Unintentionally, we have set in motion massive systems of the planet with huge amounts of inertia that have kept it relatively hospitable to civilization for the last 10,000 years. We have heated the deep oceans.  We have reversed the carbon cycle by more than 600,000 years. We have loosed a wave of violent weather. We have altered the timing of the seasons. We are living on an increasingly narrow margin of stability.

While the world’s governments have spent nine years trying to ratify emissions reductions of five to seven percent, a larger reality is being ignored. The science tells us clearly we must cut our emissions by at least 70 percent if we are to allow the climate to re-stabilize.
While some aspects of the science are dizzyingly complex, the facts underlying the science are quite simple. Carbon dioxide traps in heat. For 10,000 years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has remained the same — 280 PPM—until the late 19th century when the world began to industrialize using more coal and oil. That 280 is now up to 380 – a level this planet has not experienced for at least 650,000 years. Unchecked, that 280 will double later in this century to 560 PPM which correlates with an increase in the global temperature of 3* to 10* F. For context, the last Ice Age was only 5* to 9* F colder than our current climate. Each year, we are pumping seven billion tons of heat-trapping carbon  into an atmosphere whose upper extent is about 10 miles overhead. 

 
The most visible evidence of this new climatic instability lies in the relentless succession of extreme weather events all over the world during the past few years.
A few highlights just from 2005 include:
* In January, two feet of snow fell in the hills outside Los Angeles.
 * In February, a 124-mile-an-hour windstorm shut down nuclear plants in Scandinavia and the UK
 * A severe, prolonged  drought in the Midwest dropped water levels in the Missouri River to their lowest on record last summer.
 * In July, the worst drought on record in southern Europe triggered wildfires in Spain and Portugal and left water levels in France at their lowest in 30 years.
 * That same month, a lethal heat wave in Arizona kept temperatures above 110 degrees for a week and killed more than 20 people.
 * In August, the Indian city of Mumbai received 37 inches of rain in one day — killing 1,000 people and disrupting the lives of 20 million others.
 * Days later, global warming hit home with a vengeance in the form of Katrina, Rita and Wilma — hurricanes which began as relatively small, category 1 storms but which swelled to enormously destructive megastorms as they passed over the superheated waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The economic consequences of these intensifying weather extremes are visible in the rising disaster relief costs to governments and the escalating losses of the world’s property insurers. 
 
During the 1980s insurance losses to extreme weather events averaged $2 billion a year; in the 1990s they averaged $12 billion a year. In 1998, the insurance industry lost $89 billion  to extreme events — more than it lost during the entire decade of the 1980s.  In 2005, the industry reported that the world absorbed about $150 billion in losses from climate impacts.
 
Moreover, Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, estimates that within several decades, losses from climate impacts will amount to $300 billion a year, while the largest re-insurer in Britain projects that, unchecked, the impacts of climate change could bankrupt the global economy by 2065.
 
Politically, there is a strong totalitarian threat to climate change. It is easiest to see in certain poor countries whose ecosystems are as fragile as their traditions of democracy. It is not hard to foresee governments resorting to permanent states of martial law in the face of food shortages, droughts, floods, incursions of environmental refugees and epidemics of infectious disease.
 
A couple of years ago, following a long spell of  drought and frost, 700,000 Papua New Guineans left their homes and began wandering the countryside in search of food, water and warmth. And officials said they could not control the situation. Fortunately, other countries came to their aid, but the situation is a vivid illustration of the kind of political instability that climate change implies.
 
The escalation of climatic instability holds anti-democratic potentials for the North as well. It will cause big job losses. It will shrink foreign markets. It will impair the flow of industrial commodities from abroad. This is not the kind of climate in which democracy flourishes. This is the kind of climate that could easily lead to food rationing, with its associated black-market crime. It could lead to the militarization of disaster relief forces to maintain social order. The threat is imminent enough that the Central Intelligence Agency is studying the potentials for political destabilization from climate-related disruptions.   Last year, the Pentagon released a major planning scenario detailing mass-migrations, wars and all kinds of political chaos that would result from a rapid climate change event. What is significant about the document is that it reclassifies climate change from an environmental problem to a national security threat.
 
There is one more body of evidence that has nothing to do with computer models or weather patterns. It involves physical changes taking place today:
 * Warming expands water.  Officials recently relocated  40,000 inhabitants from their island homes in the South Pacific which are being submerged by rising sea levels.
 
Heat changes ecosystems. Two recent studies in the journal Nature reported that animals, insects, birds, fish and whole ecosystems all over the world are migrating toward the poles in a futile search for temperature stability.
 
Warming is also accelerating in the deep oceans — down to a depth of two miles.  That deep ocean warming is causing the break up of Antarctic ice shelves— three pieces at least the size of Rhode Island have broken off since 1995.  A little more than a year ago, the largest ice shelf in the Arctic — 3,000 years old, 80 feet thick and 150 square miles in area — collapsed.
 * High above the oceans, most of earth’s glaciers are retreating at accelerating rates. The biggest glacier in the Peruvian Andes was retreating by 14 feet a year 20 years ago; today it is shrinking by 99 feet a year.
 * The Siberian and Alaskan tundras, which for thousands of years absorbed methane and CO2, are now thawing and releasing those gases back into the atmosphere.
 
We have even altered the timing of the seasons. Because of the buildup of atmospheric CO2, spring is now arriving almost two weeks earlier in the northern hemisphere than it did 20 years ago. Without realizing it, we are changing the rhythms of nature by which we have planted our crops, and lived our lives and written our poetry for 10,000 years.  
 
Finally, climatic instability is bad for human health. The most obvious impact comes from heating. Recently, the UN’s weather agency (World Meteorological Organization) predicted a worldwide doubling of deaths due to heat waves in the next 20 years.  Witness the 35,000 heat deaths in Europe two summers ago.
 
There is another, more complex set of health impacts – and they involve the warming-driven northward migration of tropical diseases. Warming accelerates the breeding rates and the biting rates of insects.  It expands their range by allowing them to live longer at higher altitudes and higher latitudes. As a result, mosquitoes are now spreading yellow fever, malaria and dengue fever to populations which have never previously been exposed.  Globally malaria quadrupled between 1990 and 1995.
 
The British medical journal, the Lancet, has called indifference to climate change a form of “bio-political terrorism.”
 
So the consequences to our social existence are truly profound.  As one world-class  scientist said: “If this newly unstable climate had begun 150 years ago, the planet would likely never have been able to support its current population.” 
 
This, then, is the central drama underlying the issue: the ability of this planet to sustain civilization versus the survival of the largest commercial enterprise in human history. The oil and coal industries together generate more than a trillion dollars a year in commerce. They support the economies of more than a dozen countries. In this battle, their resources are virtually without limit. 
 
For more than a decade, the fossil fuel lobby has mounted an extremely effective campaign of disinformation to persuade the public and policy-makers that the issue of atmospheric warming is still stuck in the limbo of scientific uncertainty. That campaign for the longest time targeted the science. And in so doing, it marginalized the findings of more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the U.N. in what is the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history. It then misrepresented the economics of an energy transition. And most recently, with its new champion in the White House, it has attempted to demolish the diplomatic foundations of the climate convention.  And it has been extraordinarily successful in maintaining a relentless drumbeat of doubt in the public mind.
 
More than a decade ago, Western Fuels, a $400-million coal consortium, declared in its annual report it was launching a direct attack on mainstream science and enlisting several scientists who are skeptical about climate change—Fred Singer, Pat Michaels and Robert Balling. It turned out these three skeptics received about a million dollars in a three-year period from coal and oil interests which was never publicly disclosed until we published it. 
 
Western Fuels and several coal utilities launched an extensive public relations campaign which called for local press, radio and TV appearances by these greenhouse skeptics. According to its strategy papers, the purpose of the campaign was to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” The same document indicates the campaign was designed to target “older, less-educated men…[and] young, low-income women” in districts which receive their electricity from coal and, preferably, have a representative on the House Energy Committee.
 
The coal industry followed this effort with a $250,000 video which claimed global warming is good for us.  It argued that as we get more warming in the far north, we can grow more food to help feed an expanding population.  Unfortunately, the video overlooks two factors. The first is the bugs. Of all natural systems, one of the most sensitive to even slightest temperature change is insects; even a slight warming will trigger an explosion of crop-destroying, disease-spreading insects. Plant biologists point out an even more unconscionable omission. While enhanced CO2 may temporarily increase yields in the northern latitudes, it will decimate food crop growth in the tropical latitudes where the majority of the world’s poorest and hungriest people live. A half-degree increase in the average temperature will cause a substantial decline in rice yields in Southeast Asia—and a drop-off of 20 percent of the wheat crop in India—a country where a third of the population—more than 300 million people—live in extreme poverty.
 
This manufactured denial is by far the biggest obstacle facing all of us at work on this issue.  It is the predictable outcome of a campaign of disinformation which was launched a decade ago by the coal industry — which paid three would-be scientists more than a million dollars in a three year period to publicly deny this reality. More recently it has been carried forward by ExxonMobil which has spent more than $13 million in the last five years to bankroll these skeptics.  
 
As recently as July, 2006, ExxonMobil took another step to further distort public policy.  In February, a group of 86 Evangelical ministers urged strong action on global warming to help preserve God’s creation — and to protect the world’s poorest residents from the ravages of climate change.
 
That was followed, in July, by a statement from a smaller group of evangelical organizations downplaying the severity of climate change.  Six of the fundamentalist Christian groups that formed the core of this new coalition received nearly $2.5 million in funding from ExxonMobil.
 
In the early 1990s, with the science still uncertain, this deception could be excused as predictable, business-as-usual response. But since the science has become so robust and the impacts so visible, I am coming to regard it as a crime against humanity.  
 
To me as a journalist, this whole campaign goes way beyond traditional public relations spin.  To me, this effort basically amounts to the privatization of truth.  

The industry-sponsored “skeptics”  are fond of pointing out uncertainties in the science. They have made a living off of scientific uncertainty. But they have used it in a very selective and misleading way.
 
Here is what I think is the truth about uncertainty. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere 100 years. If we could magically stop all our coal and oil burning, we would still be subject to a long spell of costly and traumatic disruptive weather. Moreover new research indicates that prehistoric climate changes have happened as abrupt shifts rather than gradual transitions, and that small changes in a very delicately balanced atmosphere have produced very large outcomes. Not only are we gambling with our future. We are gambling with our eyes blindfolded. We can’t really read the cards we’ve been dealt.
 
Here is some good news.  Outside the U.S., there is virtually no debate in any other country in the world about what is happening to the climate.  All the debates in the other countries are on the policy side — how do we change our energy diet without wrecking our economies.  One proof is that, even as the US has been dragging its heels, a number of European countries have decided to forge ahead.
 
Holland just finished a plan to cut its emissions 80 percent in the next 40 years.  Tony Blair has announced Britain will cut its emissions by 60 percent in the next 50 years. Germany has committed to cuts of 50 percent in 50 years.  In mid-2005, French President Jacques Chirac called on the industrial nations to cut emissions by 75 percent in the next 45 years.
 
So it’s important to remember that the confusion about climate change stops at the boundaries of the United States. 
 
With that in mind, I would like briefly to reference three interactive policy strategies which could easily be accommodated within the Kyoto framework.
 
They include:
 • a change of energy subsidy policies in industrial countries — redirecting the $25 billion that the US government spends — and the $200 billion that industrial nations overall — spend — on subsidizing fossil fuels — and putting those subsidies behind renewable technologies. 
 • the creation of a large fund, of about $300 billion a year for several years — to jumpstart renewable energy infrastructures in developing countries; this could  be funded by a tax on global commerce (in the form of a tax on international currency transactions) to address a global threat.
 • the adoption within the Kyoto framework of a binding, progressively more stringent Fossil Fuel Efficiency Standard that rises by 5 percent per year. 
 
Under this plan, every country would start at its current baseline to increase its fossil fuel energy efficiency by 5 percent every year until the global 70 percent reduction is attained.  That means a country would produce the same amount of goods as the previous year with five percent less carbon fuel.  Alternatively, it would produce five percent more goods with the same carbon fuel use as the previous year. 
 
Since no economy can grow at five percent for long, emissions reductions would outpace long-term economic growth. 
 
For the first few years of this progressive efficiency standard, most countries would meet their goals by implementing low-cost or even profitable efficiencies – the “low-hanging fruit” — in their current energy systems.  After a few years, as those efficiencies became more expensive to capture, countries would meet the 5 percent goal by drawing  more and more energy from renewable sources – most of which are 100 percent efficient by a Fossil Fuel standard.
 
And that would create the mass markets and economies of scale for renewables that would bring down their prices and make them competitive with coal and oil.
 
Several oil executives have said in private that they can, in an orderly fashion, decarbonize their energy supplies. But they need the governments of the world to regulate them so all companies can make the transition in lockstep without losing market share to competitors. A progressive Fossil Fuel Efficiency Standard would, I think,  provide that type of regulation. 
 
The real economic issue involved in a global transition to clean energy is not cost.  The real economic issue is whether the world has a large enough labor force to accomplish the task in time to meet nature’s deadline.
 
While most discussions about the climate crisis involve diplomacy and economics, climate change is ultimately a fundamental issue of human morality.
 
When I talk to policy makers about this issue, I cast it in economic terms. Here are the coming financial impacts of climate change — $300 billion a year in losses in the coming decades — versus the economic benefits of a global transition to clean energy. 
 
But climate change is not basically an economic issue. It is, first and foremost, a moral issue.  Climate change hits poor countries hardest — not because nature discriminates against the poor, but because poor countries can not afford to strengthen their infrastructures to buffer climate impacts.  To continue to ignore this threat means putting at risk billions of poor people around the world who are immediately vulnerable to its impacts. 
 
It means dishonoring all the work of all those generations who have worked so hard to create this civilization we enjoy today.
 
Ultimately of course, it means consigning our children to a future of chaos and disintegration. What is really missing from the climate debate is an insistence on the moral imperative of truly facing this challenge in all its dimensions. Animals are displaced. Natural systems are showing alarming signs of stress. Species are going extinct. We are tampering with the very foundations of creation. Surely our lives are more than the sum of our economic transactions.  Hopefully we have maintained enough of our capacity for appreciation that we can not let ourselves knowingly proceed with the ruination of our species home. Were the U.S. to take the lead in this effort, it could accomplish more than a simple energy transition. Not only could this kind of initiative stave off the most disruptive impacts of our inflamed atmosphere. It could also bring all the nations of the world together in a common global project.  It could begin to put people in charge of governments — and governments in charge of corporations. It could create millions of jobs — especially in developing countries.  It could begin to turn impoverished and dependent countries into trading partners. It could begin to reduce the destabilizing — and dehumanizing — inequity between the North and South.  And in a very short time it could jump the renewable energy industry into a central driving engine of growth for the global economy. Back here on earth, the reality is dismal.
 
Climate change has become the pre-eminent case study of the contamination of our political system by money.  Four years ago, the President reneged on his campaign promise to cap emissions from coal-powered plants. The Administration then announced the first draft of its energy plan – which is basically a fast track to climate hell.
 In a truly Orwellian stroke, the White House removed all references to the dangers of climate change from the EPA’s website. This is not political conservatism. This is corruption disguised as conservatism. Finally, of course,  the president withdrew the US from the Kyoto talks. At the time, he pledged the US withdrawal would not affect the efforts of other countries. Nevertheless, in December in Montreal, the Bush Administration did its best to kill the ongoing climate negotiations. Still, despite the current political situation, I do believe the time is right for a major political offensive on the climate crisis. We have as allies most of the nations of the world.  We have growing numbers of corporations. Most importantly, we have nature.  Climate change will only get worse.  
 But the time for action is very short. The deep oceans are warming; the tundra is thawing; the glaciers are melting; infectious diseases are spreading; violent weather is increasing and the timing of the seasons has changed.  And all that has resulted from one degree of warming.  By contrast, the earth will warm from 3 to 10 degrees later in this century, according to the IPCC. 

Our civilization is standing at an extraordinary crosspoint. And while a positive prognosis may be overly visionary, the alternative – given the escalating instability of the climate and the intensifying desperation of global poverty – is truly horrible to contemplate.  Our modern history has been marked by the totalitarianism of command-and-control economies and the opulence and brutality of unregulated markets and runaway globalization. It is just possible that a global public works project to rewire the planet could serve as a pilot, a model that could begin to point all toward that optimal calibration of competition and cooperation that would maximize our energy and creativity and productivity while, at the same time, dramatically extending the baseline conditions for peace – peace among people and peace between people and nature.    
——————————————————————-
Ross Gelbspan, a 30-year journalist with The Philadelphia Bulletin, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, is the author of two books on the climate crisis:  The Heat Is On (1997) and Boiling Point (2004). He maintains the website: www.heatisonline.org