Imperiled Life. Javier Sethness
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characteristics of atmospheric CO2, average global temperatures have risen an estimated 0.8°C (1.4°F) since preindustrial times. Because a time lapse of some decades exists between the point at which hydrocarbons are released into the environment and the point at which they in fact contribute to global warming, a great deal more warming can be expected based solely on the emissions that have been caused to date—at least 1.4°C (2.45°F) over preindustrial average global temperature levels, according to one estimate.[26] The Nobel Prize–winning IPCC estimates in its 2007 Fourth Annual Report that global average temperatures could rise by a total of between 1.1°C and 6.4°C (1.93°F–11.2°F) by the end of this century—though as some commentators disconcertingly note, such predictions may constitute significant underestimates, considering that the various feedback mechanisms that might turn climate change into a self-perpetuating phenomenon—discussed below—are still unquantified and hence excluded from the data on which the IPCC bases its conclusions.[27] Hansen, for one, insists that the global atmospheric carbon concentration must be reduced to no more than 350 ppm, “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization is based.”[28] Australian environmentalists David Spratt and Philip Sutton recommend an even more radical target of 315 ppm, which they associate with an average increase of only 0.5°C (0.88°F) over the temperature that prevailed in preindustrial human history—a goal similar to that endorsed at the April 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held by the Morales government in Cochabamba.[29]
The average global temperature increase of 0.8°C (1.4°F) observed to date has already profoundly affected many of Earth’s peoples and much of the planet itself. While mainstream U.S. media has frantically sought to cast doubt on the responsibility that the warming experienced until now has had for the marked increase in the frequency and destructiveness of recent extreme weather events, a number of climatologists are alleging that such skepticism is unwarranted, in a marked reversal of the reluctance with which many climate researchers have so far approached this question.[30]
Turning to the devastation for which capital-induced climate catastrophe is responsible, some 20 million residents of Pakistan, for instance, were displaced by the unprecedented flooding in summer 2010 that destroyed some 1.2 million homes, killed 1,600 people, and injured over 2,300 others, leaving between one-fifth and one-third of the state’s cultivated farmland temporarily submerged.[31] When the floodwaters receded from Pakistan’s central province of Punjab, silt deposits were left behind, covering large swathes of land previously dedicated to agricultural production.[32] A United Nations Children’s Fund report from September 2010 warned that more than 100,000 Pakistani children were at risk of dying of malnutrition over the subsequent six months because of the floods.[33] A follow-up report in early 2011 found that about one-quarter of the children in the Sindh Province were malnourished, with 6 percent “severely underfed”—rates analogous to those observed in African famines.[34] Flooding in Pakistan in summer 2011, while less apocalyptically disastrous than the preceding year, nonetheless destroyed 100,000 homes, inundated 900 villages, and displaced an estimated 5 million people.[35]
Climate change has been deemed directly responsible, because local scientists have found that warming has steadily shifted monsoon rains to the northwestern regions of Pakistan over the past four decades, away from the larger rivers more capable of absorbing significant rains.[36] Everything else being equal, moreover, a warmer atmosphere can also be expected to produce more violent precipitation events such as these, as warmer air holds more water vapor than does colder air.[37] That constituted power has failed to provide the resources needed for some sort of adequate reconstruction of Pakistan after the floods—that some 8 million affected people lacked basic health care, food, shelter, and schooling a year after the disaster—is entirely unsurprising, however grave the implications for human welfare.[38]
Shifting to the continent of Africa, 2010 also saw the emergence of famine conditions that jeopardized the lives of approximately 10 million residents of Africa’s Sahel region—principally the countries of Niger, Chad, Mali, and Mauritania—as rains failed for a second consecutive year, causing the annual “lean season” between the running down of food stocks and harvest season to come three months earlier than usual.[39] Oxfam representative Caroline Gluck compared the social devastation induced by the famine conditions in Niger to suffering caused by the 1984–85 famine in Ethiopia, which killed 1 million people.[40] As was the case with a similarly severe food crisis that gripped the Sahel in 2005, it is unknown precisely how many actually lost their lives, but an estimated 400,000 children were expected to die from starvation in the months following June 2010 without an appropriate relief response.[41]
Fire conflagrations experienced in much of central Russia in 2010 led to the death of an estimated 56,000 people and destroyed an estimated one-fourth of the country’s arable land, leading Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to declare an indefinite moratorium on grain exportation from Russia, the world’s fourth-largest grain exporter, with serious consequences for food prices—and hence, people’s ability to feed themselves—in importer countries.[42] Those worst affected in this sense reside in Afghanistan, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, among other impoverished states.[43] Heat waves were to blame for unprecedented temperatures in South Asia in May and June 2010—53.7°C (128.6°F) at the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan in early June—that killed thousands, though it is unclear if the death toll from these events approached that of Europe in summer 2003, when some 35,000 people succumbed to heat-induced death.[44] The UN Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System dubbed the flooding caused by torrential rains in Sri Lanka in late 2010 and early 2011 a once-in-a-century event; the rains washed away 80 percent of the rice crop on the island country’s eastern Batticaloa district.[45] Additionally, 2010 saw a drought in Amazonia the likes of which had not been experienced for some forty years, with the Rio Negro, one of the Amazon’s largest tributaries, reduced to its lowest levels since records began in 1902 and an estimated eight gigatons of CO2 emitted by dying trees—a greater total amount, it should be added, than the estimated present annual carbon emissions of China, the greatest current emitter of all.[46] In the Arctic, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan broke off Greenland’s Petermann glacier in August of the same year; indeed, the 2010 Arctic summer ice extent was the third-lowest ever recorded, and the same data for 2011 may well match the all-time low observed in 2007—reflections of the “death spiral” into which the Arctic ice has been forced.[47]
Climate change likely also bears responsibility for the disastrous flooding experienced in the U.S. South in mid-2011 and Hurricane Irene that same summer as well as the dry spring in northern Europe and the southwestern United States—the former having brought about the driest April observed since people started keeping records in England in the seventeenth century, and the latter the driest spring in more than a century.[48] Climate overheating is also the likely culprit for the spectacular drought suffered in China in 2011, which drove Chinese authorities to release some five billion cubic meters of water from behind the infamous Three Gorges Dam for irrigation and personal use.[49] Anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate systems is clearly seen as well in the catastrophic failure of rains in the Horn of Africa in 2011 and the attendant drought, found by the United Nations to be the worst in six decades.[50] This devastating event left some 13 million individuals at risk of dying from starvation—a number that included millions of children, thousands of whom have perished to date.[51] It is this event, together with the ongoing torturous civil conflict in the region, that has seen thousands of desperate Somalis arriving daily at the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, a settlement originally established two decades ago to house 90,000 persons, but now populated by some 500,000; it is this event that has brought about the conditions for the emergence of malnutrition rates of 58 percent among children in Somalia’s Bay region, and thus the potential death of three-quarters of a million people, as the United Nations warns.[52]
These disconcerting events have taken place in just the past two years. In addition to the 2003 heat waves in Europe, episodes of drought in western North America (1994–2004) and Central and Southwest Asia (1998–2003) along with flooding in Europe (2002) are “consistent,” in the IPCC’s words, with “physically based expectations arising from climate change.”[53] It is estimated that China loses 965 square miles to desertification annually; increased sea levels have already begun to sterilize the soils of