Amnesty Magazine

Slow Death by Global Warming

The refusal of some wealthy nations–and the world's biggest energy corporations–to address global warming is destroying the livelihood of entire societies and eliminating prospects for growth in developing countries.

BY ROSS GELBSPAN

Ross Gelbspan, a 31-year editor and reporter at The Philadelphia Bulletin, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, is author of The Heat Is On: the Climate Crisis, the Cover-up, the Prescription (Perseus Books, 1998). His latest book, Boiling Point, was published by Basic Books in July.

Near the Arctic Circle, elders of the Inuit nation are seeing their lives disrupted by vivid consequences of global warming: deformed fish, depleted caribou herds, dying forests, starving seals, and emaciated polar bears. Recently the Inuit began battling with mosquitoes–a pest they had never before encountered. As the sea ice melts, rising water levels are washing entire coastal villages–and a way of life–into the ocean.

"These are issues of life and death," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference. "We go out to hunt on the sea ice to put food on the table. You go to the supermarket."

Half a world away, the ocean is inundating a small group of islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea; officials are currently relocating 40,000 residents. Two years ago, the prime minister of New Zealand offered to accept the entire population of Tuvalu, another island nation being submerged by the rising sea levels that global warming is causing.

"Climate change is a form of slow death," said Tuvalu's President Leo Falcam.

From the Arctic Circle to the South Pacific, global climate change is shredding the most fundamental human rights of some of the world's most vulnerable people, threatening millennia-old cultures, and literally stealing the ground beneath people's feet.

When the issue of climate change first arose in 1988, the debate relied on anecdotal information and theory. On one side, a few scientists–many of whom were funded by energy companies–argued that the burning of fossil fuels had no impact on climate and that changes, if any, were simply natural cycles.

Now, hard data are confirming that climate change is dramatic, real, and driven by fossil fuel burning: Weather patterns are increasingly unstable; deep oceans are warming; glaciers are melting; drought and famine are proliferating; sea levels are rising; fish, birds, insects, animals, and whole ecosystems around the world are
migrating toward the poles in search of stable temperatures; infectious diseases carried by migrating insects are spreading; and the timing of the seasons themselves is altered. Virtually the entire scientific community has been amazed by the speed of the crisis.

Climate change is progressing 50 percent faster than initially projected, according to scientists at the U.K.'s Hadley Center, the country's principal climate laboratory.

Moreover, more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations, in what is the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history, have determined that levels of carbon in our atmosphere exceed any this planet has experienced in the last 420,000 years. Those changes have resulted in a mere 1 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature over the last century. But, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that the average global temperature will rise from 3 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit later in this century.

Even as they documented and projected global catastrophes, most researchers defined climate change narrowly–as a scientific issue, a technological challenge, or an environmental problem. But it has become increasingly clear that the central dimension of the threat embodies profound issues of human rights and environmental justice.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the rights to secure shelter, food, health, and the tools for basic sustenance–all of which are endangered by the extreme weather, disease outbreaks, crop failures, and famine caused by global warming. The impact of an increasingly unstable climate falls disproportionately on people in poor countries. They are hit hardest–not because nature discriminates against the poor, but because developing countries cannot afford the kinds of infrastructures, such as back-up food reserves, redundant generating systems, and accessible healthcare facilities, needed to buffer the effects of global warming.

The most recent report of the U.N. panel on climate change focuses squarely on the issue of environmental justice. Warning of an increase in devastating droughts, floods, violent storms, and the spread of cholera and malaria, the 2001 report concludes that poor countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America will bear the brunt of the most extreme climate changes. Economic losses from warming-driven natural disasters rose tenfold in the last half-century (from $4 billion a year in the 1950s to $40 billion in 1999), with a quarter of those losses occurring in developing countries, according to the panel.

Most of the Earth's people will be on the losing side, concluded Dr. James McCarthy, a co-chair of the IPCC.

"There is sickness in the animals," Siloah Atagoojuk, an Inuit woman living above the Arctic Circle, told a Washington Post reporter recently. "The flesh doesn't look good. You have to cook it extra. Even the caribou are not healthy, as fat–same for marine animals. We have known all along since we were little kids there will be a time when the Earth will be destroyed and destroy itself. Seems this is happening."

The injustice is compounded by the fact that the world's wealthiest nations generated the crisis and reaped the benefits of industrialization fueled by the burning of massive quantities of coal and oil. Since the carbon dioxide or "greenhouse gas" released by fossil fuels is trapped in the atmosphere for about 100 years, the current warming is the result of emissions generated over the last century by the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan. (That situation is now beginning to change as China and India, with their huge coal resources, are approaching the emission levels of the United States.)

Nevertheless, the United States–with about five percent of the world's population–remains the world's chief emitter, generating 25 percent of all carbon emissions. The Kyoto Protocol reflected that reality by exempting developing countries from the first round of mandatory emissions cuts. Diplomats at the 1997 meeting reasoned that the countries of the North that created the problem, and have the resources to begin to address it, should take the lead; the developing world would follow in subsequent rounds of the treaty.

The first President Bush had endorsed that developing country exemption as early as 1992, when he signed the Rio Treaty. But his son, President George W. Bush, turned that reasoning on its head and used it to justify U.S. withdrawal from the global climate treaty. Parroting the arguments of U.S. coal and oil producers, Bush proclaimed the treaty "unfair" to the United States, since it exempts poor countries from the first round of cuts.

Australia, a large emitter of carbon dioxide, and the world's largest exporter of coal, followed Bush's lead in refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. By contrast, Holland has plans to cut its emissions by 80 percent in 40 years; Tony Blair has committed the U.K. to cuts of 60 percent in 50 years; and Germany has pledged a 50-percent cut in carbon fuel use in 50 years.

Two years ago, Tuvalu began to mobilize support among other small island nations to sue the United States and Australia in the International Court of Justice for failing to adopt the Kyoto Protocol. Despite the low probability of success, Tuvalu's Finance Minister Bikenibeu Paeniu explained last year: "We are fighting a giant. This is one of the few options we have."

An attorney for the Inuit people agreed that the legal approach would likely fail and, moreover, would be too expensive for the Inuit to pursue. As a result, Inuit activists said they intend to lodge a formal complaint against the United States to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an arm of the Organization of American States (the commission's rulings are non-binding).

In the face of science and all this suffering, the fossil fuel lobby–and its tiny handful of industry-financed "greenhouse skeptics"–have gone from denying the reality of global warming to insisting it is good for us. They argue that hotter summers, higher levels of carbon dioxide, and longer growing seasons will increase food crop production in the United States. They neglect to note findings that these crops will be far less nutritious and far more vulnerable to climate-driven droughts, proliferating pests, and wildfires.

According to longtime "greenhouse skeptic" Sherwood Idso, the recent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide has boosted yields of cereals, fruits, legumes, and vegetables. "This unanticipated but welcome godsend is not just a relic of the past; for, if we will let it, it will grow even stronger in the years and decades ahead, as the air's CO2 [carbon dioxide] content continues to rise," Idso wrote in the journal of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, a coal-industry funded think tank.

But even these debatable benefits will bypass the developing world. The same temperature changes that may temporarily boost agricultural production in the North will devastate crops in the tropics, where most of the world's poor and hungry people live. A half-degree temperature increase would cause a drop of 20 to 40 percent in the rice yields in Southeast Asia, for example, according to the IPCC, drawing on findings from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the University of Massachusetts and other research centers. Plant biologists reporting to the IPCC also project the same heat rise would cut India's wheat yield by up to 20 percent.

As if to underscore the growing threat to food security, the Earth Policy Institute noted that, for the first time in recorded history, world food consumption has outpaced food production for four consecutive years. Last year's world grain harvest fell short of consumption by 93 million tons, dropping world grain stocks to the lowest level in 30 years. Looking forward, the United Nations Environment Program projects that later in this century global warming will reduce several of the world's key food crops, such as corn grown in the Midwestern United States, by some 30 percent.

Perhaps the most devastating impact of climate change on the world's poor is the spread of disease. Warming accelerates the breeding and biting rates of insects and allows them to live longer at higher latitudes and altitudes. As a result, mosquitoes are now spreading yellow fever, dengue, and West Nile Virus to populations that have never before experienced these diseases and have no natural immunity. Globally, malaria rates quadrupled between 1995 and 2000.

Malaria kills an African child every 30 seconds and remains one of the most important threats to the health of pregnant women and their newborns, said Carol Bellamy, executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). About 20 percent of the world's population is at risk of contracting malaria, with the vast majority in Africa. Worst hit is the sub-Saharan region, which accounts for 90 percent of Africa's malaria deaths: some 3,000 children a day–most under the age of five.

Insect-borne diseases aside, the rights of people in developing countries are being eroded by a host of other illnesses related to malnutrition–as their food crops fall victim to increasingly erratic and extreme weather. The World Health Organization recently estimated that the intensifying effects of global warming will compromise the health of millions of people in the coming decades.

Summing up the situation, a British medical journal, The Lancet, called indifference to climate change "a form of bio-political terrorism."

Ironically, an increasingly unstable climate could spark violence by people whose crops are destroyed by weather extremes, whose homelands are submerged by rising sea levels, and whose borders are overrun by environmental refugees. And if the current pattern holds, political leaders in the industrialized world could use the threat of such incidents to justify curtailing human rights at home. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, says that climate change will exacerbate world poverty and could make millions of people more open to extremism. The disproportionately heavy consequences of climate change on poor countries will create "fertile ground for extremist views," he warned in an interview last year. "Things go wrong. People want to blame someone."

With the growing understanding that climate change is propelled by human behavior, the assignment of blame is not only possible, but essential to finding solutions. For reasons that are easy to understand, the U.S. government–influenced by the powerful fossil fuel lobby–is blocking the most obvious solution: a global switch to renewable energy. Climate stabilization requires humanity, worldwide, to cut its use of carbon fuels by 70 percent, according to the U.N. science panel. Such a major reduction threatens the very survival of the coal and oil industries, which, together, constitute one of the largest commercial enterprises in the world.

Moreover, researchers are calling for governments and corporations to respond with staggering speed. If the world is not getting half its energy from non-carbon sources by 2018, according to a study in the journal Nature, atmospheric carbon levels will double–perhaps triple–later this century. The consequences would almost certainly be catastrophic.

Shortsighted critics argue that the costs of stabilizing the climate are prohibitive. But they are contradicted by the world's property-insurers, which are already paying the bill for inaction. The world's largest such company, Munich Re-Insurance, estimates the cost of climate-driven impacts will reach $300 billion a year in the next two decades, while Britain's biggest re-insurer has said that climate change could bankrupt the global economy by 2065.

A growing movement is arguing that the shift to clean energy makes economic as well as humanitarian and environmental sense. A global program to rewire the world would spark whole new technologies, employment opportunities, and a radical restructuring of industry. It would raise living standards abroad without compromising ours, according to such experts as the late Anil Agarwal, founder of the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, and Dr. Morris Miller, a former executive director of the World Bank. Development economists point out that every dollar invested in energy in poor countries creates far more wealth, and far more jobs, than the same dollar invested in any other sector. Such an economic surge could begin to turn impoverished and dependent nations into robust trading partners. And, ultimately, it could begin to redress a profound, long-standing inequity that threatens to further undermine human rights around the world.

Were the United States to spearhead a wholesale transfer of clean energy technology to developing countries, that would do more than anything else in the long term to address the economic desperation that underlies anti-U.S. sentiment. (For one such proposal, see "Toward A Real Kyoto Protocol" at: www.heatisonline.org)

Unfortunately, it would probably be too late to preserve the ancient cultural heritage of people like Paani Laupepa of Tuvalu. "By refusing to ratify the Protocol, the United States is effectively denying future generations of Tuvaluans their fundamental freedom to live where our ancestors have lived for thousands of years," Laupepa told the BBC two years ago.

Others are losing the right to live at all. The people of Lesotho–a southern African nation that used to be agriculturally self-sufficient–now face a protracted, warming-driven drought that is bringing widespread malnutrition and the threat of famine. "The cattle are beginning to die; there is not enough to eat," Chief Bernard Letsie told the Reuters news service earlier this year. "There is no water. I tell my people we must pray. Maybe God will give us rain." Otherwise, Letsie said, "I see only death."