WORLD WAR 3: BATTLE FOR EARTH

 

1. Climate change
2. Global warming and mankind
3. Story of ozone and ozone holes
4. World War 3: Battle for Earth

 

Mobilizing the troops

In the long 1968 (less than 50 years ago!?) for the first time in history a global debate on matters of preserving the environment was held in the General assembly of the United nations. UNESCO organized an international conference on rational use and preservation of the biosphere.

The world's awareness about the ecological catastrophes around the world, which the media began to follow more often, culminated on the 22nd of April 1970 when twenty million people gathered in organized events. 22nd April later was named as the Earth Day. [42]

In 1972 the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (ECO I) was held in Stockholm where on the initiative of the USA and Scandinavian countries the creation of the global UN program for the protection of the environment was suggested. The same year the General assembly of the UN accepted the UNEP, United Nations Environment Programme.

After the first world climate conference organized in 1979 in Geneva, in which the first outlines of the potential effects of climate changes were considered, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the International Council for Science (ICSU) established the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). WRCP was of crucial importance for giving the scientific basis to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was founded in 1988 under the influence of WMO and UNEP. The mandate of the committee is focused on the assessment of the influence of human activity on climate change.

In 1992, during the Earth Summit / United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, 160 countries formed convention on climate change with the goal to cut the emission of harmful gasses in the atmosphere until 2000 and lower it to the amount of emission that was present in 1990.

The third conference of countries that signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in Kyoto 1997, defines the goals for reducing anthropogenic emissions of carbon monoxide and other greenhouse gasses. Countries that signed the Kyoto protocol agreed that they will lower the emission of greenhouse gasses to 5.2 % below the level of emission of greenhouse gasses from 1990, before the year 2012. For it to become valid, 55 countries needed to ratificate it and those countries needed to be responsible for at least 55 % of the pollution. This happened on the 16th of February 2005 when the protocol was ratificated by Russia.

USA did not ratificate the Kyoto protocol, China however did, so?

After the failure of the "historic" UN conference on the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2010, when the world leaders couldn't create a legally binding contract on the subject of reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses, the representatives of the 194 members of the United Nations Framework Convention in the Mexican seaside resort Cancun, 2011, decided to lower their appetites and move forward with smaller steps. The key conclusions of the conference were the agreement to found the Green Climate Fund (GFC) whose goal would be to help poor countries battle the effects of global warming and an agreement to stop deforestating and destroying forests (deforestation is responsible for around 20 % of the total emission of carbon dioxide).

 

Cannon fodder and war profiteers

What the world's superpowers did after all those conferences and agreements to lower the emission of carbon dioxide you can see in Fig. 10.

Fig. 10. Top 10 polluters. Countries that signed the Kyoto protocol obligated themselves that they would, by 2012, lower their emissions of harmful gasses to levels below the emissions in 1990. USA did not sign the Kyoto protocol. (UN, 2010) → Download high quality image

Annex B of the Kyoto protocol dictates the decrease each country needs to achieve (from -8 % to +10 %) in a five year period from 2008 till 2012. For Croatia this means a 5 % decrease compared to the situation in 1990. Uh... this statistic - due to a sudden (de)industrialization after the war for independence Croatia increased it's CO₂ emissions by 31.83 % (in 2007 it was 24.84 million tons or 0.08 % of the world's emission) and could easily be penalized for excessive emissions of greenhouse gasses. [43]

The glimpse of hope for Croatia maybe lies in the fact that its increase in CO₂ is well below the world's average. The world's emission of CO₂ in 2007 was 40 % greater than the emission in 1990. Another interesting bit of data related to Fig. 10: the increase in CO₂ in China was so large that the entire population of Africa, about a billion of them in 54 countries, would have to hold their breath for more than 2.5 years (man creates around 1 kg of CO₂ a day) and shut down all machines on the continent in order to compensate.

The conflict between the rich and the poor played a large part from the start in international politics regarding the preservation of our environment. According to the thoughts of many poor countries, climate politics are one of the ways of keeping the North prevalent over the South. Another seventeen countries from the, now past, eastern block refused to cooperate with UN's climate conference as they considered the climate politic of that time to be "neocolonial". Even though the Soviet block no longer exists, the distrust between the developed and the non developed world has not vanished. The distrust is based on the fact that the more developed North, after getting rich on the South's expense and achieving a remarkable life standard, is now setting the "growth limit" and that by calling upon climate politic, North is trying to stop the South's development.

The other side also held conferences, so a conference about climate changes was held in the Heartland institute in March 2008. The conference was followed by over 400 scientists who questioned the official theory about the influence of industrial development and production on global warming. This lead to the, now called, Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change in which they stated that the governing factions are trying to control the countries in development with taxes and bills for emitting CO₂. [44]

Another argument to this theory was given last year with the Climategate affair which erupted when Julian Assange and WikiLeaks published over a thousand private e-mails that British scientists from the University of East Anglia (UEA) sent to their colleagues all over the world, showing that the date was being tampered with in order to control different opinions.

Considering that climate skeptics have overblown and abused the fact that those e-mails leaked to the public, and given the unfortunate mistake in the IPCC report assessment saying the Himalayan icebergs will melt and fully vanish by 2035, the president of IPCC dr. Rejendra Pachauri reported that it did not matter if the Himalayan icebergs will melt by 2035, or by 2070, or even by 2010, but instead what mattered was the fact that they are melting and the repercussions of such events.

 

Collateral victims

Mobilization for the war against CO₂ in some parts of the world was so successful they threw in all their natural resources in to the battle for good weather. For example, in Malaysia, 48 468.22 km² (1 km² = 100 ha) of ancient rainforests was used in furnaces in which combustion destroys CO₂. In other words, they were replaced with a monoculture of oil palms to satisfy the growing need for palm oil (one of the resources needed for the production of bio diesel). 14.69 % of Malaysia's surface (329 847 km²) was in 2010 covered with oil palm plantations and their neighbors are not that far behind them. So it is no surprise to see that if, according to prognoses, their plans to expand their plantations come to fruition (Fig. 11) all of the rainforests in Indonesia (and all the animals from them) might simply vanish. Some believe that the best measurement for man's influence on the environment is the environment's biological diversity. [45, 46, 47]

Fig. 11. Planned growth of surfaces cowered with oil palms in Indonesia till 2020 (UNEP, 2011).

You have surely seen, while reading the newspapers, large titles stating how bio fuels do not harm the climate as the CO₂ produced through combustion of bio fuels is again used in Brazilian and Malasian plantations (for the growth of plants that create the bio fuel itself, soy, corn, sugarcane, oil palms, etc.). Reducing the problem of pollution only to CO₂ is a criminally bad oversimplification of the problem since nature itself does not like to be simple. She has ways of telling us that we have other issues aside from CO₂. For example, for the formation of city (photochemical) smog you only need a certain amount of nitrogen oxides, volatile hydrocarbons (mostly from exhaust gasses that come from cars) and a bit of light. The resulting cocktail has more than 100 compounds among which ozone and peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN) are the most dangerous one. If you keep reading your newspapers you will find out that for the smog on your streets (and your newly found allergies) bad metrological conditions are to blame (because without a nice sunny day there is no city smog). The increase in CO₂ concentration (and all other pollutants) is dangerous, but it is even more dangerous to proclaim CO₂ as humanities number one enemy. This only serves to mask the real problems - one of which is that the combustion of (bio) fuels harms the environment!

 

Is there any hope for victory?

Professor James Lovelock, a scientist well known for his Gaia theory by which the entire planet is actually a single organism, believes that politicians and scientists want to benefit from the idea of saving the world but that they are too arrogant in believing that we have the knowledge and power to do so. We have not yet gotten to a point where we can say that we truly understand complex events such as climate changes. That and human inertia is so widespread that we basically cannot do anything significant. The only hope, according to Lovelock, is the possibility that the planet will take care of it self. Are we included in this arrangement? [48, 49]

I believe you all heard the old saying about how we did not inherit the Earth from our parents but are instead borrowing it from our children. If we want our children to live better then why are we leaving them constantly worse air, poorer ground and dirtier water? And there is even more children than ever before. Even though they say we have reduced the rate of annual population growth (we will gain another billion inhabitants only in another 13 years and not in 12 according to last years statistics), the number of people on Earth is increasing on an alarming rate (Table 5). If they all had the standard as the average American we would not suffice 5 of these planets. [50]

It seems we are losing a battle without even knowing what are we fighting against (or what for). It is much more realistic to take CO₂ as an indicator of man's influence on the environment (i.e. as a pollution indicator) and on that basis prepare for a battle, not against global warming but against global pollution. The atmosphere is an inert system which reacts slowly to us and there is a high chance we have already passed the final (catastrophically) limit of pollution from which our current "cosmetic" activity can take us back. If you use your own body as a detector for polluted air, the signals from your detector are: vertigo, headache, redness and itching in the eyes, runny nose, coughing and shortness of breath, toothache, chest pain, cold and allergies and finally the increase in the severity of preexisting lung and heart diseases.

"Global warming can best be compared with the swine flu pandemic. It was based on scientific research, a reputable world health organization stood behind it, yet today everyone is shying away from the topic saying it was too much. Many scientists believe the same situation is happening with the climate," says Paar. If Paar is right and global warming is not coming, but global freezing is, are we ready for it?

Even though climate changes do not necessarily have to be negative - in some areas there will be negative changes in the climate while some places will experience an improvement - they need to be adapted to. You are probably aware of the fact that every species that overly specializes for a certain habitat usually reacts to change with extinction. It is estimated that only 0.1 % of all of the species that showed up on Earth is now still alive while the other 99.9 % went extinct. Can we (or do we) want to adapt to the unavoidable climate changes?

We are many, we do not possess the knowledge, we do not have the will, we do not have the power and we do not know what we are fighting against. Are you still an optimist?

 

Do poets see the future?

In the end, read a song by American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) [51]

 

FIRE AND ICE

 

Bibliography

References for this articles can be found four consolidated on one page: Climate change: References.