By Joel A. Huberman
I was inspired to write this essay
when I read the Viewpoints section in the Sunday edition of The Buffalo News on February 12, 2012.
The News had recruited two “experts”
to answer the question, “Should [the] U.S. remove restrictions on oil
drilling?” One expert, Andrew P. Morriss, replied “Yes”,
while the other expert, Michael E. Kraft, responded “No”.
Although both men discussed important concerns (the factors affecting oil
prices, the need for conservation, the importance of producing energy locally
rather than in politically and militarily unstable foreign regions, etc.), both
of them completely missed what seems to me to be the major issue—the elephant in the room.
That elephant is the carbon dioxide
(CO2) that we release when we burn fossil fuels (oil, gas, and coal) and the
global warming, ocean acidification, and other disastrous consequences of that
CO2.
I think most readers of this essay
are already familiar with many of the predicted effects of continued fossil
fuel burning. I’ll mention just a few—melting of glaciers, melting of polar ice
caps, frequent heat waves and frequent and prolonged droughts, frequent storms
and floods, submersion of coastal cities and farms as sea levels rise, and
combined warming and acidification of our lakes and oceans.
All readers of this essay living in
the eastern two-thirds of the United States are currently experiencing or have
recently experienced abnormally high temperatures. I’m writing this essay on
March 21, 2012, in the middle of a period of unusually high temperatures (70s
to low 80s, in mid-March, in Buffalo, NY), which has been going on for nearly two
weeks straight. This has never happened before in my lifetime, and I’m 71 years
old. According to Jeff Masters, the founder of Weather Underground, in his blog
for March 17, 2012,
Minneapolis, MN, was 39°F above its average, and Bismarck, ND was 41° above its
average for the preceding day, March 16. What will happen if summer temperatures in the American
midwest approach 40°F above average? Answer: many Americans will die.
Speaking of the American midwest, if
global warming continues at its present pace, our midwest and most of our west
are likely to become deserts within the next 50 years. According to a recent study by Aiguo Dai of the National
Center for Atmospheric Research (available here),
the map below shows the measured pattern of dryness and wetness across the USA
in the decade 2000-2009 (which does not include last year’s severe Texas
drought). To
interpret this map, one needs the color scale below it and the corresponding quantitative indicators of drought
potential (“Palmer
Drought Severity Index” measurements). Values less than -4
are considered indicators of severe drought potential.
Thus, even in the first decade of
the 21st century (2000-2009), the American midwest and west were rather dry. But what might the future bring if we keep burning fossil fuels and warming the planet?
