The road to ecological Armageddon
Gelbspan is no irresponsible doom-sayer. He is a long-time editor and reporter, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the author of one other respected book on climate change: The Heat is On. He also covered the UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972 and the World Economic Forum at Davos in 1998.
Gelbspan has used his background and reportorial skills to put together a body of evidence that documents how doing nothing about climate change is putting us on the road to catastrophe. Consider these chilling developments discussed in Boiling Point:
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Scientists have found that since the year 1000, the decade of the 1990s was the hottest in history. Indeed, 1998 was the hottest in the last 1,000 years!
Climatologists reveal that climate warming was progressing at the rate of one degree centigrade per century, but that rate began changing in the mid 1970s when research showed that the warming rate had increased to about three degrees centigrade.
In 2001, researchers found that the world's oceans had warmed by about one-tenth of a degree centigrade to a depth of almost two miles in the last five years. Gelbspan quotes one of the researchers, the distinguished Sydney Levitus of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, as noting, "I believe our results represent the strongest evidence to date that the Earth's climate system is responding to human-induced forcing." Scientists now know for a fact that the Arctic has thinned dramatically over the past two decades. In 1980, an Arctic ice shelf was 150 feet thick. By 2003, the same ice shelf had thinned to less than half that depth.
This is chilling information, indeed, but if we are headed to ecological Armageddon, climate-wise, why have so many otherwise rationale human beings adamantly maintain that global warning is a figment of the tree-hugging lobby's imagination.
First, Gelbspan fingers the expected suspects. Not only is the fossil fuel industry financing the climate change skeptics, it is also directing the Bush administration's climate policies as a reward for backing Republican elections bids. Exxon Mobil alone is giving $1 million annually to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, The Frontiers of Freedom and other climate change skeptics. In 2000, the coal industry donated $3.8 million to the presidential elections, which was three times the 1996 contributions. About 88 percent of it went to Republicans.
In reading this book, it becomes a no-brainer figuring out why the US has stonewalled on the Kyoto Protocol and other environmental initiatives. Gelbspan labels the skeptics "criminals against humanity." But equally criminal, as Gelbspan points out, is the way the media has handled the climate change issue. As the author explains: " The US press has basically played the role of unwitting accomplice consistently minimising the story, if not burying it from the public altogether." Most scientists write clearly, Gelbspan notes, but many journalists are lazy, and tend to shy away from perusing articles appearing in the scientific peer-reviewed literature, the primary and most valuable source of climate science information. The resultjournalists are under-reporting the biggest story of our lifetime.
As for the "compromised activists" (the author's term for the environmental lobby), they have missed the boat. "Around the country, environmental advocates are working to get people to drive less, turn down their thermostats, and reduce their energy use," Gelbspan writes. "Unfortunately, though many environmental problems can be addressed through lifestyle change, climate change is not one of them."
Gelbspan's investigation is well written and fast paced and that would be reason enough to read this book. But the author also offers a concrete plan to avert the catastrophe. First, he dissects the three major plans put forth in the past several years: Contraction and Conversion (C and C), Sky Trust, and the Apollo Project. Gelbspan's conclusion: "None of them would really limit the political stranglehold of the fossil fuel lobby on our political system-and none would propel the industry into the kind of transformation that a sustainable future requires."
He touts the World Energy Modernisation Plan, which is designed to cut carbon emissions by 70 percent while creating millions of jobs worldwide. Read this timely book to find out the plan's details and how we can save the planet. As noted scientist Paul Ehrlich wrote in assessing Boiling Point's merit: "While the facts in this splendid book are terrifying, the opportunity it reveals is truly thrilling."
Daily Star columnist Ron Chepesiuk is a Visiting Professor at Chittagong University and Research Associate with the National Defence College.