What's your role in fixing our planet?

• Author: Whitney, Alan G.
• Position: Business and the environment

What's your role in fixing our planet? Many economists think that the solutions to our environmental problems will be found by scientists. As a scientist, I think more solutions will be found by economists.

Business people have been bombarded recently with data on the rate at which we've been disrupting the Earth. All of us deal with this information differently. Some use denial: "Well, it can't be that bad. Nature will provide some mechanism we just haven't found yet. Or they probably have the data wrong again." Some invoke a techno-fix: "Scientists will find a way to overcome that. There'll be new inventions. Mankind is ingenious when the problem gets bad enough." Some of us just throw up our hands in defeat and get on with the rest of our lives: "If we're going to produce wealth, it has to cost some part of the system."

But a look at the facts is necessary.

Truth in numbers

For the last 140,000 years, the level of [CO.sub.2] in the atmosphere was constant at around 285 parts per million. It now stands at some 350 ppm, which may seem only a trace higher, but the fact is these changes have not happened in the last 400 generations of man's history. They have occurred in the last four, and most of them in the last single generation--in fact, the last 10 years of the last generation. If you let that 140,000 years be a 24-hour clock, then the Euphrates was being settled an hour and a half ago and the [CO.sub.2] level started to change in the last 24 seconds, with most of it changing in the last six seconds.

Some say that the greenhouse effect is not coming. It is here. The six warmest years in Britain since 1880 were 1988, 1987, 1983, 1981, 1980, and 1986, in that order. We have experienced a warming of the global temperature by .6[degrees]C, and the temperature will be going up about 1[degrees]C per decade for a bit.

Let me put these small temperature rises into perspective: Man evolved about 100,000 years ago. A rise of only 1.5[degrees]C would make the Earth warmer than it has been in all of those years. A rise of 3[degrees]C would make the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years. A warming of 5[degrees]C would mean very little bio-diversity left, which provides the "nuts and bolts" that hold the whole works together. These kinds of warming will take place when the [CO.sub.2] level doubles, and there is enough coal and oil still in the ground to raise the [CO.sub.2] level by 10 times.

Other effects of bringing the carbon back include the warming of high latitudes, which will occur two or more times faster than the warming of lower latitudes. This means that much more water will flow out of Canada and Siberia into the Arctic Ocean. We can only guess the consequences of this, but certainly it means more melting of polar ice, a mechanism for further warming the planet and for raising the sea level.

The average height of the oceans, while difficult to get a good measure of, has likely already risen. And most models show the oceans could rise up to one meter in the next decade, and perhaps another in the decade following that. What would this do to the coasts of Canada, to the eastern and southern seaboards of the United States? We need some large-scale economic modeling to get a grip on the probable costs for coastal countries.

As temperatures change, so will winds. Hurricanes will be more powerful. And the amount of rain will change. In fact, the most noticeable...