With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change
With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change – Review
There’s a reason why anthropogenic climate change, or human-caused global warming, has been very much in the news for years. No other area of science builds such sobering predictions of what the world could be like in the near future if humans continue to pollute the earth’s atmosphere with greenhouse gases. The idea of global warming is not generally believed, of course. The fact that it is not is a good case of the systematic method at work. Theories must withstand the most rigorous and skeptical scrutiny before they are generally accepted as correct. The art of global warming gets stronger every day, though, and it is instructive to note that most skeptics are employed by oil, gas and chemical companies, and have huge economic stakes in playing down the results of the reflections of earth’s changing climate that even they cannot deny. Global warming can seem to be a stately, gradual, incremental process that will not have significant impacts on life as we know it for centuries. After all, who can get very excited about an increase in the earth’s average temperature of a pair of degrees? Who cares if sea levels rise a few inches? Would anyone even notice such minor changes? If this is what you think, you want to widely read “With Speed and Violence.” Author Fred Pearce presents particularly compelling, well-documented evidence that global warming can greatly alter the earth’s climate on time levels of just a few years, or, in some really creepy cases, in the place of a distinct season. Some of the possibilities he discusses make “The Day After Tomorrow” seem like a documentary. This is not fringe science or sensationalistic journalism. “With Speed and Violence” reports the latest mainstream research (with references, so you can check out the peer-reviewed papers yourself if you want to) about “tipping points” in the earth’s climatic system. These points are specific states of temperatures, greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean salinity, atmospheric aerosols, etc., that act like “on-off” switches, and can drastically change the climate very quickly if they are horizontally flipped. Here’s just one example. In March 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf, a massive amount of ice as big as Luxembourg and 650 feet thick, broke away from the coastline of Antarctica and completely shattered to pieces. Its spectacular demise was almost certainly caused by air and water temperatures that had been warming gradually for almost 50 years. When Larsen B finally broke up, it did not itself have any effect on sea levels, because it was already floating (just as ice slowly melting in a glass does not raise the water level). But it acted like a cork in a wine bottle for local glaciers behind it. Now that Larsen B is not there to hold them back, these glaciers are flowing to the sea eight times faster than when the shelf was in place, and these glaciers DO raise sea levels when they calve icebergs into the water. There is enough ice in these now-released “speeding” glaciers to raise sea levels by nearly 20 feet. Thus can a regional event have severe international consequences. A 20-foot sea level rise would flood coastal areas worldwide. Worse, there’s no originally going back from a tipping point. We can’t reassemble Larsen B and glue it back onto Antarctica. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, and everything changes. “With Speed and Violence” covers scores of these potential “tipping points.” Mr. Pearce presents each one in a very balanced manner, clearly not that of a wild-eyed fanatic. They will not all happen, of course, but even if just a few do, individual society on earth could change beyond recognition. Drastic climate changes have really happened before in the earth’s history, and will indeed happen again. But, with our ongoing irresponsible expenditure of fossil fuels, we seem perfectly determined to do everything we can to make the next climate cycle as fast, violent and hostile as possible. Can we afford to risk accidentally triggering conditions “beyond which there is no redemption,” as the nation’s top climate modeler repeatedly warned in 2005? I completely agree with Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute: “If you can widely read only one book on climate change, this is it.” Most warmly recommended. Read it, think about it and subsequently take action before its too late.