A Newer World: Politics, Money, Technology, and What’s Really Being Done to Solve the Climate Crisis

8 | A Resiliant Future: Adaption, Education, Law, and Lifestyle

227 8 a resilient future ADAPTATION, EDUCATION, LAW, AND LIFESTYLE Impacts The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has produced four Assessment Reports. The First Assessment Report came out in 1990 and played a tremendous role in galvanizing world opinion for addressing the climate crisis . The fifth will be rolled out from September of 2013 through October 2014. Each of the four Assessment Reports to date have had, as you would imagine, a large amount of material on the impacts of climate change. The reports have become increasingly more thorough—and consistently more dire in what is being seen by thousands of scientists all over the planet. Figure 8.1 shows a chart from the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.1 It is illustrative of the global breadth of the impacts from climate change. As you can see, the impacts intensify as the temperature rises. A similar scope of impacts is reflected in the study published in 2008 from the National Research Council, one of the National Academies of the United States, on the “Ecological Impacts of Climate Change.” The report notes that “climate change is transforming ecosystems on an extraordinary scale, at an extraordinary pace. As each species responds to its changing environment, its interactions with the physical world and the organisms around it change too. This triggers a cascade of impacts throughout the entire ecosystem.”2 The nrc study, like the compilation from the ipcc, looks at a vast range of impacts, both observable over the course of the recent past and for the future . The ipcc looks at the impacts on a range of sectors, including freshwater resources; ecosystems; food, fiber, and forest products; coastal systems and low-lying areas; industry, settlement, and society; and health. The ipcc Working Group II (wg ii) report also zeroes in on each of the continents, as well as the polar regions and small islands. a newer world 228 What are these impacts? More and bigger glacial lakes; the thawing of permafrost; earlier snowmelt in mountain regions; warming of lakes and rivers ; earlier timing of biological events in spring such as bird migration; a shift toward the poles for terrestrial animal and plant species; shifts also in the range and the abundance of vital ocean species such as algae, plankton, and fish; effects on crops and forests; health impacts from heat, disease, and allergies .3 The list goes on beyond these. Glaciers In Chapter 6, we touched on how black carbon deposition affects glaciers and ice in the Arctic. We did not delve into how thoroughly diminished the 8.1 Impacts from rising temperatures. Stern Review a resilient future 229 world’s cryosphere* has become over the past century, with an acceleration over the past several decades. The World Glacier Monitoring Service and the un Environment Program issued a comprehensive report on the state of the world’s glaciers in 2008. In it they documented the overall trend of the retreat of glaciers worldwide— with a doubling of the average annual melting rate over the last decade! The report predicts the disappearance of glaciers from many mountain ranges altogether during the twenty-first century if measures are not taken to reverse global warming and other negative influences on the cryosphere. In sum, the authors say that “changes in glaciers and ice caps provide some of the clearest evidence of climate change. . . . These changes have impacts on global sea level fluctuations, the regional to local natural hazard situation, as well as on societies dependent on glacier meltwater.”4 Let’s look at the last of these three first: the importance of glacial sources of water for human populations, their agriculture, and their energy. Glaciers are built from fallen snow, in some places accumulated over millennia. They are distinguished by the fact that they move, like very slow rivers, toward the ocean. Glaciers cover 10 percent of the world’s land surface—down from the last ice age, when ice covered 32 percent of the land. Locked up mostly in the polar regions and at very high altitudes, they account for 75 percent of all the world’s freshwater.5 After the Arctic and Antarctic regions, the Himalayas, sometimes known as the “Third Pole,” have the largest concentration of glaciers. What distinguishes the Himalayan glaciers from those of the Arctic and Antarctic is that they are the water source for hundreds of millions of people in Asia. There are...