas-guzzling SUV.

And all the while, oil companies kept drilling for more of the stuff to which we became so addicted. Profits were huge. Thanks to our unchecked addiction, ExxonMobil posted a staggering, record-breaking net income of $40.61 billion in 2007. (That's more than the nominal GDP of over 100 countries, including Tunisia, Guatemala and Kenya.) Now, that addiction (and all the other addictions that oil fed so well) has led us directly to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill -- the greatest ecological catastrophe to befall the nation in its 233-year history. And it was man-made.

"Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced," said President Obama during his Oval Office address last night. "And unlike an earthquake or a hurricane, it's not a single event that does its damage in a matter of minutes or days. The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years."

An addiction that led to an epidemic? Sounds positively Caligulan.

Obama pointed out that "for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked, not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor."

Democratic senators are planning to meet tomorrow to discuss the agenda that will cover the remaining time of the 111th Congress, which will come to a close on January 3, 2011. Will they show the political courage to vote for comprehensive legislation to address climate change?

Worryingly, some of them have said they will hold their vote unless such legislation caters to some offshore drilling interests. In the meantime, anthropogenic climate change -- tied closely to America's fossil fuel usage (Obama noted that "we consume more than 20 percent of the world's oil") -- continues to take a devastating toll on the global environment.

In 2004, a group of international researchers published a bleak study entitled "Extinction Risk from Climate Change" in the journal Nature. The authors predicted that millions of species will become extinct due to climate change by 2050 -- a quarter of animals and plants living on land alone. Up to 37% of the species in the biodiverse regions they studied could be wiped out, primarily because of the effects of all the carbon dioxide we're releasing into the atmosphere. These aren't just numbers. These are living creatures, and the vast majority of them have been around -- and doing perfectly fine, thank you very much -- long before Homo sapiens turned up. Now they are disappearing at a rapid clip, while humans reproduce at an unsustainable rate.

"Polar bears drowning as the sea ice they need to survive melts away," writes Defenders of Wildlife president Rodger Schlickeisen in a recent email. "Sea turtles, pelicans and other wildlife coated in oil, poisoned in their homes as the result of America’s addiction to oil...Last year, Big Oil spent millions of dollars lobbying against climate change legislation and for more drilling off our coasts."

"I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party -- as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels," Obama said last night.

"Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development -- and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development. All of these approaches have merit and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead. But the one approach I will not accept is inaction."

Well, unless the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is the wake-up call that environmentalists are hoping will end up being the disaster's silver lining, Obama may have no choice but to accept that last approach. Inaction is exactly what followed Carter's call for an environmentally sound, long-range energy policy over 33 years ago. "There is no way that I, or anyone else in the government, can solve our energy problems if you are not willing to help," Carter warned Americans in his address. But no one listened to him.

We weren't willing to help back then. What about now? Are we addicted to oil, and if so, can we admit it and change our daily behavior. Will we consider more seriously the things we choose to do and buy and the size of our carbon footprint? If we wait another 33 years to do something, what will be left of our environment? What species can survive three more decades of humans sleeping at the wheel?

image: screenshot from President Carter's Report to the American People on Energy, February 2, 1977 (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)

A Desert Grows Where an Emperor Once Hid

Centuries ago, a young Chinese emperor fled to Guangdong to escape the Mongols. Now the residents of China's most populous province are facing a different sort of enemy -- themselves

On June 14, 1276, as Mongol invaders approached Fuzhou -- China's "City of Banyan Trees" located along the southeastern coast in Fujian province -- an 8-year-old prince named Zhao Shi was hurriedly crowned the Emperor Duanzong of Song by the remaining exiled members of the Song Dynasty. Two years later, as the Mongols were about to cross the emperor's last line of defense, the child ruler fled south by boat to Guangdong.

Today, this coastal mega-city bursts with over 95 million inhabitants -- about the same population as Mexico. Economically speaking, it's the same size as Turkey. The intense human activity has put a strain on the region's fertile land. Much of it is turning into desert.

"When talking about desertification, what appear in one’s brain are desert scenes in arid and semi-arid regions in [the] northwest of China," according to the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research in Beijing. The institute notes that in Guangdong, "vegetation has been destroyed by irrational human activities...running water erosion is terribly fierce on purple sandstone here, which does not hold much anti-erodibility."

One of these newly arid places in Guangdong's Nanxiong district is known as the "red desert." The surface soil is gone. It is a barren, rocky landscape completely devoid of plant life.

"According to the Guangdong Province-based newspaper Southern Weekend, while the ecological systems of some pastoral areas were recovering, grassland degradation and desertification were still serious," writes Li Li in the Beijing Review. "The paper was quoted as saying that 13.33 million hectares of China's protected natural grasslands suffer from soil erosion."

According to James Estrin of the New York Times, an estimated 1.74 million square kilometers of China's land is now classified as desert. That's about four times the size of California. Worldwide, desertification claims 6 million hectares a year, notes Colin Dunn in a GreenerIdeal.com article. That's an area almost the size of West Virginia.

But while desertification is a global issue, it is of particular concern in China, which is home to one out of every five human beings on Earth. Li notes that the anti-desertification branch of China's State Forestry Administration is undertaking several initiatives, including "prohibitions on overgrazing, excessive farming and mining, reconverting farmland to forests or pastures, and building water-conservation irrigation facilities."

"China’s problems are particularly pressing because of its trade-oriented growth strategy which favors development along the coast," note Kiyana Allen and Kayly Ober of American University in a 2009 paper. "More concerning is that the problem is only getting worse -- the population in China’s low-lying coastal region grew at three times the rate of the national population growth rate between 1990 and 2000...This kind of rapid urbanization incites coastal degradation, which in turn leaves an inadequate infrastructure open to flooding and other weather-related disasters spurred by climate change."

Duanzong was the penultimate emperor of Southern Song Dynasty. He reigned for just two years and died at the age of 10. His flight to Guangdong did not save him. And perhaps, the scores of Chinese migrating to coastal communities like Guangdong will also find that "irrational human activities" will ultimately tip the ecological balance into permanent unsustainability. As officials tackle the nation's desertification problems, they might take Duanzong's ill-fated story as a bit of a warning. After all, his temple name means "Final Ancestor."

image: desertification near Datang Town, Nanxiong County, Guangdong Province (credit: Chen Zhiqing)