Boiling Point

I don’t have a lot of use for Salon these days, and it is sometimes difficult to justify the subscription to it. But I struck gold this week, and there were several stories that held my interest. Salon did a review of Boiling Point” by Ross Gelbspan, a book making the argument that adverse global climate change isn’t something in our distant mid-21st century future, but a phenomenon we’re experiencing now.

Reading “Our Ecological Footprint” crystallized my sensation of a potentially oncoming global trainwreck of resource scarcity and climate change. The conceptual basis and assumptions underlying ecological footprint analysis are open to challenge, and there are many challengers. However, it’s hard to argue with the footprint as a powerful symbol of ecological overshoot. While I’m glad for those fighting the good fight over greenhouse gas emissions and global climate research, it strikes me as a bit of a lost cause to argue about whether or not the hockey stick is the correct global climate change model. We should turn our attention to environmental security – maintaining biodiversity, protecting critical infrastructure along coastlines, preserving public health and minimizing resource depletion – all of these things are worth doing, even if there is no future dominated by inhospitable climate.

Environmental security is a dimension that is completely ignored in our global war on terrorism, a policy choice that is certainly going to hurt us someday. Salon quotes Gelbspan:

"The continuing indifference by the United States to atmospheric warming -- since this country generates one-fourth of the world's emissions with 5 percent of its people -- will almost guarantee more anti-U.S. attacks from people whose crops are destroyed by weather extremes, whose populations are afflicted by epidemics of infectious disease, and whose borders are overrun by environmental refugees".

Salon says, “Gelbspan argues that while Americans fret about terrorism, a much worse nightmare is accelerating,” where that nightmare is global climate change. It’s not an either/or proposition. A case has been made for the linkage between environmental impacts and war or terrorism, which shows the hollowness of our current homeland security/hard power approach to the global war on terrorism.

I’ve started re-reading about climate change and human health, since this is an environmental health blog. Environmental Health Perspectives, May 2001 supplement has a survey of the literature that is a good starting point (EHP’s web site is down now – I’ll link to it later). This is an issue that outweighs most of the environmental health problems that people wring their hands over, such as dioxins. I will be returning to it from time to time.