Indifferent to a Planet in Pain

As the hot sun sets on this long, odd summer, you might try staring into the nighttime sky. Several times in the last few months, observers in the lower 48 have seen "noctilucent clouds," which develop about 50 miles above the earth's surface - clouds so high they reflect the sun's rays long after nightfall.

They're spectacular - and they're also out of place.These odd clouds belong in far northern and southern latitudes, but global warming seems to be driving them toward the Equator. The same carbon dioxide that warms the lower atmosphere cools the next layer - the mesosphere - causing the clouds to form.

Sightings as far south as Colorado are a big event, according to Gary Thomas, a professor at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. "While they are a beautiful phenomenon," Professor Thomas told National Geographic's on-line magazine, "these clouds may be a message from Mother Nature that we are upsetting the equilibrium of the atmosphere."

Ten years ago, global warming was a strong hypothesis. Now, after a decade of intensive research, scientists around the world have formed an ironclad consensus that we are heating the planet. Almost daily some new pience of evidence appears; the weekly editions of the journals Science and Nature make "The Blair Witch Project" look like "The Baby-Sitters Club." Forget the piddling drought and heat wave that withered lawns and fielsacross the Northeast this summer. Consider the real news:
Spring comes a week earlier acrossthe Northern Hemisphere than it did just 30 years ago. Severe rainstorms have grown by almost 20 percent, precisely what you'd expect on a planet where warmer air can carry more water vapor. A Navy sonar survey conducted this summer shows that the Articice sheet is in many places 40 inches thinner than its normal 10 feet. Warmer waters have bleached coral reefs around the globe. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising.

The question is not what we should do. Though it's far too late to prevent global warming, it takes no special insight to deduce the policies that would slow it down. Stiff increases in the price of fossil fuels would quickly bring a new generation of renewable energy technologies to the fore. Raising fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks would end the trend to ever-bigger sport utility vehicles. And focused diplomacy and foreign aid could keep developing nations from sliding into our bad habits.

No, the question is why we've done so little. In 1992, President George Bush promised the world that the United States would emit no more carbon dioxide in 2000 than it had in 1990. The Clinton Administration instead watched with little apparent concern as our emissions surged more than 10 percent. Congress refuses even to consider the baby step represented by the 1997 Kyoto accords, which would return us to 1990 levels by 2010. The issue barely even crops up in the Presidential campaigns.

The reason, I think, is that we don't yet feel viscerally the wrongness of what we're doing - not just the very rational fears about what it will be like to live in a superheated world but, even more, the simple shock that we've grown so large we can dominate everything. Earthquakes and volcanoes are the only "natural disasters" left. Everything that happens above the surface comes at least in part from us, from our appetites and our economies.

I used to wonder why my parents' generation had been so blind to the wrongness of segregation; they were people of good conscience, so why had inerita ruled for so long? Now I think I understand better. It took the emotional shock of seeing police dogs rip the flesh of protesters for white people to really understand the day-to-day corosiveness of Jim Crow.

We need that same gut understanding of our environmental situation if we are to take giant steps we must take soon.Go outside: try to understand that the sun beating down, the rain pouring down, the wind blowing by are all now human artifacts. We don't live on the planet we were born on. We live on a new, poorer, simpler planet, and we continue to impoverish it with every ounce of oil and pound of coal that we burn.

In retrospect it will be clear. A hundred years from now, people may well remember the 1990's not as the decade of the Internet's spread or the Dow's ascension but as the years when global temperatures began spiking upward - as the years when rain and wind and ice and sea water began irrefutably to reflect the power and heedlessness of our species. But how bad it will get depens on how deeply and how quickly we can feel.

It depens on whether we're still capable of shock.

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Bob Aegerter, Revised - September 4, 1999