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Expert Warns of Trouble Ahead for Climate Change
By Geraldine Sealey, Spring 2003 IRP Fellow
Washington, February 24, 2003 - The Bush administration's failure to address climate change could lead to serious biological disruption on the planet this century, an expert on biodiversity issues said here today.
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Thomas Lovejoy talks to IRP Fellows about global climate change. |
World governments have yet to agree on a target for greenhouse gas concentrations, making it more difficult to stem the global warming trend, Thomas Lovejoy of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment told the IRP Fellows in International Journalism.
"It's pretty serious if you think about the kind of timetable I'm talking about, which is essentially a 50-year horizon before it gets really bad biologically," he said. "The fact we're doing very little now, [means] we're missing all kinds of opportunities."
Lovejoy said the United States should be using its position as the lone global superpower to set a greenhouse gas target and develop and export new, potentially lucrative alternative energy technologies such as hydrogen-based vehicles.
The Bush administration drew international criticism in 2001 when it abandoned the Kyoto agreement on global warming, which commits 37 industrialized nations to cut gas emissions. Bush, who proposed more modest emissions rules, said the treaty set unrealistic goals and could damage the U.S. economy.
The U.S. government should see tackling climate change as an opportunity to stem biological disruption and not as an economic problem, Lovejoy said. While effects of climate change, such as earlier flowering times, are already evident, the more serious consequences could come 50 years from now.
Researchers know, for example, that coral reefs in much of the world will be obliterated by climate change because they are sensitive to increased sea temperatures, Lovejoy said. A major chunk of the Amazon rain forest is in danger of drying out, according to another scientific model.
The study of global biodiversity, a collective term to refer to the variety of the 1.5 million described life forms on earth, helps researchers understand the effects of climate change. Biodiversity, a phrase Lovejoy coined, is essentially one the most sensitive sets of indicators we have in measuring environmental stress, he said. "It is just a very simple fact that no organism, no plant, animal, no microbe, no person, can exist without affecting its environment."
As the world anticipates a war in Iraq, however, scientists are finding it difficult to communicate the seriousness of climate change and its effects on biodiversity, Lovejoy said. "The airwaves and the print media are filled with drumbeats and that tends to push long term issues off the agenda," he said.
Copyright © 2005 International Reporting Project. All Rights Reserved.