High Tide

[Boomer]

From Mother Jones: http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/06/06_400.html

Interview: High Tide
Mark Lynas traveled the world to show that climate change is a global problem from which nobody -- whether rich or poor -- can hide.

Mark Lynas
Interviewed By Jeff Fleischer

June 23, 2004

Thanks to rising ocean levels, the nation of Tuvalu is literally disappearing. A collection of islands north of Fiji and east of the Solomons, Tuvalu is losing its surface area as melting glaciers and rising temperatures cause the Pacific waters to rise. Scientists predict that Tuvalu will be under water within a few decades, and the country has already started a program to gradually relocate its people as the clock runs down on its existence.

Research ing his new book, “High Tide,” over three years, climate specialist Mark Lynas visited places that, like Tuvalu, have weathered the effects of rapidly accelerating climate change. He tells of drought in the formerly lush Mongolian plains, the melting of glaciers in the Andes, and widespread flooding in Britain, where he’s from. In each case, Lynas talks to locals about the changes they’ve witnessed and shows readers what’s potentially in store for them if global warming continues on its current path.

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MJ.com: Can you talk about how climate change has influenced hurricanes and other violent storms hitting the U.S.?

ML: I went to talk to some of the hurricane climatologists who were working in Miami primarily. They told me the biggest change in terms of why hurricane damage is going up is not that hurricanes are getting worse, but there’s much more economic development in hurricane-prone areas of the coast. So you have to be quite clear when you’re looking at statistics for insurance industry payments and so on that you’re not getting mixed up here between economic factors and climatic factors. But it does seem like hurricane climatology is changing in the Atlantic. We’re now seeing very active hurricane seasons, and that’s something that has shifted because of warmer waters in the Atlantic after about 1995. It’s possible that the warming trend in the oceans is now beginning to affect hurricanes. Looking into the future, all the computer models show that we’ll see hurricanes with much higher rainfall, more destructive winds, and more disastrous outcomes in a warmer world.

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MJ.com: Even if the world commits to fighting global warming, to what degree can it be scaled back at this point?

ML: Global warming is already irreversible, in the sense that even if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped tomorrow, we’d probably still see another degree and a half or so of warming. So even if all emissions stopped, we’d still see double the warming we’ve already experienced. And that does mean the loss of many more glaciers, possibly the extinction of large numbers of species, the death of coral reefs and the loss of island nations like Tuvalu. That’s the best we’re ever going to get.