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The Really Inconvenient Truth:
Global Warming’s Impending Threat to Humanity

Bruce Johansen
Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha

Bruce E. Johansen, Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, just published a threevolume work entitled Global Warming in the 21st Century (2006) that has been met with critical acclaim. Although Johansen’s first academic specialty was the influence of Native American political systems on U.S. political and legal institutions, in the ’90s he began critically surveying the scientific research on the environment, publishing such works as: The Global Warming Desk Reference (2001), The Dirty Dozen: Toxic Chemicals and the Earth’s Future (2003), and Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Issues (2004). His writings have been published in The New York Times, The Nation, The Progressive and The Atlantic Monthly. The following article, which he just provided to the Nebraska Report, summarizes the most recent scholarship on this dangerous phenomenon.

During early autumn, 2006, scientists taking their annual surveys of Greenland and Arctic ice learned that the truth regarding global warming is now more inconvenient than ever — and strikingly so. The Arctic ice cap was full of huge holes, and glaciers that used to cover much of southern Greenland were washing into the sea. At the same time, acidification of the oceans is occurring at a faster rate than scientists had suspected, as the Amazon Valley endures drought that may reduce its carbon-capturing canopy to dusty savanna within decades. Siberian permafrost has been melting at speeds unanticipated by anyone, advancing the date when natural increases in carbon dioxide and methane levels join with human generation of fossil fuels to spiral temperatures out of control.

Anyone who has seen Al Gore’s slide show (and some, such as G.W. Bush, who have not) should take a look at a lesser-known but more revealing slide show compiled by James Hansen, the lead scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), whom the Bush Administration has been trying (and failing) to shut up.

Hansen’s message is stark: at 2 degrees Celsius of additional warming, the Earth passes a threshold to fundamental, wrenching change in which natural feedbacks take control, accelerating heating beyond control. Given warming ‘in the pipeline’ but not yet observed, we are now almost halfway there. Given present levels of greenhouse gas increase, between the next 50 and 100 years, we will lock in a future that Hansen characterizes as a “different planet,” with mass extinctions of animal species and human environmental refugees from rising oceans in the hundreds of millions, as ice caps crumble at both poles and sea level rise at a speed unknown in Earth’s history.

All we have to do is step on our collective gas pedals in our customary way and, within a number of decades we can count on our fingers, we will be forecasting when the toilets will back up at the White House (17 meters above present sea level).

February Rain & Thunder on Baffin Island

How quickly is the climate changing in the Arctic? Some residents of Baker Lake, Nunavut, 1,330 kilometers west of Iqaluit (which is on southern Baffin Island) spotted magpies flitting around town during May 2006. These scavengers, a relative of the crow, had never been seen in Nunavut before. The magpies are not expected to become permanent residents, however, even if the climate warms, because they roost in trees. The tundra has no trees. Inuit living in the northernmost reaches of Baffin Island have now seen wasps. Hockey players in Canada’s far north have been looking for rinks with artificial ice. In Pangnirtung (north of Iqaluit) families from outlying camps came into town for Christmas 2005 by boat—the sea had not yet frozen over.

On February 26, 2006, rain fell on Baffin Island. Sheila Watt- Cloutier, until recently chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, emailed me: “I thought I would send you an update on our very strange weather. Last night on February 26th… so much rain fell that I woke up to several puddles and pools of water in my tundra backyard and since it was 6 above C. today the puddles/pools were not freezing. There was even lightning last night here in the Arctic on a February night.”

“A Planetary Disaster of Monstrous Proportions”

The Bush Administration’s latest policy paper on global warming tells us that we have plenty of time to address the issue, so much that voluntary measures will do the job. Hansen, however, says that with 99 percent certainty additional warming of 2 to 3 degrees C., a conservative estimate for the end of this century, will produce an “expected equilibrium (long-term) sea level rise on the order of 25 meters,” producing “the potential for a continually unfolding planetary disaster of monstrous proportions.” The only alternative, he argues, is to slash fossil fuel consumption drastically and quickly, keeping temperature increases within 1 degree C.

In human terms, the East Coast of the United States, including many major cities, is particularly vulnerable, and most of Florida would be under water with a 25- meter sea level rise. Most of Bangladesh and large areas in China and India also would be under water. Hansen’s slide show adds up estimates of people who would be displaced by a 25-meter sea level rise, using the population distribution in 2000: about 40 million people on the East Coast of the United States and 6 million on the West Coast, more than 200 million people in China, about 150 million in India, and in Bangladesh more than 100 million. Even leaving out Europe (London would be under water at 25 meters, as well as other cities), this is a total of half a billion environmental refugees from rising oceans alone. To get a true worldwide total, add large parts of Sydney, Australia, Tokyo, and Manila, among other coastal cities.

We are on the Way

We are on the way. The Arctic ice cap had so many holes last summer, according to satellite images collected during late August, the European Space Agency that a ship could have sailed from Northern Siberia or the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen to the North Pole without difficulty. In a decade or two, sea lanes may open in the summer over the Arctic Ocean. “This situation is unlike anything observed in previous record-low ice seasons,” said Mark Drinkwater of ESA’s Oceans/Ice Unit. As more Arctic ice melts, albedo (reflectivity) decreases in the region, causing even more ice to melt. Within a decade or two, the Arctic may be nearly ice-free during summer.

At the same time, Greenland’s ice sheet has been melting faster than ever before, according to research by U.S. scientists. The data indicates that the rate of ice loss accelerated between 2004 and 2006, with the world’s second-largest ice sheet melting two and one-half times faster at any time. Satellite observations indicate that Greenland lost roughly 164 cubic miles of ice from April 2004 to April 2006 — more water than the volume of Lake Erie. Ice loss has been spreading northward from southern Greenland, and inland from the coasts. Temperatures in southern Greenland have risen by about 4.4 degrees F. during the last two decades.

Absent human activity, says Hansen, the Earth would have been expected to eventually cool off and head into a new ice age. However, the ice-age cycle that Earth has experienced for millions of years has now been terminated by human release of fossil fuels that triggers several natural feedback mechanisms. Thus, says Hansen, “Humans now control global climate, for better or worse” (Hansen, Declaration, 2006, 9).

Acceleration of Ocean Acidification

As ice melts, increasing carbon levels in the oceans are damaging life there at a rate unanticipated by scientists even a few years ago—this, as the G.W. Bush Administration pushes carbon-dioxide “sequestration” in the oceans as a “solution” to the problem.

Deep-water corals are at risk from increasing ocean acidification, for several reasons. First, they are comprised of aragonite, a carbonate material that is more soluble than the calcite used by corals closer to the surface. Carbonates’ vulnerability to dissolution also increases in colder water at greater pressure. By the end of this century, two thirds of deep-water corals (compared to none today) could be exposed to seawater that is corrosive to aragonite.

The effects of acidity in the oceans also will continue long after fossil-fuel burning peaks on land. Ken Caldeira of Stanford University modeled ocean acidification for fossil-fuel burning that peaks in the year 2100, and found that the oceans will continue to become more acidic for centuries after that. At the surface, acidity will peak at about 2750. A kilometer deep in the ocean, acidification will rise for a thousand years.

Permafrost Feedbacks Accelerate

As the Bush Administration’s latest climate-change plan touts voluntary conservation, the climatic truth also is becoming acutely more inconvenient in Siberia. Methane emissions formerly trapped in now-melting Siberian permafrost are bubbling out five times more rapidly than previously thought and may trigger what researchers warn is a climate time bomb, according to a study in the September 7, 2006 issue of Nature. The findings were based on new, more accurate measuring techniques.

As temperatures rise, more permafrost melts, setting up a vicious cycle. As the cycle intensifies, it becomes self-perpetuating, combining with human contributions of greenhouse gases to further increase warming, icemelt and sea-level rise. A study in the journal Science described the amount of carbon dioxide trapped in a type of permafrost called yedoma in Siberia as much more prevalent than originally thought, amount to about 100 times the amount of carbon dioxide released into the air each year by the burning of fossil fuels. This carbon will not be released all at once. Instead, its gradually accelerating release will augment human sources as the present century continues.

The Amazon Valley, Drought and Warming

The same warming trend that melts ice at the poles and releases carbon dioxide from permafrost in Siberia also is helping to intensify drought in the Amazon Valley. This area’s rainforest, known to some ecologists as the “lungs of the world,” could turn to dry brushland by the end of this century, further increasing the world’s greenhouse-gas load. In the meantime, human deforestation is speeding this trend.

During 2005 a severe drought spread through the Amazon Valley at the same time that new evidence was being assembled indicating that damage from logging had been 60 to 123 per cent more than previously reported. “We think this [additional logging] adds 25 per cent more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere” from the Amazon than previously estimated, said Michael Keller, an ecologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, and co-author of an Amazon logging inventory published in Science.

In some areas of the Amazon, the recent drought was the worst since record keeping began a century ago. Some scientists asserted that the drought was most likely a result, at least partially, of a rise in water temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean that also played a role in spawning Hurricane Katrina and other devastating storms during the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons. If global warming is involved, this drought may be only an early indication of a new weather regime in the Amazon Valley, which holds nearly a quarter of the world’s fresh water.

The Amazon Valley could be caught in a double vise as the world warms. Rising Atlantic Ocean temperatures probably will combine with more frequent El Nino events to provoke more frequent droughts.

Drought in the Western United States

For several years, the United States has been experiencing a long-term mega-drought encompassing most of the Western states and portions of the Midwest. Such mega-droughts have occurred in the Earth’s history, generally in conjunction with a warmer climate. Such an event killed Anasazi culture long before the European invasion of the Americas, and drought played a role in the decline of the Mayas in present-day Mexico and Guatemala. Global warming causes a relaxation of atmospheric circulation with resulting intensification of hot, dry conditions in subtropical regions such as the Southwest United States, parts of Mexico, and the Mediterranean.

Evidence already exists of an increased tendency toward warmer, drier conditions in those regions in conjunction with global warming already realized during the past three decades. If global warming continues to intensify, winter snow pack will decrease, intensifying summer dry conditions, and increasing forest fires. Already, the last few summers have provided the U.S. West with its worst cumulative record of forest fires in recorded history, with the same trend in Australia. In 2006, more of the Western United States burned than during any single year on record.

Hansen, an Iowa native who grew up in Denison and graduated from the University of Iowa, raises the possibility that “If these conditions reach sufficient intensity and geographical scale they may become self-perpetuating, and we will have suddenly entered a longterm mega-drought in the western United States. Weather would continue to fluctuate from year to year, but water supplies would be much more limited than in prior decades and dust storms may become frequent. We cannot say what level of global warming is needed to cause such a mega-drought, but the likelihood increases with increase of greenhouse gases and global warming.”

The ‘Tipping Point’ Advances

The idea of a ‘tipping point,’ beyond which global warming accelerates on its own with no possibility of reversal, has become a popular debating point as — in the real world — the date of this crucial event advances. The sense of urgency in the scientific literature is palatable. The evidence surrounds us.

“In my opinion there is no significant doubt (more than 99 per cent certainty),” says Hansen, “that additional global warming of 2°C would push the Earth beyond the tipping point and cause dramatic climate impacts including eventual sea level rise of at least several meters, extermination of a substantial fraction of the animal and plant species on the planet, and major regional climate disruptions. Much remains to be learned before we can define these effects in detail, but these consequences are no longer speculative climate model results. Our best estimates for expected climate impacts are based on evidence from prior climate changes in the Earth’s history and on recent observed climate trends.”

Every day of political procrastination brings that day closer.