Part of the curriculum at the University of Denver’s Institute for Public Policy Studies is Dick Lamm’s graduate-level course on building a sustainable America. The former governor brings an array of speakers to the class to talk about economics, politics and climate change.
This quarter his bright young students were so upset by what they were hearing, he worried that they were plummeting into despair. “One of the students said she thought they needed a therapy session,” Lamm said.
That was before the dire forecast of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was released last week.
The findings of the 21-page summary appeared on the same day that Exxon Mobil reported earning $39.5 billion in 2006, the largest annual income by a U.S. company ever.
Now we all need therapy.
“The dilemma we’re faced with is that if we present the reality of the future, it’s so depressing,” Lamm said. “It raises the issue of whether our society can stand as much reality as this report presents us.”
Cue Jack Nicholson.
Unlike the global-warming fable the Bush administration has generated in the past six years (with considerable help from Exxon Mobil), the IPCC report is not a political document.
It is the consensus interpretation of sophisticated data collected by hundreds of scientists from all over the world.
Several of the report’s authors are from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, but representatives from 113 countries participated in the research.
It’s impossible to ignore.
The report stated that scientists have determined with 90 percent certainty that human activities are the cause of global warming and that even if reductions in fossil-fuel use were to be achieved immediately, “warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries.”
Average temperatures are expected to increase 3.2 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, and sea levels likely will rise 7 to 23 inches. The result will be shrinking sea ice and snow cover, more frequent heat waves and droughts, and more intense storms, hurricanes and typhoons.
In human terms, that means an estimated 10 million people from the Gulf Coast and the Netherlands to Bangladesh flooded out of their cities, increasing famine across Africa, and enormous dislocations in populations, ecosystems and species.
Four of the U.S. scientists on the IPCC will appear before the House Science and Technology Committee this week to explain the panel’s findings. “With the scientific questions long settled, it is incumbent on the president to demonstrate leadership” on this issue, said Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., a member of the committee.
While leadership would be swell, environmental leaders fear all the politicians will produce is more empty platitudes.
“I hate to say it, but I’m pessimistic,” said Bert Melcher, a longtime environmentalist, transportation planner and the original director of the Regional Transportation District.
For a decade, Melcher has studied global warming and ways to reduce greenhouse gases, all the while witnessing the spectacle of Americans blithely burning fossil fuels at an ever faster clip.
Bleak as the forecast of the IPCC is, Melcher said there still is hope, but only if “we scare the hell out of ourselves” and begin to reverse the trends immediately.
He recommends that individuals reduce their miles traveled, find ways to increase fuel efficiency in their vehicles, telecommute as much as possible, support tax incentives for energy conservation and better land-use plans, and vote as if the future depends upon it.
There is no time left for self-deception, he said. The Bush administration’s censorship of science “is one of the more immoral things I’ve seen in my 76 years.”
But, he said, it’s not too late.
“Technically we can do it, and economically we can do it. We need a Manhattan Project for the world.”
Even Governor Gloom agreed.
“There is a path through the labyrinth,” Lamm said, “but we need to get serious.
“Pearl Harbor serious.”
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
