A Buddhist Response to Climate Change, Part 2
April 8, 2008 The Result: Climate Change
Ice caps and glaciers melted. The world’s most famous cities underwater. One-third of the planet turned to desert; the other two-thirds filled with people struggling for enough food and water to survive. Is this to be our future?
Our world is spiraling out of control and yet we still have leaders failing to take action on global warming. Newscasters and journalists report on how the stock market bounced back after some minor profit taking and what the latest tidbits from Hollywood are. People complain about the price of gasoline as they get back into their SUV and drive off, alone. Parents shake their heads and worry about how climate change will affect their children, then board the plane to go visit their children and grandchildren because they love them.
On March 11, 2007, the Sunday Times, a major newspaper in the United Kingdom, detailed the earth-changing scenarios degree by degree that would likely occur in global warming. The article was an interview with Mark Lynas, the author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet and referenced research by the Hadley Centre for Climate Change in the United Kingdom . Based on tens of thousands of pages of scientific research, Six Degrees provides a succinct analysis of what the world could look like after global warming:
“At one degree of warming, the Arctic is ice-free for half the year, the South Atlantic—typically void of hurricanes—experiences coastal hurricanes, and in the western U.S. severe droughts are plaguing residents.
Two Degrees of Warming: Polar bears struggle to survive as glaciers increasingly melt away. Glaciers in Greenland begin to disappear, while coral reefs are vanishing.
Three Degrees of Warming: The Amazon rain forest is drying out and El Niño’s intense weather pattern becomes the norm. Europe repeatedly experiences searing summer heat that has rarely happened before.
Four Degrees of Warming: Oceans could rise, taking over coastal cities. The disappearance of glaciers may deprive many of fresh water. Northern Canada’s agriculture could boom and a Scandinavian beach could be the next tourism hotspot. A part of Antarctica could collapse, causing water to rise even further.
Five Degrees of Warming: Uninhabitable zones could spread, snow pack and aquifers feeding big cities could dry up, and climate refugees could run in the millions. Human civilization could begin to break down with this drastic of changes to the climate. The poor would likely suffer the most.
Six Degrees of Warming: The oceans could be marine wastelands, the deserts could march across continents, and natural disasters could become common events. The world’s great cities could be flooded and abandoned. This could be ‘the doomsday scenario.’” [1]
[1] http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/sixdegrees/
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