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Sept. 17, 1998 - Art Bell
18:45
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Linda Moulton Howe - Climate Change
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Thanks, and now there is new scientific information that indicates toxic chemical pollution has spread deeper into ocean waters than previously thought.
Dutch scientists at the Netherlands Institute for Marine Research have discovered man-made polybrominated chemical compounds in sperm whales that have washed up on beaches.
Those whales feed at 3,000 feet down.
So the implication is that man-made chemical pollution is getting into the Atlantic Ocean food chain that deeply.
My God.
3,000 feet.
3,000 feet down is where the sperm whales feed, and they are finding that they've got these polybrominated chemical compounds in the fat, and that would be from what they're feeding on down there.
Also, the oceans are slowly rising as the world's glaciers are melting.
Ice deposits are disappearing in Europe, Africa, Russia, China, New Zealand, and the United States.
Linda, may I stop you and ask you a question?
Now, people will fax me and say, but glaciers go through periods of retreat and then growth, but I think I want to tackle that argument.
What we're seeing right now Yes, and this is what you are going to hear from a couple of scientists that I've interviewed on this story tonight.
And to drive this point home, in Spain alone, the number of glaciers has dropped by half from 27 to 13 since 1980.
Geophysicists now predict that Montana's Glacier National Park will lose all of its glaciers in this next century.
In Alaska, at Valdez, the huge Columbia Glacier has melted back more than 8 miles in only the last 16 years.
The reason is that while the average surface temperature of the Earth has risen 1 degree Fahrenheit in the 20th century, the temperature in Alaska, northwestern Canada, and Siberia has increased five degrees Fahrenheit since 1968.
Holy smokes!
Yep, and that is exactly what scientists predicted about global warming.
You know, I was all set to say people say, oh, a degree, come on, what does that mean?
Well, actually a degree means a lot.
Six or seven could be catastrophic.
Well, the one degree globally and this five degrees Uh, in, uh, the northern regions.
This was predicted, uh, by modeling in global warming that the northern regions would warm more and faster than the rest of the planet.
I know, but the politicians of One Stripe said, B.S.
Uh, all these, uh, models are B.S.
Well, uh, part of the reason for this is global warming changes patterns of atmospheric circulation And further, as ice and snow melt, less heat is reflected off the land, which stays warmer.
Scientists now say that Alaska and other far northern regions should warm about twice as much as the rest of the Earth.
And in the next 100 years, our planet is expected to warm globally another 2 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit.
That means even higher temperatures and faster melt in Alaska.
Now, when we come back, we're close to a break.
We are, but it also means bigger storms, doesn't it?
Well, there is one interesting and ironic victim in all this, in Alaska, in this new warming, and it's trees.
And after the break, we will hear about this from a scientist who has been He's been studying glaciers up there for about 10 years, and he has some very interesting comments to say.
And let us also not forget the 75 square mile chunk of the Antarctic that broke off and just went away.
And now they're talking about the instability of the big ice sheet down there.
But there is some good news about the poles, and I'll be discussing that also.
Alright, good.
So it's a good news, bad news kind of night.
You better listen closely now.
That has to do with what's going on up north.
And you might say, what does that have to do with me?
Well, I'll let Linda answer that.
Linda, somebody, say, down in Jersey City or in San Diego might say, ah, so who cares if it gets warm up north?
If they live near a coastline, they want to hear the scientist that I'm going to be interviewing.
Because we are dealing with rising sea levels, and before the break I was talking about how in this century that the Earth has risen one degree Fahrenheit, but the temperatures in Alaska, northwestern Canada, and Siberia have increased five degrees Fahrenheit since 1968.
One victim in all this new Alaska warming are some trees that ironically can't get enough water as the ice melts and the water table falls lower.
The U.S.
Forest Service estimates that one-third to one-half of Alaska's white spruce have died since 1983 and that's in only 15 years.
Linda, if the ice is melting, why is the water table going lower?
Because you've got permafrost frozen ground.
That as it melts and the water seeps down, it goes lower down below the tree roots than it was when it was more in a permafrost condition.
I've got to tell you, I saw some of that going on in Alaska when I was last there, and you know what?
They said that they thought it had something to do with the earthquake in Alaska.
And there's thousands of dead trees.
But they said it was the earthquake.
No, this problem, and it depends on the regions, there's several things happening in Alaska.
And tonight, one scientist who has seen the forest devastation of the White Spruce firsthand and is studying Alaska's glacier melt is Dr. Greg Wilds, Assistant Professor of Geology at the College of Worcester in Worcester, Ohio.
And you can hear what Dr. Wiles has to say about this.
Alright, and here comes that report.
Well, yeah, there's certain areas where trees are becoming moisture stressed as permafrost melts, especially in the Arctic region.
And furthermore, that those trees are being preferentially attacked by bugs and such.
So there are large parts of what we call the boreal forest in the north that are being impacted.
When you have permafrost melting, the water table, where the trees draw their water from, is becoming lower, because the actual frozen ground is actually melting, and therefore there's a drop in the water table, so those trees don't have the same moisture source that they did in the past.
In that sense, they're not getting drowned, they're actually, you know, dying of thirst.
What is your projection over the next, let's say, hundred years, this next century, For what will happen at the poles, Alaska, are we going to be in 100 years of continual melt and retreat?
Well, that's a good question.
And I think based on what we've seen, the retreat of glaciers that we're seeing today
and some other events suggest that over maybe a time scale of hundreds of years,
that the warming we're experiencing today is unprecedented over that time period,
meaning it hasn't occurred prior to the time of, say, over the last thousand years.
So what that would suggest is that perhaps the warming may continue.
Another major consequence of all the glacial melt on land is runoff into the oceans.
And that means sea levels are rising millimeter by millimeter, centimeter by centimeter.
Another scientist who studies sea level changes related to ice melt is Dr. Mike Meyer, Yes, we know that there are some highly paid contrarians who go around the country publishing articles and giving speeches.
research at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
I ask him to first comment about politicians and media commentators who still debunk global warming.
Dr. Meyer.
Yes, we know that there are some highly paid contrarians who go around the country publishing articles and giving
speeches.
They're well funded by those organizations that would like to see the status quo continue and not face up
to the fact that nature is changing things.
Are we in global warming as a human-caused condition or is it a perturbation of the Earth?
Okay, first of all let me say that global warming is absolutely real.
There are many, many Records that prove that this is so, so you cannot deny the fact that there is warming.
The big question is, how much of global warming has been caused by humans' actions in releasing greenhouse gases and things like that?
That's more difficult, but the IPCC, which was a consortium of thousands of scientists, did come to a consensus that we can now see the impact of humans What do you foresee could happen to sea levels over the next 100 years?
Well, I was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, that has a whole chapter devoted to that subject.
We generally think that by the year 2100, sea level will rise, our best guess, about half a meter, about a foot and a half.
A fourth or a third will be due to the melt of these small glaciers.
And the consequences of a foot and a half in terms of global coastlines, what would we, as humans living in animals and marine life and so forth, what kind of consequences might that have, if any?
You know, a foot and a half doesn't sound like much, but on the other hand, most of the shorelines of the world slope at a Very flat, slope of about 100 to 1.
So 1.5 feet of sea level rise translates to 150 feet of coastline retreat.
150 feet?
Yeah, 100 times.
And some things are even more pronounced, like the saltwater wedge under the freshwater in estuaries will probably retreat Maybe a thousand times greater than the amount of actual sea level rise.
Furthermore, the retreat of a coastline of 150 feet will not only damage real estate, it will also pinch out coastal wetlands and have lots of other bad effects.
So far in Western civilizations, or this industrial civilization, we have not been through a 100-year period With a projected global temperature rise of 2 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit before, could there be surprises out there?
There could be.
Science always progresses, you know, even though nature throws little surprises at us occasionally.
There could be some surprises that we do not anticipate, cannot anticipate.
But I think that the models are robust.
The physics is very simple.
about greenhouse gas concentrations.
So that although there may be some fluctuations that we didn't think about, in general terms,
the global mean annual temperature is going to rise by about the amount you said.
Sea level will rise, and so on.
It's very clear from all of your research that we're headed for a foot and a half increase in sea
levels over the next 100 years.
It means that getting close to the oceans is problematic no matter where you are.
That's right.
So, shouldn't it be a policy of government to dissuade people from building close to shorelines that are going to disappear?
There's a gap between should and will.
And you can imagine the homeowner that has just bought this beautiful piece of real estate Fantastic ocean view and puts a little dog down and so on.
That person doesn't want to be told.
But aren't we past the point of where we've got to shift this to practical, global, environmental terms that are logical and in balance with what is happening in the world around us versus greed, politics and money.
I agree with you completely.
We should, and I wish we would.
Can scientists have an impact, for example, on administrations and policies?
I think you have to criticize scientists.
They're generally pretty reticent, and they produce a result, and they understand that there are certain basic assumptions about it and errors in the measurements.
They don't want to come out and be dogmatic, and the politician Once a soundbite, you know, a dogmatic statement.
And so scientists have been not so very good in terms of letting the public know.
But if you were running the world today and you could make a benevolent and guiding policy statement, what would you say to everyone?
Well, I would be scared to death.
Because there's so many considerations beyond just the science.
But I would say that the science does point out, without much doubt at all, that sea level is going to rise, the climate is changing, and so on.
And that ought to be factored into any decisions the policy makers make.
But from a scientist's point of view, if you were talking to your family or your neighbors about what they should try to do as homeowners and as people who are going to have Some kind of state and what kind of future we're having, what would you say?
Well, I would say that you better take into consideration the fact that sea level is rising and will rise even more rapidly in the future.
That this will cause shoreline retreat, storm surges from storms will go further inland, wetlands will be endangered and so on, and you should consider this before you buy or develop property or whatever.
Now the good news in all of this, Art, is about the North and South Poles that we hear a lot about.
The North Pole is ice floating in the middle of an ocean like ice in a glass of water.
Right.
And that frozen seawater can melt or freeze and it won't directly affect sea level just as ice melting in your glass takes up the same volume and it doesn't spill over the top.
How about the ice above water level?
No, anything that's floating in the water is like ice in your glass.
I've got you, I've got you.
Yeah, but at the South Pole, Antarctic, there is a continent of land underneath huge ice glaciers.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, for example, contains 3.8 million cubic kilometers of ice.
If it ever disintegrated, releasing its water into the ocean, The sea level could rise as much as 6 meters, or 18 feet.
But, Dr. Meyer pointed out that the bulk of that ice is at temperatures of minus 20 to minus 40 degrees Celsius, which is minus 68 to minus 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
Good.
So, if the average global temperature rises even 6 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the projected maximum over the next century, It won't have much effect on the extremely cold Antarctic ice.
In other words, we don't have to worry, Art, about the West Antarctic ice sheet sliding off the land into the sea in our lifetimes, or even our children's lifetimes.
But in a few centuries, if global warming continued, the West Antarctic ice sheet might become a problem.
All right.
What I note of what the scientist you just interviewed said, He suggested that we begin to take steps to deal with what's coming, and I noticed that he didn't suggest that we modify our behavior.
He talked about the contrarians, and I would guess that the fact that he didn't suggest we would modify our behavior is a tip of the hat to the contrarians' effectiveness?
Well, yes, and the fact is that I think that there is a cynical mood in many places.
That is working against our trying to live in different ways, handle industrial civilization differently and balance with the earth, which, if we don't, we're going to have worse problems.
If we were now trying to have reasonable policies about shoreline development, it might make people grouch.
But wouldn't you rather have intelligent policies now about the fact that we are inescapably headed toward rising sea levels?
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