“Well, we’re about to do it again. We’re devoting 74 pages of this issue to a series of stories on global climate change, and I’d be willing to bet that we’ll get letters from readers who don’t believe global climate change is real, and that humans contribute to the problem. Some readers will even terminate their memberships.
“Why would I publish articles that make people angry enough to stop subscribing? That’s easy. These stories cover subjects that are too important to ignore, From Antarctica to Alaska to Bangladesh, a global warming trend is altering habitats, with devastating ecological and economic effects.”
In its coverage of world climate change, the National Geographic magazine of September 2004 has plugged into the results of monitoring and research by scientists with a range of appropriate expertise investigating all contributory factors to the phenomenon.
While much of the information reported comes from or through the United
Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there are other sources in related fields such as oceanography, atmospheric research, and geological surveying.
Many Americans, mostly followers of George W Bush, don’t want to believe that their rich lifestyles are a main cause of troubling climate change, and I suspect that there may be some well-off Batswana who share that position. The biggest polluters, anyway, are in the northern, western world, our doubters might say. The best we can hope for, perhaps, is that John Kerry wins the US presidential election because he has promised to promote research into alternative fuels to oil and coal (in the full knowledge that the Bush family owe their personal wealth to oil).
We, for our part, need to be reminded that greenhouse gases released by industry, agriculture, automobiles, and coal-fired electric generation (at Morupule), are a key factor in changing the earth’s climate. If most of the carbon dioxide and other heat trapping gases in the atmosphere have come from the developed world, they don’t stay there, but spread around the globe. Moreover, so much of it has been discharged that the vegetation and seas haven’t been able to soak it all up.
We also need to be reminded of the danger of desertification that can result from our own extension of ranching into drier westernmost parts of our country. Awareness of the threats to climate change caused by others living far from us may help to remind us of the inter-connectedness of the world’s climates and seasons.
The signs of climate change are clear. Glaciers are retreating. Ice shelves are fracturing. Permafrost is melting. Sea level is rising. The rising sea level is first felt, and most felt, far to the east, in the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh, where the crops of dirt-poor rice farmers are threatened by rising sea level. More than a hundred million people around the world live within three feet of average sea level. Vulnerable to sea-level rise, Tuvalu, a small country in the South
Pacific has already begun formulating evacuation plans. Mega cities where human populations have concentrated near coastal plains and river deltas -
Shanghai, Bangkok, Jakarta, Tokyo and New York - are at risk. Even wealthy countries like the Netherlands, with half its landmass already at or below sea level, face ruin.
In the Nile Delta, where many of Egypt’s crops are cultivated, widespread erosion and salt-water intrusion would be disastrous.
Already we have pumped out enough greenhouse gases to warm the planet for many decades to come.
Our borders may be far from the sea, but oceans - however far they are from countries - provide life-sustaining circulation to the planet.
Propelled mainly by prevailing winds and differences in water density, which changes with the temperature and salinity of the seawater, ocean currents are critical in cooling, warming and watering the planet’s terrestrial surfaces - through rain - and in transferring heat from the Equator to the
Poles. The point is that melting ice pours unsalted water into sea, changing salinity, with potentially disastrous outcomes in rainfall.
Yesterday’s and today’s generations have created the environment in which our children and grandchildren are going to live, but those who are most responsible for the worst, care least. They oppose the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming.
The sad truth is that even Kyoto would barely slow the rise in heat-trapping gases. “Controlling the increase would take 40 successful
Kyotos,” says an expert from America’s National Centre for Atmospheric
Research.
Small we may be in population and large in land area, but we cannot escape the reality that we are polluting our atmosphere from Morupule power generation and Selebi-Phikwe copper and nickel production. Sooner or later, we may have to replace our coal-generated electricity with that of wind and sun.
If reports that South Africa is unable to meet its own power needs are true, we may not be able to rely indefinitely on their power generating systems, and may have to look to Zimbabwe for power to our northern population, if we can’t generate from sun and wind.
