7-28-05, 10:15 am

In early April I rented the video of The Day After Tomorrow, last summer’s global-warming disaster film. Its conceit was that global warming produced a global freezing. A group of young survivors decamped to the New York Public Library, where they burned books to keep warm and await their rescue, while the city was blanketed in so much ice and snow that the Statue of Liberty’s torch rose slightly above it.

A few weeks later CBS aired its own television movie disaster film in which locusts, impervious to insecticides, ravaged the land.

Therefore, when I saw in the New Yorker magazine a three-part article on global warming by Elizabeth Kolbert, beginning with the April 25, 2005 issue, I was happy to read a scientific account on the realities of global warming. I was only slightly amused to see on the last of the three issue’s cover a view of Manhattan from underwater.
There’s no doubt that the world has become warmer than it has been in the last two millennia, and the reason for this warming trend is the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of the burning of fossil fuels. Kolbert reports the results of this warming trend that she witnessed from hopping around the globe.

Villages in Alaska are seeing a dramatic reduction in the permafrost. Glaciers in the Arctic, Greenland, Glacier National Park and Antarctica are melting at a somewhat alarming rate. The perennial sea ice has already shrunk by roughly 250 million acres, an area the size of New York, Georgia and Texas combined. Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide levels today are significantly higher than they have been at any other point in the last 420,000 years. Scientists predict that the perennial ice cover in the Arctic will disappear by the year 2080.

The Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate sponsored by the National Academy of Science warns, “if carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.” A doubling of carbon dioxide from pre-industrial levels are likely to put the global temperature at two to eight degrees higher.

Before you say, well, that might not be so bad, consider some of the more dire consequences of this temperature rise. As water from the tropics drifts north it sets up a “conveyer belt” that moves heat around the globe, disrupting the climate patterns to which we have grown accustomed.

If Greenland or the West Antarctic ice sheet were destroyed sea levels around the world would rise by at least 15 feet, inundating areas where hundreds of millions live. Were both ice sheets to disintegrate, global sea levels would rise by 35 feet. This could take hundreds of years, but once the disaster was under way it would feed on itself, becoming irreversible.

The Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City does algorithm computer simulations forecasting climate changes. David Rind has found that as CO2 levels rose in the past the world began to experience greater and greater water storages, starting near the equator and spreading to the poles. When he applied this index to the GISS model for doubled CO2 it showed that most of the continental United States would suffer from severe drought conditions.

If this were the case, we can only imagine the famine that would ensue, as every food producing area of the world would likewise be affected. All living creatures in their quest for food would ravage the land, as the locusts had done in the fictional television movie.

What Causes this CO2 Increase in the Atmosphere?

We do. The exhaust of the automobiles we drive and the smoke emissions from factories that use coal as their source of energy continually pours CO2 into the atmosphere.

What Can Be Done About It?

Response to such an overwhelming threat to the planet can either originate from governmental dictates or from the people themselves. Sad to say the Bush administration has been lax and self-serving, refusing to sign the Kyoto agreement to control emissions. Some measures could be immediately taken:

• Driving our cars half as much as we are currently accustomed. • Making use of alternate sources of energy, such as solar energy. • Increase the manufacture and sales of hybrid cars in order to drive down their price.

When I finished reading Kolbert’s articles a second time (to absorb their myriad of details) I went to my favorite place in New York City, Brighton Beach. The day was cool. As I walked along the boardwalk and looked out over the ocean and surrounding landscape, I wondered if one day in the not too far future it would be underwater.