Global warning

We got snowy relief today. Not much, just one inch of confirmation that this is winter in the northern hemisphere. But the distressingly warm November and December prompted me to write this, to be published in a week in Off the Edge...

On New Year’s day in New York City, for a while I walked in the streets wearing no more than a t-shirt. I had not lost a bet, nor was I overcome by an egoistic urge to defy winter – at 13 degrees Celsius, there was no winter to be defied. To say the warmth was unseasonal seems a euphemism; unearthly is more like it.

It was not one day of freak weather in one city. New York did not see snow throughout November and December for the first time since 1877. Nor is the American Northeast an isolated case. Russian bears suffered insomnia instead of enjoying hibernation in the warmest December in 130 years, regions of the ski-steeped Alps went maddeningly snowless, and Eastern Canadians shivered not from cold but from reports that a gigantic ice shelf has cracked off Ellesmere Island in the neighbourhood of the North Pole.

If we spot these aberrations on the world map and connect the dots, the lines, perhaps faintly but distinctly, spell: global warming. Of course, global warming is not the sole cause of a tepid December in so many Northern regions. El Nino, the cyclical rise in Pacific water temperatures, is doing its rounds, but expert opinion maintains that global warming forges ahead. This winter, and 2006 as a whole, issue a barrage of warnings that it’s payback time after decades of high living on borrowed air. Meteorological agencies expect 2007 to be the warmest year ever.

Political concern is hard to detect in the largest polluting country. While the White House heat sensors pulsate on political hot spots, atmospheric simmering makes scarcely a beep. The Bush administration tragicomically had Dick Cheney, umbilically-glued to Big Oil, draft energy policy, and infamously hired Philip Cooney, a former lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute, as head of Environmental Quality. In 2005, Cooney mangled scientific reports to blur the link between greenhouse gases and global warming. Exposure cost him that post, but he soon took a job at ExxonMobil.

A White House deployed with such company unsurprisingly reneged on the Clinton’s signature of the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The United States maintains low vehicle emissions standards among advanced economies, and has seen a boom in coal-burning power stations in recent years.

The world’s top polluter remains internally pressured to stay the course. Yet perhaps the only file in Bush’s tattered policy portfolio that can be salvaged is a concerted effort to purge the urge to pollute. The Iraq occupation is in shambles, economic security ever hangs on the capacity to sustain trade and budget deficits, and average real incomes have stagnated.

The November 2006 elections showed that the electoral base is not as dogmatically lumped as often made to be. The ‘Republican base’ is probably not as opposed to anti-global warming measures as their representation suggests. Democrats, now controlling Congress, did not ride loudly on an environmental platform, but have indicated that it will be given high priority.

Still, it is mostly up to the Presidency to effect meaningful and expeditious change. In last year’s State of the Union address Bush wowed the nation by admitting that America is addicted to oil. Although the statement was motivated more to reduce dependency on foreign oil, it caused a stir that can lead in the direction of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But such admission cannot be made without serious and painful treatment, and further action requires more and better informed people.

The benefits of status quo keep sparkling. Rich elites and suburban coddled classes keep rolling with the good times and purchase the accoutrements of trendy, healthy living. They can buy bottled enhanced water from the Coca-Cola company while loss of glacial melt in the Himalayas, the source of vast river flow, depletes natural water for hundreds of millions of Asians.

Unfortunately, few know about such horrifying disasters that potentially await. Thus An Inconvenient Truth, a penetrating documentary on global warming, arrives at an opportune time.

The film features a slide show by Al Gore, long-time campaigner on climate change. He shows, in compelling terms, that changes in greenhouse gas levels closely correlate with changes in average global temperature. A parallel and upward trend in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and average temperature is evident. An Inconvenient Truth also collates reports and images of rapidly receding glaciers, loss of ice cover in Antarctica, drought, flooding and other extremities, and simulations of population expanses that would drown with the rise of ocean water levels.

Gore debunks the myth that scientific opinion is split on the reality of global warming. While scientific publications are basically unanimous that global warming is real, media somehow portrays divided opinion. True to the hotness of the topic, more muck was dug up by the Union of Concerned Scientists on Exxon-Mobil’s efforts in sowing public doubt in global warming. The largest oil company spent millions and adopted tobacco industry disinformation tactics, which succeeded for 40 years in denying links between smoking and lung cancer.

It is not global warming that is hard to comprehend; it is lifestyles and profits that are resistant to change. Will Bush rise above vested interest, inertia and comfort, and at least as a start, call for substantially tougher car emission standards and get back on board with the rest of the world? We can only hope and pray.

Too often America has chosen to be global leader in wrong things. And too often we have mimicked America in wrong ways, notably in leaving it to political business interests to dictate national policy.

It won’t hurt Malaysians to watch An Inconvenient Truth and reclaim the policy sphere to serve society and the natural environment we inhabit. The world will do well to fight less over wealth, race and religion and put more energy into averting the greater catastrophe of increasingly volatile and deadly weather.

If not, future generations might be packing along sandals, rain jackets or scuba gear to New York City for New Years’ Day.