bears

[freckles_and_doubt]

My dad phoned from France the other night, and we had a long phone conversation which entailed about ten minutes of catching up on our mutual lives, plans and what have you, and another 35 minutes or so discussing, volubly and impassionedly, global warming. This interchange was something of a revelation to me: I'd always thought I'd got my more or less psychotic environmental angsts from years of reading science fiction, but in fact the rot clearly set in a lot earlier. Given that my father is an animal scientist by training, this also explains why my personal environmental philosophy tends to circle back around population pressure and biodiversity despite the fact that I'm an airy-fairy English academic who wouldn't recognise an exponential growth curve if it slithered up my leg. (It was absolutely no sort of revelation to have this kind of conversation with my dad, incidentally. Both my parents are characterised by an ability to take an intelligent interest in issues in the abstract, which makes them interesting to talk to and is one of the many reasons why I am a Lucky Daughter, TM).

Anyway. Global warming. I find it absolutely fascinating, in doing some back-up reading after the conversation, to consider the sad case of the polar bear. To say that the ice caps are melting is something of a cliché of common global warming discourse. The ice caps are melting, yeah, we know. OK, but did you know how much they're melting? 8% per decade, according to the BBC; at this rate there'll be none left in summer by 2060. This starting to make a serious difference to polar bear populations, not only because longer summers are giving them less time to hunt, but because this summer the ice has retreated 200 miles further north than usual, so they're having to swim much longer distances than usual between ice floes, and significant numbers of them are drowning.

This is sad, and predictable, and a horribly good example of the complex web of relationships which our heedless presence on this planet is joyously and thoughtlessly destroying, and the feedback loops and knock-on effects are going to hit a threshold or trigger or something very, very soon and we're all royally screwed. But what interests me is that Googling for this kind of thing pulls up a rash of articles talking about increased ice cap meltage as early as 2003; various scientists gave dire warnings with dire figures attached, and then the whole thing dropped out of the news for a couple of years. It's only when charismatic mammals are directly threatened that the issue is deemed newsworthy again (it made the cover of a March issue of Time). This also suggests that global warming is gaining increasing status as a valid threat in the popular consciousness, but as far as I'm concerned, it's too little, way too late.

This wouldn't be happening if we were all orang-utans, with a moderate birthrate, a more enlightened culture and the sense not to come down from the trees in the first place. Opposable thumbs, definitely a mistake.

Comments

Global dimming

[first-fallen.livejournal.com]

I watched a really interesting documentary on TV a few months ago about Global Dimming. It's a very controversial theory, in that many environmental scientists are scoffing at its existence, but it makes a lot of sense. Basically, the amount of light reaching the earth's surface is decreasing because of pollution, causing decreased evaporation, change in climate and crop failures. The scary thing is, global dimming is slowing global warming, so if we clean up our skies then the planet will get hotter. It's a bit of a Catch 22.

Tried to link to Google results for Global Dimming, comments won't accept the href link. Argh, just Google it yourself.

Re: Global dimming

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I saw something similar on BBC last year, possibly the same documentary? The stats for September 11th after the World Trade Centre, when no planes were flying across America, were terrifying in the extreme.