Be Worried, Be Very Worried
| Polar Ice Caps Are Melting Faster Than Ever... More And More Land Is Being Devastated By Drought... Rising Waters Are Drowning Low-Lying Communities... By Any Measure, Earth Is At ... The Tipping Point Jeffrey Kluger Time Magazine April 3, 2006 Vol. 167 No. 14 No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us. |  In the Canadian high Arctic, a polar bear negotiates what was once solid ice. Bears are drowning as warmer waters widen the distance from floe to floe. | Global Warming Feeling The Heat A Science Advisor Unmuzzled The Greenest Bank |
It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry--a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180 m.p.h.--exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast--when the emergency becomes commonplace--something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.
The image of Earth as organism--famously dubbed Gaia by environmentalist James Lovelock-- has probably been overworked, but that's not to say the planet can't behave like a living thing, and these days, it's a living thing fighting a fever. From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us. Scientists have been calling this shot for decades. This is precisely what they have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows in from the sun and raising global temperatures.
Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it. If there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.
But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Nature, it seems, has finally got a bellyful of us.
"Things are happening a lot faster than anyone predicted," says Bill Chameides, chief scientist for the advocacy group Environmental Defense and a former professor of atmospheric chemistry. "The last 12 months have been alarming." Adds Ruth Curry of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts: "The ripple through the scientific community is palpable."
And it's not just scientists who are taking notice. Even as nature crosses its tipping points, the public seems to have reached its own. For years, popular skepticism about climatological science stood in the way of addressing the problem, but the naysayers--many of whom were on the payroll of energy companies--have become an increasingly marginalized breed. In a new TIME/ ABC News/ Stanford University poll, 85% of respondents agree that global warming probably is happening. Moreover, most respondents say they want some action taken. Of those polled, 87% believe the government should either encourage or require lowering of power-plant emissions, and 85% think something should be done to get cars to use less gasoline. Even Evangelical Christians, once one of the most reliable columns in the conservative base, are demanding action, most notably in February, when 86 Christian leaders formed the Evangelical Climate Initiative, demanding that Congress regulate greenhouse gases.
A collection of new global-warming books is hitting the shelves in response to that awakening interest, followed closely by TV and theatrical documentaries. The most notable of them is An Inconvenient Truth, due out in May, a profile of former Vice President Al Gore and his climate-change work, which is generating a lot of prerelease buzz over an unlikely topic and an equally unlikely star. For all its lack of Hollywood flash, the film compensates by conveying both the hard science of global warming and Gore's particular passion.
Such public stirrings are at last getting the attention of politicians and business leaders, who may not always respond to science but have a keen nose for where votes and profits lie. State and local lawmakers have started taking action to curb emissions, and major corporations are doing the same. Wal-Mart has begun installing wind turbines on its stores to generate electricity and is talking about putting solar reflectors over its parking lots. HSBC, the world's second largest bank, has pledged to neutralize its carbon output by investing in wind farms and other green projects. Even President Bush, hardly a favorite of greens, now acknowledges climate change and boasts of the steps he is taking to fight it. Most of those steps, however, involve research and voluntary emissions controls, not exactly the laws with teeth scientists are calling for.
Is it too late to reverse the changes global warming has wrought? That's still not clear. Reducing our emissions output year to year is hard enough. Getting it low enough so that the atmosphere can heal is a multigenerational commitment. "Ecosystems are usually able to maintain themselves," says Terry Chapin, a biologist and professor of ecology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "But eventually they get pushed to the limit of tolerance."
CO2 AND THE POLES
As a tiny component of our atmosphere, carbon dioxide helped warm Earth to comfort levels we are all used to. But too much of it does an awful lot of damage. The gas represents just a few hundred parts per million (p.p.m.) in the overall air blanket, but they're powerful parts because they allow sunlight to stream in but prevent much of the heat from radiating back out. During the last ice age, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was just 180 p.p.m., putting Earth into a deep freeze. After the glaciers retreated but before the dawn of the modern era, the total had risen to a comfortable 280 p.p.m. In just the past century and a half, we have pushed the level to 381 p.p.m., and we're feeling the effects. Of the 20 hottest years on record, 19 occurred in the 1980s or later. According to NASA scientists, 2005 was one of the hottest years in more than a century.
It's at the North and South poles that those steambath conditions are felt particularly acutely, with glaciers and ice caps crumbling to slush. Once the thaw begins, a number of mechanisms kick in to keep it going. Greenland is a vivid example. Late last year, glaciologist Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Pannir Kanagaratnam, a research assistant professor at the University of Kansas, analyzed data from Canadian and European satellites and found that Greenland ice is not just melting but doing so more than twice as fast, with 53 cu. mi. draining away into the sea last year alone, compared with 22 cu. mi. in 1996. A cubic mile of water is about five times the amount Los Angeles uses in a year.
Dumping that much water into the ocean is a very dangerous thing. Icebergs don't raise sea levels when they melt because they're floating, which means they have displaced all the water they're ever going to. But ice on land, like Greenland's, is a different matter. Pour that into oceans that are already rising (because warm water expands), and you deluge shorelines. By some estimates, the entire Greenland ice sheet would be enough to raise global sea levels 23 ft., swallowing up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh. The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 215 ft.
FEEDBACK LOOPS
One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating is that as the poles' bright white surface shrinks, it changes the relationship of Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that 90% of the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking much of its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90% of the energy it receives. The more energy it retains, the warmer it gets, with the result that each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that preceded it.
That is what scientists call a feedback loop, and it's a nasty one, since once you uncap the Arctic Ocean, you unleash another beast: the comparatively warm layer of water about 600 ft. deep that circulates in and out of the Atlantic. "Remove the ice," says Woods Hole's Curry, "and the water starts talking to the atmosphere, releasing its heat. This is not a good thing."
A similar feedback loop is melting permafrost, usually defined as land that has been continuously frozen for two years or more. There's a lot of earthly real estate that qualifies, and much of it has been frozen much longer than two years--since the end of the last ice age, or at least 8,000 years ago. Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of partially decayed organic matter, rich in carbon. In high-altitude regions of Alaska, Canada and Siberia, the soil is warming and decomposing, releasing gases that will turn into methane and CO2. That, in turn, could lead to more warming and permafrost thaw, says research scientist David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. And how much carbon is socked away in Arctic soils? Lawrence puts the figure at 200 gigatons to 800 gigatons. The total human carbon output is only 7 gigatons a year.
One result of all that is warmer oceans, and a result of warmer oceans can be, paradoxically, colder continents within a hotter globe. Ocean currents running between warm and cold regions serve as natural thermoregulators, distributing heat from the equator toward the poles. The Gulf Stream, carrying warmth up from the tropics, is what keeps Europe's climate relatively mild. Whenever Europe is cut off from the Gulf Stream, temperatures plummet. At the end of the last ice age, the warm current was temporarily blocked, and temperatures in Europe fell as much as 10°F, locking the continent in glaciers.
What usually keeps the Gulf Stream running is that warm water is lighter than cold water, so it floats on the surface. As it reaches Europe and releases its heat, the current grows denser and sinks, flowing back to the south and crossing under the northbound Gulf Stream until it reaches the tropics and starts to warm again. The cycle works splendidly, provided the water remains salty enough. But if it becomes diluted by freshwater, the salt concentration drops, and the water gets lighter, idling on top and stalling the current. Last December, researchers associated with Britain's National Oceanography Center reported that one component of the system that drives the Gulf Stream has slowed about 30% since 1957. It's the increased release of Arctic and Greenland meltwater that appears to be causing the problem, introducing a gush of freshwater that's overwhelming the natural cycle. In a global-warming world, it's unlikely that any amount of cooling that resulted from this would be sufficient to support glaciers, but it could make things awfully uncomfortable.
"The big worry is that the whole climate of Europe will change," says Adrian Luckman, senior lecturer in geography at the University of Wales, Swansea. "We in the U.K. are on the same latitude as Alaska. The reason we can live here is the Gulf Stream."
DROUGHT
As fast as global warming is transforming the oceans and the ice caps, it's having an even more immediate effect on land. People, animals and plants living in dry, mountainous regions like the western U.S. make it through summer thanks to snowpack that collects on peaks all winter and slowly melts off in warm months. Lately the early arrival of spring and the unusually blistering summers have caused the snowpack to melt too early, so that by the time it's needed, it's largely gone. Climatologist Philip Mote of the University of Washington has compared decades of snowpack levels in Washington, Oregon and California and found that they are a fraction of what they were in the 1940s, and some snowpacks have vanished entirely.
Global warming is tipping other regions of the world into drought in different ways. Higher temperatures bake moisture out of soil faster, causing dry regions that live at the margins to cross the line into full-blown crisis. Meanwhile, El Nino events--the warm pooling of Pacific waters that periodically drives worldwide climate patterns and has been occurring more frequently in global-warming years--further inhibit precipitation in dry areas of Africa and East Asia. According to a recent study by NCAR, the percentage of Earth's surface suffering drought has more than doubled since the 1970s.
FLORA AND FAUNA
Hot, dry land can be murder on flora and fauna, and both are taking a bad hit. Wildfires in such regions as Indonesia, the western U.S. and even inland Alaska have been increasing as timberlands and forest floors grow more parched. The blazes create a feedback loop of their own, pouring more carbon into the atmosphere and reducing the number of trees, which inhale CO2 and release oxygen.
Those forests that don't succumb to fire die in other, slower ways. Connie Millar, a paleoecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, studies the history of vegetation in the Sierra Nevada. Over the past 100 years, she has found, the forests have shifted their tree lines as much as 100 ft. upslope, trying to escape the heat and drought of the lowlands. Such slow-motion evacuation may seem like a sensible strategy, but when you're on a mountain, you can go only so far before you run out of room. "Sometimes we say the trees are going to heaven because they're walking off the mountaintops," Millar says.
Across North America, warming-related changes are mowing down other flora too. Manzanita bushes in the West are dying back; some prickly pear cacti have lost their signature green and are instead a sickly pink; pine beetles in western Canada and the U.S. are chewing their way through tens of millions of acres of forest, thanks to warmer winters. The beetles may even breach the once insurmountable Rocky Mountain divide, opening up a path into the rich timbering lands of the American Southeast.
With habitats crashing, animals that live there are succumbing too. Environmental groups can tick off scores of species that have been determined to be at risk as a result of global warming. Last year, researchers in Costa Rica announced that two-thirds of 110 species of colorful harlequin frogs have vanished in the past 30 years, with the severity of each season's die-off following in lockstep with the severity of that year's warming.
In Alaska, salmon populations are at risk as melting permafrost pours mud into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning. Small animals such as bushy-tailed wood rats, alpine chipmunks and pinon mice are being chased upslope by rising temperatures, following the path of the fleeing trees. And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears--prodigious swimmers but not inexhaustible ones--are starting to turn up drowned. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out."
WHAT ABOUT US?
It is fitting, perhaps, that as the species causing all the problems, we're suffering the destruction of our habitat too, and we have experienced that loss in terrible ways. Ocean waters have warmed by a full degree Fahrenheit since 1970, and warmer water is like rocket fuel for typhoons and hurricanes. Two studies last year found that in the past 35 years the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has doubled while the wind speed and duration of all hurricanes has jumped 50%. Since atmospheric heat is not choosy about the water it warms, tropical storms could start turning up in some decidedly nontropical places. "There's a school of thought that sea surface temperatures are warming up toward Canada," says Greg Holland, senior scientist for NCAR in Boulder. "If so, you're likely to get tropical cyclones there, but we honestly don't know."
WHAT WE CAN DO
So much for environmental collapse happening in so many places at once has at last awakened much of the world, particularly the 141 nations that have ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions--an imperfect accord, to be sure, but an accord all the same. The U.S., however, which is home to less than 5% of Earth's population but produces 25% of CO2 emissions, remains intransigent. Many environmentalists declared the Bush Administration hopeless from the start, and while that may have been premature, it's undeniable that the White House's environmental record--from the abandonment of Kyoto to the President's broken campaign pledge to control carbon output to the relaxation of emission standards--has been dismal. George W. Bush's recent rhetorical nods to America's oil addiction and his praise of such alternative fuel sources as switchgrass have yet to be followed by real initiatives.
The anger surrounding all that exploded recently when NASA researcher Jim Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a longtime leader in climate-change research, complained that he had been harassed by White House appointees as he tried to sound the global-warming alarm. "The way democracy is supposed to work, the presumption is that the public is well informed," he told TIME. "They're trying to deny the science." Up against such resistance, many environmental groups have resolved simply to wait out this Administration and hope for something better in 2009.
The Republican-dominated Congress has not been much more encouraging. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice been unable to get through the Senate even mild measures to limit carbon. Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, both of New Mexico and both ranking members of the chamber's Energy Committee, have made global warming a high-profile matter. A white paper issued in February will be the subject of an investigatory Senate conference next week. A House delegation recently traveled to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand to visit researchers studying climate change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were believers," says Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York. "Every one of the others said this opened their eyes."
Boehlert himself has long fought the environmental fight, but if the best that can be said for most lawmakers is that they are finally recognizing the global-warming problem, there's reason to wonder whether they will have the courage to reverse it. Increasingly, state and local governments are filling the void. The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that they will meet the Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in their cities to 1990 levels by 2012. Nine eastern states have established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of developing a cap-and-trade program that would set ceilings on industrial emissions and allow companies that overperform to sell pollution credits to those that underperform-- the same smart, incentive-based strategy that got sulfur dioxide under control and reduced acid rain. And California passed the nation's toughest automobile- emissions law last summer.
"There are a whole series of things that demonstrate that people want to act and want their government to act," says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense. Krupp and others believe that we should probably accept that it's too late to prevent CO2 concentrations from climbing to 450 p.p.m. (or 70 p.p.m. higher than where they are now). From there, however, we should be able to stabilize them and start to dial them back down.
That goal should be attainable. Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try? We did not so much march toward the environmental precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the scientific scolds who told us we had a problem.
The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we're finally coming to appreciate the knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century we've been monkeying with those margins. It's long past time we set them right.
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With reporting by Greg Fulton/ Atlanta, Dan Cray/ Los Angeles, Rita Healy/ Denver, Eric Roston/ Washington, With reporting by David Bjerklie, Andrea Dorfman/ New York, Andrea Gerlin/ London
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1176980,00.html
Global warming is already disrupting the biological world, pushing many species to the brink of extinction and turning others into runaway pests. But the worst is yet to come
By DAVID BJERKLIE
Time Magazine
Apr. 3, 2006
QUIVER TREE This striking giant aloe was given its name by the San people of southern Africa, who use the tree's hollow branches as quivers for their arrows. Scientists have discovered that quiver trees are starting to die off in parts of their traditional range. The species might be in the early stages of moving southward, trying to escape rising temperatures closer to the equator.
PINON MOUSE This tiny resident of the southwestern U.S. has long eked out its living in juniper woodlands, but in California it is heading for higher, cooler altitudes in the High Sierra conifer forests. The mouse is one of several small mammals in the region that have moved their homes 1,000 to 3,000 ft. higher in elevation over the past century.
RED-BREASTED GOOSE Twenty-six bird species, including this goose, which breeds in the Arctic, are listed by the World Conservation Union as threatened by global warming. Half are seabirds whose food supplies are diminished because of climate changes. The rest are terrestrial species, including several whose coastal habitats are at risk because of rising sea levels.
AFRICAN ELEPHANT Global warming might not only shrink the elephant's range within Africa but may also wreak havoc with the animal's love life. The relative abundance--or scarcity--of food affects the social hierarchy of the herd, which in turn can determine which animals get to breed.
BUTTERFLIES Researchers have documented shifts in the ranges of many butterflies. One study looked at 35 species of nonmigratory butterflies whose ranges extended from northern Africa to northern Europe. The scientists found that two-thirds of the species had shifted their home ranges northward by 20 to 150 miles. In the U.S., researchers have closely tracked the movements of the butterfly known as Edith's checkerspot (at right, middle). Though butterflies might be sturdier than they look, scientists believe many species will not survive the impact of climate change.
KING PROTEA It is the national flower of South Africa, just one among the many spectacular members of the large family of flowering plants named after Proteus, a Greek god capable of changing his shape at will. Scientists fear that more than a third of all Proteaceae species could disappear by 2050.
MISTLETOE The limber pine dwarf mistletoe is proliferating throughout western forests in North America, thanks to heat and drought-weakened trees that act as perfect hosts for this botanical parasite. It's not unlike what happens in your body, says researcher Connie Millar of the U.S. Forest Service: "When your system is stressed, you're more vulnerable to all kinds of things that want to get you."
FROGS Amphibians have been hopping, swimming and crawling about the planet for 350 million years. But their future is hardly assured. A global assessment of the state of this entire class of vertebrates found that nearly one-third of the 5,743 known species are in serious trouble. Climate change may well be the culprit in most cases, either directly or indirectly. The home habitat of the golden toad (at right, bottom) in Costa Rica moved up the mountain until "home" disappeared entirely. More than two-thirds of the 110 species of colorful harlequin frogs in Central and South America, two shown above, have also disappeared. Scientists believe that what killed many of the harlequins and what threatens a great many other amphibian species is a disease caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. Climate change seems to be making frogs more vulnerable to infection by the fungus.
What troubles scientists especially is that if we are only in the early stages of warming, all these lost and endangered animals might be just the first of many to go. One study estimates that more than a million species worldwide could be driven to extinction by the year 2050.
—With reporting by with reporting by Dan Cray/ Los Angeles
Q&A: NASA's chief climate scientist, who charged that his views on global warming were being squelched, says we're getting close to a tipping point
Time Magazine
Apr. 3, 2006
Earlier this year, James Hansen, NASA's chief climate scientist, made headlines when he accused the administration of muzzling him when he tried to speak out about global warming. Hansen, director of the space agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was one of the earliest researchers to sound the climate change alarm. He alleges that White House appointees in NASA limited his access to the press and ordered him to remove web postingss that contradicted the President's positions. The White House took a PR bruising when the charges went public and Hansen's profile has since been higher than ever. He recently spoke to TIME about both the science and the politics of the global warming crisis.
TIME: Are we correct in thinking that a climatological collapse has begun, and if so, when might we reach the stage at which it would be out of our power to fix things?
Hansen: We are getting close to a tipping point, despite the fact that most people barely notice the warming yet. We have witnessed 1?F warming in the past 30 years. There is 1?F more in the pipeline due to gases already in the air. Still another degree is certain because of energy infrastructure already in place, such as power plants and vehicles on the road. Three degrees will take us to a level at or just above the warmest in the past million years. The changes at that level are substantial but something we can probably adapt to. In order to limit change to that level we need to get on a track that I call the alternative scenario, which requires that we begin to slow emissions this decade and substantially reduce them before mid- century. If we stay on a business-as-usual path for another decade, the alternative scenario becomes impractical if not impossible.
TIME: What is that alternative?
Hansen: Business-as-usual will yield warming of 6 to 9?F by the end of the century and that will have two major impacts. First, sea level will rise. The last time it was 5?F warmer than now sea level was at least 80 feet higher. It may take a few centuries for most of that rise to occur, but once started, the ice sheets would continue to disintegrate out of our control, so every several decades we would need to rebuild above a higher shoreline. Those costs would dwarf any costs associated with learning to use energy more sensibly. Second, we'll lose animals and plants. We would push the polar species and alpine species off the planet. On the other hand, the climate change and CO2 in the air will be good for aggressive, weedy plants such as poison ivy.
TIME: The idea of tipping points and feedback loops catches a lot of people by surprise. Were the scientists blind-sided too?
Hansen: Not really, but not enough thought was given to the potential for large sea level changes, probably because of the assumption that it takes the ice sheets millennia to respond. I have argued the importance of sea level and I think that realization is catching on. I do think, on the other hand, that many scientists are spending too much time trying to figure out the effects of possible changes in the ocean's circulation. Europe, and the U.S., will not freeze over or get colder if the Atlantic circulation slows down. Global warming overwhelms the modest effects of reduced heat transport.
TIME: If atmospheric carbon is currently at 380 parts per million, how long do you think it take before aggressive action would begin to bring it down?
Hansen: We have to first level out emissions, then get them to start to decline. By the end of the century we could reduce emissions by perhaps 70% so that atmospheric CO2 would stabilize.
TIME: Have you noticed a sea change in public perception and willingness to do something about the problem?
Hansen: Not a sea change, but they are beginning to wake up, and this coincides with the science becoming a lot clearer in the past five or six years.
TIME: What about political perception and political willingness?
Hansen: Incredibly, there are still staunch deniers who would prefer to listen to a science fiction writer [Michael Crichton, author of "State of Fear," which challenges global warming science] rather than a real scientist. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the strongest deniers among the politicians have connections to the fossil fuel industry.
TIME: Do you have any hope that the White House will act?
Hansen: We can't give up, no matter what the odds look like. Another three years of business as usual will make it much harder to avoid large changes.
TIME: Aren't regional and local action like the mayors' and governors' initiatives mostly window dressing? Can they really make a dent in carbon output if Washington doesn't do something?
Hansen: They are useful practice, but, yes, it is absolutely essential that the U.S. take a real leadership role. Until that happens, it is basically business as usual.
TIME: If you could write the next Kyoto treaty, what provisions would you include?
Hansen: I should note that I don't make policy and my opinions are personal. We do need a strong disincentive for exploitation of the "worse than coal" energy sources such as tar sands and shale oil.
TIME: You started as something of an environmental scold and lately you've become more of an environmental hero. Feel vindicated?
Hansen: I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but there is no time for feeling good until the U.S. begins to take the leadership role that it is capable of.
The Greenest Bank: HSBC is one banking behemoth that wants to be carbon neutral
By ADAM SMITH/LONDON
Time Magazine
Apr. 3, 2006
HSBC is more than just a bank. Sure, it's flush with $1.5 trillion in assets, and its canny deposits scooped up pre-tax profits of $21 billion last year. But it's also got a worldwide staff of 250,000, many of whom spend much of their time in the air shuttling among HSBC's 10,000 offices. And that makes the London-based megabank both a global building manager and a major travel company. Environmentally, that's a pretty big footprint. HSBC may not be responsible for the kind of carbon emissions of, say, Big Oil, but producing the energy sucked up by the bank and its airborne execs resulted in the emission of some 606,300 tons of CO2 in 2003. This year that figure will top 771,630 tons. Unlike its bottom line, that's not a figure the bank is proud of.
Nor is it willing to let it stand. In late 2004, HSBC committed itself to becoming carbon neutral—the first major bank to do so—by January 2006. The principle is simple: the bank spends its cash on green energy projects that reduce CO2 emissions by the same amount the bank creates. "We realized we had to go above that 'business as usual' scenario," says Francis Sullivan, HSBC's adviser on the environment, speaking from the corporation's towering London HQ. The bank was already spending $7 million annually to boost the energy efficiency of its buildings but, says Sullivan, "we cannot generate all the electricity, heating, cooling and lighting we need from CO2- free sources. Buying other people's reductions seemed to be the right way forward."
In a dry run during the last quarter of 2005, the bank could well have met its target. For each of the approximately 187,400 tons of CO2 HSBC generated, it sent $4.43 to four projects that reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by the same amount. Among the projects: a wind farm that powers up to 45,000 homes in New Zealand and a project in Germany that reduces emissions of methane gas by converting pig and cattle manure into heat and electricity. An independent auditor will report this month on whether the bank can officially call itself carbon neutral.
The plan is not without its flaws. For one thing, it's not easy to be certain the reductions being offered are real. "You could end up spending a lot of money on something that didn't exist, or had been sold to somebody else already," Sullivan says. Besides, carbon neutrality in itself is not going to head off global warming. The steps HSBC has taken are a good start, says Mike Childs of Friends of the Earth in London. "But what are they going to do to minimize the impact of their operations?"
Sullivan has an answer for that. Under the Carbon Management Task Force he set up in 2004, HSBC plans to boost investment in energy efficiency to cut emissions by 5% by 2007, using measures like automatically switching off staff PCs after hours. The bank will also be buying more of its electricity from green sources—the kind not generated from fossil fuels. Once it has come to grips with its own direct impacts, Sullivan suggests, HSBC may start offering advice to other firms interesting in offsetting their own emissions.
Meanwhile, HSBC has already set its sights even higher. "There's nothing to stop us being carbon negative," says Sullivan, comparing HSBC's CO2 emissions to a monthly paycheck and offset credits to monthly expenses. "We could make purchases from time to time that will either take us back down to zero, or will take us negative for a bit and then we would come up again," he says. "Sometimes you're in credit, and sometimes you're in deficit." Now that's a bank talking.
Posted by Arthur Caldicott on 03 Apr 2006