Endgame?

On the final day of last month’s climate summit in Copenhagen, a massive winter storm bore down on the east coast. That night, Brian Williams opened his NBC Nightly News program with this sentence: “While the global warming conference goes on in Copenhagen, we’ve got the opposite problem in the eastern half of the nation.” Mr. Williams’ erroneous remark goes a long way toward perpetuating public ignorance about the crisis we face.

He reminded me of a woman I met in the grocery store checkout line last December, who also failed to comprehend the whole picture. She declared the 70 degree day reason for celebration. I looked her in the eye and said, “It should be cold. This kind of weather is a clear sign of climate change.”

Her smiled faded, and she said, “I know. You’re right. I just can’t think about it. It’s too upsetting. I worry about my grandchildren.”

And worry she should.

In the most comprehensive study of its kind ever undertaken, the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” The study found that:

• Eleven of 12 years between 1995 and 2007 rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature.

• Atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeds by far the natural range of the last 650,000 years. The primary source of the increase is burning fossil fuels.

• The amount of methane in the atmosphere in 2005 exceeded by far the natural range of the last 650,000 years. The primary source of the increase in methane is very likely to be a combination of human agricultural activities and fossil fuel use. More than a third of the rise in nitrous oxide concentrations is due to human activity, primarily agriculture.

Other data indicates that since the late 1960s, mountain glaciers and snow cover have declined by 10 percent in both hemispheres. The ocean is absorbing more than 80 percent of the heat added to the climate system, resulting in more destructive hurricanes and rising sea levels.

Global warming is happening faster than scientists expected. This year is projected to be the hottest on record.

In the face of this crisis of unprecedented proportions for life on the planet, world politicians (I hesitate to call them “leaders”) in Copenhagen failed to agree on binding, substantive curbs in greenhouse gas emissions.

Because no such an agreement has been reached in 15 years’ worth of climate summits, the planet is experiencing more droughts, more intense and severe downpours, heavy snowfalls, flooding, widespread earlier onset of spring, and plant and animal range shifts—witness Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, the proliferation of wildfires in California, the worst drought in Korea in 100 years of record, the worst flooding on record in Argentina and Uruguay, and species extinctions, to name just a few examples.

Additional effects of climate change are civil unrest and rise in disease as global heating intensifies.

Swift decisive action was needed in Copenhagen. None was forthcoming. And many environmental scientists say we have already gone beyond the tipping point.

Without a binding agreement among nations, I fear that individual and grassroots efforts do not have the power to affect the sweeping change we need. I can buy local, change light bulbs, eschew plastic bags, recycle, buy less, use less, drive less. But entrenched energy interests still hold an iron grip on policy makers, and you and I alone can’t institute sweeping changes to cut fossil-fuel dependency and curb greenhouse gases. Only governments have that power.

What do we do now?

- Marcia Nehemiah