One world, one problem

By Bill McKibben

Mainly, the battlefront has kept widening over the decades, as we come to understand just how many threats there are: that species are going extinct, that carcinogens are spreading through the air and water, that genetically modified crops might contaminate their natural cousins. By the early part of this decade, researchers estimated there were 30,000 local environmental groups in this country, saving and protecting and doing all kinds of noble work.

In the past two or three years, however, something new and different has begun to happen: A consensus is emerging that one fight, and one fight only, looms at the center of our environmental efforts. That's the battle against global warming, which has begun to serve as the organizing principle for green America.

Foundations are diverting money from other programs; the heads of the big Washington-based environmental groups have agreed that this will be their priority for the foreseeable future. Not because free-flowing rivers or threatened grizzlies or toxic waste have grown less important, but because people have begun to realize that we could win every other battle and it would be meaningless if we lost the fight against climate change.

This shift -- the steady morphing of the environmental movement into the climate movement -- stems in large part from the latest round of scientific reports. In the past two years, the top scientists at work on climate change have shifted from worried to very nearly panicked, because the data shows we have less time than we thought, and more danger. NASA's James Hansen, America's foremost climatologist, defied a White House gag order last year and said we had 10 years to reverse the flow of carbon into the atmosphere or else we would live on a ``totally different planet.'' In particular, Hansen had been studying the ever-more-likely collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, which holds enough water to raise the earth's seas 25 feet.

But you could reach the same conclusions by looking at the increase in drought, or the spread of desertification, or rising storm intensity, or the release of methane gas from warming Siberian bogs -- every system we study is showing deep stress from the 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature we've already caused. No one wants to see what will happen if we raise the mercury another five degrees, which is the consensus forecast for this century unless we get to work very quickly.

And it's not just the scientists -- a team of British economists reported last month, after a year and a half of close study, that the potential economic cost of climate change exceeded World War I, World War II and the Great Depression combined.

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