[GPSCC-chat] Green Talk Column

[Wes Rolley]

This is the text of my most recent column.  It is scheduled to run on 
Friday, Nov. 11.

When at the Morgan Hill Library, I normally scan the new books section 
looking for something interesting. The last time I did this, I 
discovered /The World in 2050/, a look at the future by Laurence C. 
Smith, Professor of Geography at UCLA. It is an easy read, but I 
frequently had to put it aside to think about what I had just read.

Smith set out to write a book about the way climate change affects the 
extreme northern portions of our planet. But his many conversations, 
especially with indigenous people of the North, convinced him that he 
needed to broaden his scope. The result is a sobering anticipation of 
what this world will be like in 2050.

According to Professor Smith, four primary forces are changing the world 
for all of us: population growth, resource depletion, climate change and 
globalization. It makes sense to look at them in that order.

The population of Earth has just reached 7 billion. some are thinking 
long and hard about how we are going feed all of them. We see drought 
and famine in the Horn of Africa now and most of us appear to be 
bystanders to that unfolding tragedy. Many had died. More have take to 
the road to escape this tragedy. But the facts are that we are adding 
the population of the United States every 4 years. By 2050, there will 
be 9 billion people, not 7. We will have added another China and the 
task of feeding them will be much harder.

Population growth will not be distributed evenly. While most countries 
will see their populations increase, a few, notably Japan, Russia, 
Korea, Germany and Italy are projected to experience a population 
decline. In the case of Japan, perhaps 20%. Almost all of the growth 
will be urban. In 2008, for the first time, more people lived in an 
urban rather than a rural setting. Fewer will be providing their own 
food, but will buy food imported from somewhere near or far.

All of those people will need new urban facilities to be built. New 
buildings, new transportation infrastructure, new things, perhaps even 
new parks. What resources will be required and at what cost? We already 
copper prices so high that people risk death to cut the copper from live 
electrical facilities. At current usage rates the earth has only a 35 
year supply of copper in proven reserves.

Clearly, oil and coal will not be around forever and yet we are 
continuously exhorted to use it up as quickly as we can. You can not 
listen even to PBS without hearing an advertisement urging us to drill 
for more oil, exploit the tar sands of Alberta, hold our breaths waiting 
for clean coal to become a reality, and all in the hope of generating 
more jobs.

In California, as well as most urban centers around the world, we will 
see an increasingly expensive bid to control our water. It is the one 
thing that we can not live without,

The climate change genie is out of its bottle and there is no apparent 
desire to stuff it back in. We know that temperatures are warming. We 
see the results with great regularity as the world is buffeted with a 
series of deadly storms, each driven to increased intensity by our 
changing climate. So far in 2011, the US has had 14 weather events 
costing us over $1 Billion each with the April 25/30 super outbreak of 
tornadoes costing over $9 Billion.

We are beginning to see the development of a new climate paradigm in the 
Mediterranean. Greece has experienced 10 years without normal winter 
rains. Focused on the current financial crisis there, we lose sight of 
the ecological crisis underway.

Big changes in climate will create climate refugees. We already see this 
beginning in Africa, where Somalian refugees are flooding into Kenya. 
Can any country absorb these refugees into its own growing population? 
The UN expects that there will be over 100 million who need to move, 
some to escape drought as in Somalia, others to escape sea level rise in 
Vietnam's Mekong Delta or Bangladesh;

It is still our decision whether we can avert the worst of these 
problems. It appears that the US is quite willing to do nothing.


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