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Let's Not Get Bogged Down in Denial

February 7, 2005

Some people find global warming to be threatening. Not because of what may happen in a hotter world.

No, some people find the whole idea threatening – as if acknowledging the real evidence that scientists are accumulating about global warming upsets “the way things ought to be,” in the words of a leading practitioner of combat radio.

On Feb. 6, a University of Washington biology professor published an op-ed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer describing the fierce reaction to his research about the role that a runaway carbon dioxide buildup played in a mass extinction 250 million years ago.

Professor Peter Ward carefully pointed out that he was not saying the same cataclysm is likely to happen again as a result of the current CO2 buildup. Still, we face serious risks – disruptions in weather patterns in critical agricultural regions, spread of tropical diseases to temperate latitudes. Publicizing his findings from the deep past shed important light on the climate questions facing us today.

While many worried people asked Ward for more information, others bristled with indignation, as if Professor Ward had attacked all that is right and good. “I was alarmed as well at the number of telephone calls and e-mails dripping with hostility toward anyone who would even suggest that global warming is both real and a potential danger to our society and civilization,” he wrote.

Those in denial can think whatever they want, but science is marching on. And a few cracks in the stolid glacier of political indifference are starting to show in Washington.

Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska is part of a growing corps of Republicans who believe that doing something about the changing climate is better than doing nothing. He plans to float a bill that would speed up development of technologies to reduce carbon emissions. No mandatory emissions caps like the McCain-Lieberman legislation, mind you, but better than anything that has come out of the White House so far.

And look who served as co-chair of an international task force that published a report telling industrial nations that it’s time to move fast to curb carbon emissions – Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of the six Republicans who voted “yea” on McCain-Lieberman’s first floor vote in 2003. (The bill failed, but the 55-43 margin was surprisingly close.)

Snowe’s Maine colleague, fellow Republican Susan Collins, has just introduced a bill to spend $10 million per year for the next six years on studying the risks of abrupt climate change. Joining Collins in sponsoring the bill was Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell.

Ground zero of abrupt climate change could be a swampy, buggy mess of peat bogs in western Siberia. Research findings published last year suggest that the bogs, the largest peatlands in the world, may have been the source of a huge outgassing of methane 9,000 to 11,500 years ago. Methane is another greenhouse gas.

Peat bogs are found in cool regions where dead plant material doesn’t decompose well. As a result, the bogs store a vast quantity of carbon, estimated at more than half a trillion tons. That’s about 80 times as much carbon as the entire U.S. releases every year.

The northern latitudes are warming up all over the world, however. Warm those bogs up and dry them out, and at some point, bacterial processes will start turning all that stored carbon into CO2 that would waft its way into the air. In short order, the peat bogs could add several quilts onto the thickening blanket of greenhouse gases that are heating up the atmosphere and changing the climate.

As the peat bogs example indicates, we may be approaching dangerous climate thresholds we don’t want to cross. The emerging signs of political movement in DC are long overdue, but more alacrity, if you please, ladies and gentlemen.