Due to Global Warming, pretty much every part of California that voted for Al Gore and John Kerry will soon be under water. The British Guardian reports.
The oceans will rise nearly half a metre by the end of the century, forcing coastlines back by hundreds of metres, the researchers claim. Scientists believe the acceleration is caused mainly by the surge in greenhouse gas emissions produced by the development of industry and introduction of fossil fuel burning.
Scary news that, especially if you paid a cool two million for a a Bay Area one bedroom, one bath christened with salt spray. Scary for the rest of us, I suppose, considering all the childless couples that will be packing up their new age CDS, and looking for new real estate out where the Bush voters roam. But the report puts a lot of things in perspective.
The analysis showed that during the past 5,000 years, sea levels rose at a rate of around 1mm each year, caused largely by the residual melting of icesheets from the previous ice age. But in the past 150 years, data from tide gauges and satellites show sea levels are rising at 2mm a year.
Now I can grasp the fact that 2mm a year is a lot more than 1mm a year. Twice as much, if my grade school math hasn't deserted me. On the other hand, if 2mm a year is bad, 1mm a year, or a quarter meter by the time folk start arguing about whether 2100, or 2101 is the first year of the twenty-second century, is pretty bad too. I mean, how much does it matter if the water in your living room is just above or just below the coffee table with the cute blue tile that you bought only after being assured the artisan was paid according to fair labor rates? And we are going to get the quarter meter rise even if we stop producing green house gases at all, which is the economic equivalent of not breathing out anymore. The tortoise eventually catches up with the hare.
What this tells us is that global warming is something that we had better get used to, because not even Michael Moore knows how to stop it. But surely, our Bay Area Bodhisattva says as he spills a drop of Merlot with a quaint smoky aftertaste on his copy of Nation, it is imperative to reduce greenhouse gases at least to slow down the inevitable conquest of real estate by Poseidon, and give him more time to scope out small towns in Montana? Well, no, according to the analysis.
According to Prof Miller, there is little chance of slowing the rising tide caused by global warming. "There's not much one can do about sea level rise. It's clear that even if we strictly obeyed the Kyoto accord, it's still going to continue to warm. Personally, I don't think we're going to affect CO2 emissions enough to make a difference, no matter what we do. The Bush administration should stop asking whether temperatures are globally rising and admit the scientific fact that they are, but then turn the question around politically and say: 'We can't really do anything about this on any kind of cost basis at all'," he said.
And there you have it. Efforts to slow down global warming by reducing human contributions is hopeless. Why? Because to be effective, we would have to strangle all economic growth in all nations. Even that would merely delay the inevitable. And that ain't going to happen. There's no way that millions of industrious folk in China and India are going to be denied their own cute coffee tables. So what do we do?
The global warming argument is a canard. We can't save ourselves or mother earth by reversing the economic development clock. The only way forward is through. Only very wealthy societies will be able to control their green houses emissions in the future, and deal with the effects of natural global warming. The genie of economic development has been out of his bottle for a long time. We should do everything we can to ensure that all nations become wealthy as rapidly as possible. Only then will we have any hope of managing the global environment.
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