[Mb-civic] MUST READ: Is It Warm in Here? - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Is It Warm in Here?
We Could Be Ignoring the Biggest Story in Our History

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, January 18, 2006; A17

One of the puzzles if you're in the news business is figuring out what's 
"news." The fate of your local football team certainly fits the 
definition. So does a plane crash or a brutal murder. But how about 
changes in the migratory patterns of butterflies?

Scientists believe that new habitats for butterflies are early effects 
of global climate change -- but that isn't news, by most people's 
measure. Neither is declining rainfall in the Amazon, or thinner ice in 
the Arctic. We can't see these changes in our personal lives, and in 
that sense, they are abstractions. So they don't grab us the way a plane 
crash would -- even though they may be harbingers of a catastrophe that 
could, quite literally, alter the fundamentals of life on the planet. 
And because they're not "news," the environmental changes don't prompt 
action, at least not in the United States.

What got me thinking about the recondite life rhythms of the planet, and 
not the 24-hour news cycle, was a recent conversation with a scientist 
named Thomas E. Lovejoy, who heads the H. John Heinz III Center for 
Science, Economics and the Environment. When I first met Lovejoy nearly 
20 years ago, he was trying to get journalists like me to pay attention 
to the changes in the climate and biological diversity of the Amazon. He 
is still trying, but he's beginning to wonder if it's too late.

Lovejoy fears that changes in the Amazon's ecosystem may be 
irreversible. Scientists reported last month that there is an Amazonian 
drought apparently caused by new patterns in Atlantic currents that, in 
turn, are similar to projected climate change. With less rainfall, the 
tropical forests are beginning to dry out. They burn more easily, and, 
in the continuous feedback loops of their ecosystem, these drier forests 
return less moisture to the atmosphere, which means even less rain. When 
the forest trees are deprived of rain, their mortality can increase by a 
factor of six, and similar devastation affects other species, too.

"When do you wreck it as a system?" Lovejoy wonders. "It's like going up 
to the edge of a cliff, not really knowing where it is. Common sense 
says you shouldn't discover where the edge is by passing over it, but 
that's what we're doing with deforestation and climate change."

Lovejoy first went to the Amazon 40 years ago as a young scientist of 
23. It was a boundless wilderness, the size of the continental United 
States, but at that time it had just 2 million people and one main road. 
He has returned more than a hundred times, assembling over the years a 
mental time-lapse photograph of how this forest primeval has been 
affected by man. The population has increased tenfold, and the 
wilderness is now laced with roads, new settlements and economic 
progress. The forest itself, impossibly rich and lush when Lovejoy first 
saw it, is changing.

For Lovejoy, who co-edited a pioneering 1992 book, "Global Warming and 
Biological Diversity," there is a deep sense of frustration. A crisis he 
and other scientists first sensed more than two decades ago is drifting 
toward us in what seems like slow motion, but fast enough that it may be 
impossible to mitigate the damage.

The best reporting of the non-news of climate change has come from 
Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker. Her three-part series last spring 
lucidly explained the harbingers of potential disaster: a shrinking of 
Arctic sea ice by 250 million acres since 1979; a thawing of the 
permafrost for what appears to be the first time in 120,000 years; a 
steady warming of Earth's surface temperature; changes in rainfall 
patterns that could presage severe droughts of the sort that destroyed 
ancient civilizations. This month she published a new piece, "Butterfly 
Lessons," that looked at how these delicate creatures are moving into 
new habitats as the planet warms. Her real point was that all life, from 
microorganisms to human beings, will have to adapt, and in ways that 
could be dangerous and destabilizing.

So many of the things that pass for news don't matter in any ultimate 
sense. But if people such as Lovejoy and Kolbert are right, we are all 
but ignoring the biggest story in the history of humankind. Kolbert 
concluded her series last year with this shattering thought: "It may 
seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could 
choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in 
the process of doing." She's right. The failure of the United States to 
get serious about climate change is unforgivable, a human folly beyond 
imagining.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/17/AR2006011700895.html?nav=hcmodule
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