[Marxism] Fortune magazine article faces-up to climate change.

["Barry Brooks" <durable@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's never too late to face the truth. It will always help. Even today,
with the ice at the both poles melting, many people still doubt climate
change is a reality.

Folly marches on, supported by the blindness of pride and fear.
Perhaps this article from Fortune magazine will finally lend respectability
to what science has know for at least 50 years. Better late than never.

I don't want to talk about it either, but the alternative is worse.

Barry

http://www.energybulletin.net/12179.html

Published on 17 Jan 2006 by Fortune. Archived on 19 Jan 2006.
Cloudy with a chance of chaos

by Eugene Linden

A disturbing consensus is emerging among the scientists who study global 
warming: Climate change may bring more violent swings than they ever thought, 
and it may set in sooner. Lately John Browne, the CEO of BP, has been jolting 
audiences with a list of proposed solutions that hint at the vastness of the 
challenge. It aims at stabilizing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the 
atmosphere at about double the pre-industrial level while continuing economic 
growth. To do that, carbon emissions would have to be reduced ultimately by 
seven gigatons a year. A gigaton, or a billion tons, is even bigger than it 
sounds. Eliminating just one, argues Browne, would mean building 700 nuclear 
stations to replace fossil-fuel-burning power plants, or increasing the use of 
solar power by a factor of 700, or stopping all deforestation and doubling 
present efforts at reforestation. Achieve all three of these, and pull off four 
more equally large-scale reallocations of capital and infrastructure, and the 
world would probably stabilize its carbon emissions.

There's just one catch: Even change on this vast scale might not stop global 
warming.

What if the secret behind civilization is that we've had really good weather? 
Humankind has prospered and multiplied during one of the most benign climate 
eras in the history of the planet. And the past two centuries -- which 
witnessed the great expansion of the Industrial Revolution, a sixfold increase 
in human population, the triumph of the consumer society, and the rise of the 
integrated global economy -- have been particularly stable. One would have to 
go back 115,000 years to find a time as tranquil and warm as the present.

Even so, during the relative calm of recorded history, climate has periodically 
turned angry. And while this moodiness is but a shadow of the cataclysmic 
weather violence of the Ice Ages, it has been sufficient to shake or destroy 
civilizations. A sudden cooling and drying 8,200 years ago set back the 
development of the first cities in the Fertile Crescent. Some 4,000 years ago, 
decades of drought accompanied by howling winds scoured the Mesopotamian plain 
of the Akkadians, the most powerful civilization of the region. The Mayans 
never recovered from intense drought in the first decade of the tenth century 
A.D. And were it not for the Little Ice Age that thwarted the expansion of 
Viking civilization just six centuries ago, Europeans living in Canada and the 
U.S. might be speaking Norse rather than English.

Now climate is changing again. Most scientists recognized the reality of global 
warming more than a decade ago; most also agree that humans play a role in the 
changes. The consensus on climate change has solidified to rival the medical 
consensus on the dangers of smoking--but in the matter of climate, public 
perception has yet to catch up. Like the tourists on Phuket beaches who stood 
and gazed at an oncoming tsunami because it was outside their experience, 
society is reacting to the coming wave of climate change without urgency. 
People still believe that the science is controversial and the threat of 
climate change far off in the future; and while a few businesses, notably major 
insurers, have begun to adapt, governments are responding only slowly, as the 
lack of progress at this fall's international forum in Montreal showed.

The wave is coming, though. The last decades of the 20th century saw an 
unmistakable and extraordinary warming. During this same period, we suffered by 
some measures the strongest El Niño in 130,000 years and a swarm of 
statistically extraordinary droughts, floods, and other weather extremes. In 
2005 precedents continued to fall, as wave after wave of tropical Atlantic 
storms continued right through the end of the year. The hot ocean waters that 
helped nurture storms in 2005 may also play a role in an intense drought in the 
Amazon rain forest, normally one of the wettest places on earth.

These and other weather surprises make scientists uneasy because they resonate 
with a new understanding of how climate changes. Just 40 years ago the 
consensus was that climate shifted from warm to cold and vice versa, smoothly 
and over many centuries. Since the early 1990s, however, scientists have been 
coming to see climate change as less like a dial and more like an on-off 
switch. The transition from, say, warm to cold is far more abrupt--taking 
decades, not centuries--and far more chaotic than previously supposed (though 
still not as fast as in The Day After Tomorrow, the 2004 disaster flick in 
which a new Ice Age arrived in a matter of days). Scientists now compare such 
transitions to the flickering of a flame or a fluorescent bulb--where the 
"flickers" may be quite violent, marked by fluctuations in temperatures of more 
than 18 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few years, as well as extreme variation in 
wind speeds and precipitation.

The Earth's heat-distribution system has already begun shifting massively in 
response to rising levels of greenhouse gases. Precipitation patterns, the 
change of seasons, storm intensity, sea ice, glaciers, temperatures on the 
tundras--all are in flux. As scientists nervously monitor sea and air currents 
for signs of major shifts, many believe that today's proliferation of weather 
extremes may be the prelude to another epochal transition--a possibility first 
flagged by the great oceanographer Wallace Broecker in the journal Science in 
1997.

How bad could it get? Imagine Europe suffering floods and heat waves on a 
vastly greater scale than those endured in 2002 and 2003, while northern 
regions experience intermittent deep freezes as atmospheric and ocean 
circulations struggle to find new equilibrium. At the same time, droughts and 
floods not seen since ancient times would afflict some of the most densely 
populated regions on earth. The probability of drought in the American 
breadbasket would rise, and along with it the possibility that the U.S. grain 
surplus--which accounts for the dominant share of world grain exports--would 
disappear.

A flickering climate wouldn't just clobber countries with the wealth and 
technological resources to try to cope. It would affect every part of the 
planet, and in so doing reduce the resiliency of the global community. With 
every nation dealing with local emergencies, it would be more difficult to 
mobilize resources to aid victims in other areas, and there would be fewer 
resources to mobilize.

Municipalities around the world would struggle under the burden of greatly 
increased demands on funds to maintain and repair basic infrastructure. Forget 
about safety nets--FEMA and its ilk would be bankrupt. In the world's tightly 
coupled markets, financial tsunamis would surge through the system, leaving 
banks and corporations insolvent. Financial panics, largely absent for more 
than 70 years, would return with a vengeance.

Here at home, a flickering climate would impose an enormous tax on every 
individual and business. Property values in most places would plummet as buyers 
disappeared and costs of insurance and maintenance soared. The 
upper-middle-class American family, today so well protected against external 
shocks, would find its layers of insulation gradually stripped away as fuel, 
food, jobs, and social order became less certain. Katrina's aftermath exposed 
how quickly extreme weather can reduce an orderly society to dysfunction.

Some of the calamities that may happen--droughts that last more than a century, 
an advance of arctic zones southward, incessant and epic storms--simply 
overwhelm the imagination when we try to envision them in a world of six 
billion people depending on an exquisitely balanced food system. Earlier 
civilizations destroyed by climate did not have modern technologies or markets 
as a bulwark against nature's stresses. But changing climate won't challenge 
only markets and economies; it will stress the environment too, and by 
decimating ecosystems, we have undermined crucial buffers against weather 
extremes.

Inevitable Surprises

The storms, floods, and other weather calamities of recent years are just a 
start.

Consider the "500 year" floods in the Midwestern U.S. that caused $27 billion 
of damage in 1993. Decades of development had channeled and otherwise altered 
the Mississippi and other great rivers of the Midwest, reducing their access to 
floodplains that had absorbed and moderated the effects of extreme rainfall. 
Without those buffers, the rivers in 1993 rose higher than they might have in 
years past. When they breached dikes and other barriers, they spilled into the 
old floodplains, now largely occupied with farms and homes, amplifying the 
damage. We saw this pattern repeated in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and 
in the Christmas tsunami of 2004. While the tsunami killed more than 280,000 
people and destroyed settlements over a swath of several thousand miles, a 
series of powerful tsunamis in that part of the world during the 19th century 
passed with far less damage and loss of life. They took place before protective 
buffers of mangroves were destroyed, before hundreds of millions of people 
moved into the potential path of the waves, and before cars, trucks, and other 
contrivances proliferated only to become projectiles when the 2004 tsunami 
swept them up.

Around the world, humanity has reduced nature's capacity to dampen extremes to 
an astonishing degree: more than 59% of the world's accessible land degraded by 
improper agriculture, deforestation, and development; half the world's 
available fresh water now co-opted for human use at the expense of other 
species and ecosystems; more than half the world's mangroves destroyed; half 
the world's wetlands drained or ruined; one-fifth of the world's coral reefs 
(including crucial barrier reefs) destroyed and one-half damaged--the list goes 
on and on.

Nature does not alert us to all her tripwires. Perhaps that's why in recent 
years the unprecedented has become increasingly ordinary. When pushed past a 
certain magnitude, the damage of natural events increases exponentially, and 
that threshold falls as natural buffers are eliminated. Research led by MIT 
climatologist Kerry Emmanuel suggests that hurricanes have doubled in intensity 
during the past 30 years as the oceans have warmed. Hurricane Katrina surged to 
its immense power when the storm passed over a deep layer of 90-degree 
Fahrenheit water in the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Rita transfixed 
meteorologists when it strengthened from Category 2 to 5 in less than 24 hours 
while moving over those same hot seas. And in October, Wilma bested that by 
strengthening from tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane in a single day.

Since we are dismantling natural buffers just at the point when we really need 
them, it's tempting simply to conclude that humanity has a self-destructive 
streak. The explanation, of course, is not masochism but a collective failure 
of imagination--compounded by the fact that we are only now learning to weigh 
the threat. There are no models to estimate the economic impact of rapid 
changes in temperatures, storm tracks, precipitation, and so on. In a 2001 
report entitled "Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises," the National 
Research Council, the principal operating unit of the National Academy of 
Sciences, noted that most modeling of impacts has been confined to cases in 
which changes are gradual and moderate. Modeling the effects of abrupt change 
is a lot harder, but the study makes a couple of important points.

First, economies can minimize the effects of a gradually changing climate if 
people recognize the threat and respond. With abrupt climate change, however, 
things happen so rapidly that neither markets nor ecosystems have time to 
adapt. Moreover, a dynamic market economy with capacity to respond to 
intermittent crises by spreading risk and reallocating assets may be unable to 
respond when crisis is ubiquitous and risks loom everywhere.

Second, even gradual climate change would pose immense challenges. Tim Barnett, 
an oceanographer at Scripps Oceanographic Institution, took part in a study of 
the likely effects of climate change on the Los Angeles area. Surprisingly, he 
says, even modest decreases in rainfall during what he called a "best-case 
scenario for future climate change" (a gradual and small change, decades in the 
future) could reduce available water for the area by 50% by 2050. The region 
has limited storage capacity for water and relies on the winter snowpack that 
builds up in the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies for water during the dry summer 
months. Under even modest climate-change scenarios, however, the snowpack would 
be smaller and would melt earlier. The region would dry up before its driest 
months.

Angelinos wouldn't necessarily go thirsty. California has plenty of 
agricultural water that could be diverted to human needs. The ancillary effects 
would be harder to manage. Farm output would be reduced, and water shortages 
could idle hydroelectric plants. Drought also makes trees more vulnerable to 
pests, such as the pandora moth that afflicts ponderosa pine. Dead trees are 
tinder for wildfires, like the ones that destroyed hundreds of homes in 
Southern California in 2003. Such impacts would roil the economy. Consider how 
increased fire risk and other effects of acute water scarcity might affect 
housing prices or the job market.

Keep in mind that the 50% reduction of available water was a best-case 
scenario. And while the richest state in the world's richest nation has some 
ability to weather a drought, such shifts would not be occurring in isolation. 
The changing climate that brought drought to Southern California would also be 
affecting weather throughout the American West and beyond--damaging property, 
disrupting agriculture, and spurring migrations.

Premium Hell

You're in unsure hands.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 opened insurers' eyes to a catastrophic risk that 
they had been assuming for free. Their reaction provided a foretaste of how the 
global market might react to abrupt climate change. Following 9/11, insurers 
stopped writing policies that automatically included coverage of terrorist 
attacks. A number of major construction projects had to halt because banks 
would not finance them without terrorism coverage. Ultimately Congress passed 
and President Bush signed a law shifting responsibility for $100 billion in 
damage from future terrorist attacks to the U.S. government, and the 
construction projects got rolling again.

As climate change starts inflicting losses, insurers will again pull back, 
shifting financial risk to businesses and homeowners, the banks that finance 
them--and finally to taxpayers. In Florida, huge increases (up to 40%) in 
insurance rates are already making it harder for people to sell homes, 
according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

More than 1,000 miles from New Orleans, in Cape Cod, Mass., a far-flung echo of 
Katrina has been the 20% rise in reinsurance costs (reinsurers are financial 
institutions that backstop insurance companies). The increase prompted Hingham 
Mutual Group, a property and casualty insurer, to drop coverage for 6,500 
commercial properties. Customers left in the lurch have a fallback in FAIR 
(short for Fair Access to Insurance Requirements), a program mandated by 
various states and run by insurers. But Massachusetts's FAIR plan recently 
requested big rate increases, arguing that past weather patterns may no longer 
be a guide to estimating future climate risks. That rationale was 
"unprecedented," a team of industry experts noted in a report entitled 
"Availability and Affordability of Insurance Under Climate Change"; it's a 
vivid example of how insurance has difficulty adapting to changing climate.

For insurers the hazards of climate change become more concrete each year. 
Andrew Dlugolecki, a risk analyst at the Tyndall Center for Climate Change 
Research in Britain, recently estimated that if climate gradually warms, the 
chances of the industry getting wiped out by weather-related catastrophes will 
rise from about one in 100 worldwide today to nine in 100 by 2050. A ninefold 
increase in the risk of collapse places a heavy burden on insurers, but the 
risks may be far greater than that. Asked in 2003 how climate change that's 
abrupt and chaotic might affect those odds, Dlugolecki speculated that the risk 
of catastrophic weather-related losses rises to about nine chances in 100 by as 
early as 2010. To insure a property or business affected by that degree of 
risk, a carrier would have to charge annual rates as high as 12% of insured 
value--most businesses and individuals start self-insuring (industry-speak for 
dropping their coverage and taking their chances) when premiums reach 3% of 
value.

Already the pain of weather-related insurance risks is being felt by owners of 
highly vulnerable properties such as offshore oil platforms, for which some 
rates have risen 400% in one year. That may be an omen for many businesses. 
Three years ago John Dutton, dean emeritus of Penn State's College of Earth and 
Mineral Sciences, estimated that $2.7 trillion of the $10-trillion-a-year U.S. 
economy is susceptible to weather-related loss of revenue, implying that an 
enormous number of companies have off-balance-sheet risks related to 
weather--even without the cataclysms a flickering climate might bring.

Corporate leaders could soon feel the heat too. In 2004, Swiss Reinsurance, a 
$29 billion financial giant, sent a questionnaire to companies that had 
purchased its directors-and-officers coverage, inquiring about their corporate 
strategies for dealing with climate change regulations. D&O insurance, as it is 
called, insulates executives and board members from the costs of lawsuits 
resulting from their companies' actions; Swiss Re is a major player in D&O 
reinsurance.

What Swiss Re is after, says Christopher Walker, who heads its Greenhouse Gas 
Risk Solutions unit, is reassurance that customers will not make themselves 
vulnerable to global-warming-related lawsuits. He cites as an example Exxon 
Mobil: The oil giant, which accounts for roughly 1% of global carbon emissions, 
has lobbied aggressively against efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. If Swiss 
Re judges that a company is exposing itself to lawsuits, says Walker, "we might 
then go to them and say, 'Since you don't think climate change is a problem, 
and you're betting your stockholders' assets on that, we're sure you won't mind 
if we exclude climate-related lawsuits and penalties from your D&O insurance.' 
" Swiss Re's customers may be put to the test soon in California, where 
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing to restrict carbon emissions, says 
Walker. A customer that ignores the likelihood of such laws and, for instance, 
builds a coal-fired power plant that soon proves a terrible bet could face 
shareholder suits that Swiss Re might not want to insure against.

Turning Down the Heat

How business can take action--and why it needs political backup.

As businesses begin to recognize the dangers of climate change, markets will 
help economies adjust, pricing the risks and shifting resources. Yet markets 
have blind spots: They typically underprice long-term or novel risks. In the 
case of climate change, where large-scale actions must be taken lest change hit 
with full force, a purely market-based response would be too little, too late. 
To address the risks, governments need to get involved.

With the Earth's atmosphere already warming dramatically, we are probably stuck 
with some form of climate change. Yet the energy economy is still in the 
process of squeezing rather than easing the pressure on the trigger. China and 
other emerging economies are ramping up their consumption of fossil fuels, 
while the U.S., which is the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, 
continues to resist international efforts to rein them in.

In November and December, delegates from scores of nations convened in Montreal 
to negotiate emissions-control goals for greenhouse gases in the years 
following the expiration of the Kyoto treaty in 2012. But days of haggling 
produced nothing more than a resolution to discuss the issue further in coming 
years. (The U.S. and Saudi Arabia were the last to agree even to that.)

By itself, the Kyoto treaty will have minimal impact on the global-warming 
threat. Very few of the 160 countries that ratified the treaty (which went into 
force last February) will meet the targets of reducing emissions 5% below 1990 
levels by 2012. The U.S. rejected the treaty, and China, which is likely to 
surpass the U.S. as a greenhouse-gas producer in the coming years, is not 
governed by its provisions. Says Elliot Diringer of the Pew Center for Climate 
Change: "Unless there is continued action after Kyoto expires, it will have 
been nothing more than a blip" in the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere.

Up to now, the primary objection by the Bush administration and other opponents 
of reducing greenhouse gases has been economic impact. The unknowns of climate 
change have made projecting costs and benefits an economist's guessing game. 
For instance, in 2002 the White House Council on Environmental Quality cited 
estimates by the federal Energy Information Administration that achieving 
Kyoto's goals would erode U.S. economic output by $400 billion in 2010. That 
estimate was the worst of seven scenarios examined by the EIA; another put the 
cost at only $7 billion to $12 billion by 2010. Other studies, like a recent 
one sponsored by HSBC and entitled "Carbon Down, Profits Up," cites dozens of 
companies, cities, and regions that have found reducing carbon emissions to be 
profitable, in part because carbon reduction is often synonymous with increased 
efficiency.

But as the weather grows worse, such exercises will become moot. The ambitious 
proposals that BP's John Browne has been talking about--building nukes by the 
hundreds, for example--would stabilize the concentration of carbon dioxide in 
the atmosphere at 500 parts per million by 2050, vs. 380 ppm today. Yet even 
that might not be enough to prevent climate chaos. Says Chris Mottershead, a 
distinguished advisor at BP: "Nobody knows whether climate's tipping point is 
at 400 ppm, 700 ppm, or if there is a tipping point." Science does know, 
however, that today's concentration of carbon dioxide is higher than any in 
650,000 years; past climate flips took place with far less carbon in the air. 
What's more, BP developed its proposals with physicist Robert Socolow and 
ecologist Stephen Pacala, professors at Princeton University who worked with 
models of gradual, not abrupt, climate change.

Despite the daunting gap between present actions and what's required, plenty 
more can be done. Politics enables markets: An international agreement limiting 
carbon that includes the U.S. and the developing nations would supply the 
discipline necessary for carbon markets to flourish. (Carbon trading lets 
developed countries achieve emissions-reduction targets by paying to reduce 
emissions in developing countries.) According to an upcoming study of carbon 
markets by Ecosystem Marketplace, a website devoted to popularizing 
environmental derivatives, the carbon market in Europe has already surpassed $4 
billion in trading value as utility, industrial, and insurance companies 
experiment with this new tool.

If U.S. politicians eventually conclude that action on the scale of the BP plan 
is necessary, they could jump-start change by redirecting the purchasing power 
of federal, state, and local treasuries--more than $1 trillion a year. Once 
government at all levels commits to purchasing clean technologies, making 
efficiency improvements, and using alternative energy where possible, this 
massive spending would provide economies of scale that would help speed the 
commercialization of new technologies as well as prepare society for the shift 
away from fossil fuels. Equally sensible would be to reduce subsidies and tax 
advantages that abet the waste of fossil fuels.

Such proposals have been on the table since the early 1990s. Many are even more 
salient today. By not taking action on greenhouse emissions, we are betting our 
well-being that climate change poses little threat. If we are wrong, we will 
meet our fate.

This article has been adapted by the author from his new book, The Winds of 
Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations (Simon & 
Schuster); see also eugenelinden.com.

FEEDBACK fortunemail_letters@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Telis Demos

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Submitter WT writes:

    This article has to be the most apocalyptic thing that I have ever seen in 
a U.S. business publication. I'm sure that there are similar articles in a lot 
of environmental magazines, but Fortune? They are basically presenting the 
possibility of mass starvation around the globe. They are posing the question 
that what if the recent good weather since the end of the Little Ice Age was 
just an interlude between violent weather extremes?

    I believe that each of the Cat 5 Hurricanes--Katrina; Rita and 
Wilma--reached Cat 5 status faster as the season progressed. If multiple Cat 5 
hurricanes are a regular occurrence going forward, how long before the oil 
industry effectively gives up on deep water exploration in the GOM? Also, will 
the industry rebuild even "moderately" priced production infrastructure that 
keeps getting hammered in Cat 5 hurricanes?

    Website for the book from which the article is drawn: 
www.eugenelinden.com/winds-of-change.html


It's a positive sign that heavyweight business publications in the U.S. are 
beginning to publicize the seriousness of climate change. Other sobering 
assessments have appeared this week in the mainstream media:

Is It Warm in Here? We Could Be Ignoring the Biggest Story in Our History by 
David Ignatius in the Washington Post (also posted at Common Dreams).

Lovelock: 'We are past the point of no return' (UK Independent), also at Energy 
Bulletin.

-BA

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