Mike Davis
Has the Age of Chaos Begun?
Thu Oct 6, 2005 22:53
64.140.159.7
Has the Age of Chaos Begun?
Discussions of "tipping points" have, in recent times, largely been relegated to the war in Iraq where such moments, regularly predicted by the Bush administration, never arrive. In the meantime, an actual tipping point may have been creeping up on us on another front entirely, one that is anathema to this administration -- that of climate change.
The latest news from scientists laboring in cold climes has been startling. The expanse of Arctic sea ice has been shrinking in the summer since the late 1970s, though usually rebounding to near normal levels in the winter. Until recently. For the last few years, winter ice cover has been shrinking as well. This will be the fourth consecutive year of record, or near record, shrinkage of September sea ice in the Arctic. Scientists speculate that a threshold has been crossed.
"Experts at the U.S. National Snow and Data Center in Colorado," writes David Adam, environmental correspondent for the British Guardian, "fear the [Arctic] region is locked into a destructive cycle with warmer air melting more ice, which in turn warms the air further. Satellite pictures show that the extent of Arctic sea ice this month dipped some 20% below the long term average for September -- melting an extra 500,000 square miles, or an area twice the size of Texas. If current trends continue, the summertime Arctic Ocean will be completely ice-free well before the end of this century."
Maybe this is bad -- extinction-bad -- for the polar bear, but otherwise doesn't it open new vistas for us all? For instance, the fabled "Northwest Passage" from Europe to Asia, so energetically, if fruitlessly, searched out by early European explorers, is now almost a reality. This summer only 60 miles of scattered ice floes stood in the path of a completely open passage across the Canadian northwest.
Unfortunately, as Mike Davis explains below, the vistas opening before us are anything but pleasing. This is, in fact, a tipping point none of us will want to see -- and none of us may be able to avoid. Let's at least hope, as environmental writer Mark Hertsgaard recently suggested, that some kind of threshold or tipping point is also finally being crossed in American society. As he commented in the Nation magazine recently:
"[G]lobal warming foot-draggers have succeeded in the past largely because the public was confused about whether the problem really existed. That confusion was encouraged by the mainstream media, which in the name of journalistic 'balance' gave equal treatment to global warming skeptics and proponents alike, even though the skeptics represented a tiny fringe of scientific opinion and often were funded by companies with a financial interest in discrediting global warming. Katrina, however, may mark a turning point for the media as well as the public."
If sales of gas-guzzling SUVs are any mark of an American awakening, their recent plunge may indicate that things are indeed looking up a bit. But I fear that, when it comes to the issue of climate change, American denial extends well beyond the present obdurate administration. We like to think that, as a can-do nation, when the (ice) chips are down, when things really get tough, we can always, in cavalry fashion, ride to the rescue just in the nick of time. As it happens, as Mike Davis makes clear, climate change is unlikely to work that way.
Davis tends to migrate in his writings (and sometimes in person) to dangerous climes and tipping-point fronts almost by nature. He has just returned from New Orleans where what may well be the hurricane-version of global warming has created a potential eco-disaster (just as the news of Katrina begins to fade). He spent the previous year following the course of, and writing a must-read book (Monster at Our Door) about, a potential avian flu pandemic for which the United States is unbearably unprepared.
The President finally responded to the danger of avian flu at his news conference Tuesday by suggesting, "If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country, and how do you then enforce a quarantine?... And who best to be able to effect quarantine? One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move." There's no surprise in this. The Bush administration, facing any crisis, automatically reaches for its guns as if it were always poised at some eternal OK Corral. Think of the President's response to a potential pandemic as public health as coup d'état.
On Thursday, Bush gave his millionth speech on his Global War on Terror (and his war in Iraq). This was a day when, on the front page of the New York Times, reporter Gina Kolata broke a story about the 1918 flu virus that created a global pandemic, killing perhaps 50 million people. (Some historians believe that, even in that era before air travel, the numbers may still have approached 100 million.) According to two teams of scientists who have reconstructed that virus, it was, to the surprise of all, a bird flu that jumped directly to humans. A friend of mine, in a private e-letter he sends out, just wrote: "One one-hundredth of the money we've spent on Iraq would help prepare us against an avian flu pandemic. But now we will be told we need to spend money on the war against terror cells in the Philippines, Indonesia and, no doubt, Canada. Maybe Bush ought to declare war against birds."
If you want to know something more detailed about the nature of government preparations for terrorist and military-related disasters versus natural or non-military ones in this country, William M. Arkin at his remarkable new Early Warning blog at the Washington Post has done the math for you. He's carefully sifted through the Department of Homeland Security's 36-month "exercise schedule," covering the department's "war-gaming" of disasters of every sort that might befall our "homeland." He found that the document "makes reference to 222 separate nationwide and local drills, 'tabletop' exercises, workshops and full-scale rehearsals. Of the 222, a total of two deal with hurricanes. A whopping total of 179 deal with biological, chemical, explosive, radiological and nuclear events. Seven national exercises are listed in Louisiana and Mississippi during the 36-month period: none deal with hurricanes."
Below, Davis turns to the issue of whether various signs, especially that disappearing Arctic sea ice, indicate that we are indeed approaching, or have already passed, a climatic (as well as climactic) tipping point that may catapult us out of the last 1,000,000 years of weather patterns and right into the unknown. The only disaster that seems to be missing from our collective plate these days is the Big One, the earthquake that will sooner or later hit California. I have no doubt that, when it does, Davis will be surfing the largest slab of basalt in sight directly into the fault. Tom
The Other Hurricane
Has the Age of Chaos Begun?
By Mike Davis
The genesis of two category-five hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) in a row over the Gulf of Mexico is an unprecedented and troubling occurrence. But for most tropical meteorologists the truly astonishing "storm of the decade" took place in March 2004. Hurricane Catarina -- so named because it made landfall in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina -- was the first recorded south Atlantic hurricane in history.
CONTINUED: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=27240
Discussions of "tipping points" have, in recent times, largely been relegated to the war in Iraq where such moments, regularly predicted by the Bush administration, never arrive. In the meantime, an actual tipping point may have been creeping up on us on another front entirely, one that is anathema to this administration -- that of climate change.
The latest news from scientists laboring in cold climes has been startling. The expanse of Arctic sea ice has been shrinking in the summer since the late 1970s, though usually rebounding to near normal levels in the winter. Until recently. For the last few years, winter ice cover has been shrinking as well. This will be the fourth consecutive year of record, or near record, shrinkage of September sea ice in the Arctic. Scientists speculate that a threshold has been crossed.
"Experts at the U.S. National Snow and Data Center in Colorado," writes David Adam, environmental correspondent for the British Guardian, "fear the [Arctic] region is locked into a destructive cycle with warmer air melting more ice, which in turn warms the air further. Satellite pictures show that the extent of Arctic sea ice this month dipped some 20% below the long term average for September -- melting an extra 500,000 square miles, or an area twice the size of Texas. If current trends continue, the summertime Arctic Ocean will be completely ice-free well before the end of this century."
Maybe this is bad -- extinction-bad -- for the polar bear, but otherwise doesn't it open new vistas for us all? For instance, the fabled "Northwest Passage" from Europe to Asia, so energetically, if fruitlessly, searched out by early European explorers, is now almost a reality. This summer only 60 miles of scattered ice floes stood in the path of a completely open passage across the Canadian northwest.
Unfortunately, as Mike Davis explains below, the vistas opening before us are anything but pleasing. This is, in fact, a tipping point none of us will want to see -- and none of us may be able to avoid. Let's at least hope, as environmental writer Mark Hertsgaard recently suggested, that some kind of threshold or tipping point is also finally being crossed in American society. As he commented in the Nation magazine recently:
"[G]lobal warming foot-draggers have succeeded in the past largely because the public was confused about whether the problem really existed. That confusion was encouraged by the mainstream media, which in the name of journalistic 'balance' gave equal treatment to global warming skeptics and proponents alike, even though the skeptics represented a tiny fringe of scientific opinion and often were funded by companies with a financial interest in discrediting global warming. Katrina, however, may mark a turning point for the media as well as the public."
If sales of gas-guzzling SUVs are any mark of an American awakening, their recent plunge may indicate that things are indeed looking up a bit. But I fear that, when it comes to the issue of climate change, American denial extends well beyond the present obdurate administration. We like to think that, as a can-do nation, when the (ice) chips are down, when things really get tough, we can always, in cavalry fashion, ride to the rescue just in the nick of time. As it happens, as Mike Davis makes clear, climate change is unlikely to work that way.
Davis tends to migrate in his writings (and sometimes in person) to dangerous climes and tipping-point fronts almost by nature. He has just returned from New Orleans where what may well be the hurricane-version of global warming has created a potential eco-disaster (just as the news of Katrina begins to fade). He spent the previous year following the course of, and writing a must-read book (Monster at Our Door) about, a potential avian flu pandemic for which the United States is unbearably unprepared.
The President finally responded to the danger of avian flu at his news conference Tuesday by suggesting, "If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country, and how do you then enforce a quarantine?... And who best to be able to effect quarantine? One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move." There's no surprise in this. The Bush administration, facing any crisis, automatically reaches for its guns as if it were always poised at some eternal OK Corral. Think of the President's response to a potential pandemic as public health as coup d'état.
On Thursday, Bush gave his millionth speech on his Global War on Terror (and his war in Iraq). This was a day when, on the front page of the New York Times, reporter Gina Kolata broke a story about the 1918 flu virus that created a global pandemic, killing perhaps 50 million people. (Some historians believe that, even in that era before air travel, the numbers may still have approached 100 million.) According to two teams of scientists who have reconstructed that virus, it was, to the surprise of all, a bird flu that jumped directly to humans. A friend of mine, in a private e-letter he sends out, just wrote: "One one-hundredth of the money we've spent on Iraq would help prepare us against an avian flu pandemic. But now we will be told we need to spend money on the war against terror cells in the Philippines, Indonesia and, no doubt, Canada. Maybe Bush ought to declare war against birds."
If you want to know something more detailed about the nature of government preparations for terrorist and military-related disasters versus natural or non-military ones in this country, William M. Arkin at his remarkable new Early Warning blog at the Washington Post has done the math for you. He's carefully sifted through the Department of Homeland Security's 36-month "exercise schedule," covering the department's "war-gaming" of disasters of every sort that might befall our "homeland." He found that the document "makes reference to 222 separate nationwide and local drills, 'tabletop' exercises, workshops and full-scale rehearsals. Of the 222, a total of two deal with hurricanes. A whopping total of 179 deal with biological, chemical, explosive, radiological and nuclear events. Seven national exercises are listed in Louisiana and Mississippi during the 36-month period: none deal with hurricanes."
Below, Davis turns to the issue of whether various signs, especially that disappearing Arctic sea ice, indicate that we are indeed approaching, or have already passed, a climatic (as well as climactic) tipping point that may catapult us out of the last 1,000,000 years of weather patterns and right into the unknown. The only disaster that seems to be missing from our collective plate these days is the Big One, the earthquake that will sooner or later hit California. I have no doubt that, when it does, Davis will be surfing the largest slab of basalt in sight directly into the fault. Tom
The Other Hurricane
Has the Age of Chaos Begun?
By Mike Davis
The genesis of two category-five hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) in a row over the Gulf of Mexico is an unprecedented and troubling occurrence. But for most tropical meteorologists the truly astonishing "storm of the decade" took place in March 2004. Hurricane Catarina -- so named because it made landfall in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina -- was the first recorded south Atlantic hurricane in history.
CONTINUED: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=27240
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