With the Nobel Peace Prize going to a group of scientists and a former politician, we may finally silence the few remaining deniers and embrace the reality of a rapidly warming planet. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will share the prize with former Vice President Al Gore, who has long spoken out on the need to confront global warming.
Sharing in the award is University of Montana ecology professor Steve Running, lead author of the North American chapter in the U.N. climate change report issued earlier this year.
“What I hope this award does is finally finish off the really disingenuous climate change deniers who over the last number of years have very consciously tried to deceive the public about the reality of the issue,” Running said.
His work focused on the consequences of declining snow packs across the northwestern states. Along with higher temperatures, lowered stream flows caused ecological and economic hardship this year as many blue-ribbon trout streams were closed at the height of the tourist season. Hotter and drier soil and vegetation led to more intense and more frequent wildfires and major insect infestations in once-healthy forests.
Gore translated the numbers and jargon-filled panel reports into a slide show, which ultimately became the Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” But Gore did not come late to the debate. From his 1992 book, “Earth in the Balance,” on monthly science seminars while serving as vice president and working on negotiations on the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, he’s been firmly focused on bringing global climate change to public awareness. He says he now will focus on how best to use the honor and recognition to speed up the change in urgency. “It is a planetary emergency and we have to act quickly,” he said. He has donated his share of the prize to the nonprofit Alliance for Climate Protection.
Meanwhile, scientists in Canada and scattered throughout the Arctic are monitoring satellite data and documenting changes in sea ice as part of International Polar Year programs. “The summer of 2007 was stunning,” said Doug Bancroft, director of Environment Canada’s Canadian Ice Service.
Based on five decades of record keeping, the Northern Hemisphere is normally covered with 7.5 to 8.5 million square kilometers of ice. Coverage shrank to a low of 5.3 million in the summer of 2005. But the amount of sea ice hit a record low of just 4.2 million square kilometers this year, scientists calculated.
A NASA-led study released last week found the bulk of the thickest ice is now confined to the Arctic Ocean north of Canada. And the Northwest Passage, normally choked with ice in summer, could be navigated by a sailboat unaided by icebreakers.
On Melville Island north of the Arctic Circle, the mean temperature has been just less than 37 degrees Fahrenheit in July since records were first kept in the 1950s. This year July temperatures were around 50 F. Summer melt usually sinks 20 inches into the permafrost, but melt depth was at least 3.3 feet this year, causing land fracture, large slides and flooding.
With states and even cities wakening to the threat of economic impacts, plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are cropping up from California to the northern Rockies. Phrases like reducing the carbon footprint, carbon sequestration, cap and trade agreements are finding their way into lawmakers’ debates. California Gov. Schwarzenegger’s plan to limit vehicle emissions is tied up in court while Montana agencies argue over whether carbon from coal-fired power plants should be regulated as hazardous waste, pollution or even a commodity to be traded.
The state Department of Environmental Quality views carbon dioxide as potentially hazardous pollution. The agency’s water protection bureau chief says mercury present in carbon dioxide that is removed from smokestacks could taint groundwater supplies if stored underground. A gas and oil conservation commissioner has pointed out that carbon dioxide has long been used to boost production in declining oil fields and is bought and sold as a commodity. How state legislators will resolve all this by 2009 is unclear.
The Bush administration has already weighed in on the mercury issue, passing an “industry-friendly mercury non-control rule” that, according to Waterkeeper Alliance, “ensures our waterways will be polluted for decades to come.”
The Bush rule requires only a 29 percent mercury reduction over the next five years even though the EPA reports that a 90 percent reduction is both technologically and economically achievable.
On a smaller scale, cities such as Bozeman are studying options for reducing their carbon footprint and adopting environmentally conscious policies, much as Malibu has already done with curbside recycling. Some green options, such as using alternative energy sources, may be too pricey for the city to absorb, but mandating compact fluorescent light bulbs in public buildings and using only compostable plates and utensils in city break rooms may warrant additional spending. Let’s hope when all those fluorescent bulbs burn out in nine years there will be a safe way to dispose of the mercury in them.
It’s a start. Worthy of a Nobel Prize? Probably not.