MANILA, Philippines?By now, most of us already know about global warming and its present and future ill effects, fueled in part by efforts done by the recent Nobel Prize winners Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel in Climate Change (IPCC).
Journalist Mark Lynas joins these efforts. The author of ?High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis,? Lynas believes survival depends on doing something today. ?There may be a 50-50 chance we can avoid a devastating rise in global temperature. If you were diagnosed with a potentially deadly disease, with those odds, you wouldn?t hesitate to go through treatment. So why wouldn?t we respond the same way when the whole planet is at stake??
In his upcoming book, ?Six Degrees,? Lynas details grimly what we can expect from a warming world, degree by agonizing degree. When world temperatures rise by one degree Celsius, most coral reefs and many mountain glaciers will be lost. When they rise by three degrees, the Amazon rainforest will collapse, Greenland?s ice sheets will disappear, and deserts will spread across the midwestern US and southern Africa.
When global temperatures rise by six degrees, life as we know it may not exist, and most of humanity may be eliminated.
But before this final horrifying scenario, several things will probably happen. Lynas predicts, ?Food shortages will send grain prices soaring; refugees will flee into enemy territories; shrinking water supplies will trigger water wars; oceans will swallow up islands, leaving entire cultures homeless; and civilization will break down.?
The dreaded six degrees
Will Earth really heat up that fast? At the start of this millennium, the IPCC released a report saying that global temperature rise may reach as much as six degrees by the end of this century. Lynas says, ?The only other time our planet warmed by six degrees Celsius, 95 percent of the world?s species were wiped out. That was 251 million years ago, and it took another 50 million years for biodiversity to return to its previous level.
In fact, since life on Earth began, every episode of mass extinction has been associated with a change in climate. This time, the greenhouse gases created by humans are causing warming to occur exponentially faster. And since half the world?s forests have been cut down, and most of the natural land surface destroyed, the regulatory systems, which keep climate habitable, can?t function. It?s as though we?ve turned up the thermostat after disabling the safety mechanisms. In this precarious position, a mass extinction now would be worse than any in the past.?
Tonight on the National Geographic Channel, the premiere telecast of ?Six Degrees Could Change the World,? based on Lynas? book, will show in graphic detail how interactions throughout the world are intertwined, and how human actions in one area will affect another. Creeks are drying up, grasslands are becoming deserts, animals are going extinct, bushfires (including the giant one that hit Tasmania last year) are raging in many parts of the world.
With hard facts coupled with hi-tech graphics, the film will showcase dramatic signs that our world is changing. For instance, it took nature 150,000 years to make the great Greenland ice sheet in Disko Bay, but this huge mass is now melting into the sea faster than at any time in recorded history. In fact, because of this sheet alone, global sea levels can rise by as much as seven meters.
Is there hope for us? Lynas says, ?Society can actually change more rapidly than we might think. Just consider people?s attitudes about the automobile. At the turn of the 1900s, no one thought having a car was a human right?that?s all come about in just a few short decades. I also believe there?s an instinct in all of us to support the little guy. Today, nature is the little guy, and without us it has no voice.?
?Six Degrees Could Change the World? premieres tonight at 9 with replays on March 22 at 3 p.m., March 28 at 10 p.m., and March 29 at 12 noon on the National Geographic Channel. For more details, visit ngcasia.com/explore/SixDegrees/default.aspx.
