The Hot Zone
The Hot Zone
From City Pages by Monika Bauerlein, July 9, 1997, VOL 18 #866
Global warming isn't just a theory anymore. Now the arguments are about how dire the
changes in world climate will be, how soon they'll come--and what, if anything, can be
done to moderate them.
by Monika Bauerlein
Out on the sand plains about 50 miles north of Minneapolis, there's a cluster
of broken-down farmsteads that belong to the University of Minnesota. It's
flat, unremarkable land, dotted with clusters of oak and pine, crossed by
weedy, dead-end roads. Near a tin shed by the side of one of the trails, three
circles of bare earth have been carved neatly into the stubbled grass. Each is
divided into a grid of 6-by-6 plots that will soon be seeded with various sets
of prairie plants--purple bush clover, butterfly weed, green coneflower,
Indian grass.
By the time the plants come up next spring, a tanker truck will pull up here
once a week, bearing pure carbon dioxide from a brewery. Researchers will
fill a tank and pump high concentrations of CO2 over two of the three circles,
using a sensor to make sure the level stays constant at about 150 percent of
what it is now. The third circle will be left alone for comparison. The point is
to find out how the plants grow in the enriched air, and whether diverse plots
do any better than monocultures. It's a neat little study.
It is also an experiment inside an experiment. For a century and a half,
humanity has been adjusting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere upward about
25 percent, bringing it to a level higher than it's been any time in the last
150,000 years. Now the results are starting to come in.
Over the past century the globe has warmed up about 1 degree, and the
oceans have risen an inch. Ice is melting at the poles and atop mountain
ranges. Droughts and floods are becoming more common. The very timing of
the seasons has shifted; spring now comes a week earlier to the Northern
Hemisphere than it did in the 1950s. Plankton has been dying in the ocean
off California; bugs and plants are moving north or uphill; the Arctic
permafrost is thawing; and strange things are happening with the El Niño
system of ocean currents.
Global climate change, global warming, the greenhouse effect, whatever you
name it, is no longer a controversial theory or even a worrisome prediction.
With little fanfare, and considerable reluctance on the part of many
researchers, it's become expert consensus. How much further to push the
global experiment is a matter politicians from around the world are supposed
to decide later this year. But the change already set in motion will continue
at least until the children of children born now are old. What this means for
the planet--20 years, 50 years down the road--is the question researchers at
the UM's prairie site and elsewhere are trying to answer now.
You've heard the basic greenhouse explanation. It's like leaving your car out
in the sun. Light comes through the windows at a certain wavelength;
bounces off the interior; and can't get back out because of its new
wavelength. Similarly the stratosphere--the layer of air some nine to 31
miles up from where we live--is less "transparent" to radiation bouncing off
the globe's surface than to that coming in from the sun. Without this natural
greenhouse, Earth's average temperature would be around 18 below.
The substances chiefly responsible for the greenhouse effect are water vapor,
methane, and carbon dioxide. And since humans began vaporizing the
world's coal mines and oil deposits around the mid-1800s, they've added
billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.
This much is basic physics. What was disputed, until recently, was whether
those additions enhanced the natural greenhouse effect or simply blended in
without further consequence. (One caveat: Though often confused, the
greenhouse effect is not the same as the ozone-hole problem. In fact, they
work somewhat at cross-purposes. Ozone deterioration, caused by chemicals
until recently found in air conditioners, spray bottles, and styrofoam, allows
more ultraviolet radiation to hit the surface of the earth, causing skin cancer
and other problems. But thinning ozone makes little difference in terms of
temperature; it could even help cool the globe, much as a fraying blanket
would send you shivering at night. Just to make things more complicated,
the chemicals that destroy ozone do also serve as greenhouse gases,
probably canceling out the cooling effect right there.)
The jury appointed to answer the global-warming question was the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of 2,400 scientists set
up by a United Nations conference in 1987. Its membership was drawn from
the world's most illustrious research institutions; the U.S. delegation alone
hails from places like the Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Harvard, MIT,
and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. The IPCC has released two
"global climate assessments"; each ran thousands of pages, with footnotes
enough to fill another volume. But if the first report was comparatively
inconclusive, the second, published in 1995, was a bombshell.
First, the IPCC said in the 1995 report, its earlier findings (the 1-degree
increase in global temperatures over the last century-plus, the 1-inch sea-
level rise, and many other slight, but increasingly noticeable trends) had
been confirmed by additional research. But, it added as it did in 1990, such
trends in themselves didn't mean much: Global temperatures have fluctuated
up to 10 degrees over geologic time, usually triggered by shifts in the earth's
orbit around the sun. And though the most recent warming started right after
fossil-fuel burning took off, that didn't prove a causal relationship. What led
the IPCC to conclude that such a relationship did exist was a scientific
breakthrough no one had expected for at least another decade or two: The
computer models had fallen into place.
When it came to the greenhouse effect, the models climatologists use as
stand-ins for the real world had always confounded researchers. If you
enriched a model's hypothetical air with the amount of CO2 humans have
been pumping out, you got a much warmer climate; but it was much warmer
than what we actually have. Which meant that either some other force was
moderating the human influence, or the climate was simply doing its own
thing independent of human inputs.
Then some enterprising graduate students plugged another key real-world
variable into their model: sulfates, the acid-rain chemicals that are a major
by-product of fossil-fuel burning. If CO2 acts to reinforce Earth's greenhouse
layer, sulfates are thought to create a "parasol effect." Like veils draped
through the air high above, they reflect radiation back into space before it
can warm Earth.
As soon as sulfates were accounted for, the models' warming curves snapped
into position, overlapping the actual record with eerie accuracy. The globe
would warm more at night than during the day, they predicted (and it has);
it would stay cooler in places downwind from most coal burning, such as the
Northeastern U.S. (right again); the stratosphere would get colder while the
air further down heated up (likewise).
It looked, for all intents and purposes, like a climatic "fingerprint": No other
force--solar cycles, volcanoes, and the like--could produce as good a match
to the real-world record as the CO2-plus-sulfate model. And so the 2,400
IPCC scientists finally put their signatures to a statement as bland as it was
remarkable: "The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible
human influence on global climate."
A predictable firestorm followed. Critics called the IPCC a political body,
beholden to world governments--which, apparently, couldn't wait to have
their energy policies indicted. There were rumors about key statements being
inserted, or removed, surreptitiously. Congress even held hearings to debunk
global warming.
And it's true that much remains uncertain about the IPCC report. Some
unknown force could be playing hide-and-seek, changing the climate in a
way that only looks like human interference. This is a standard scientific
disclaimer: Similarly, researchers don't know that gravity exists, they just
know the planet behaves as if it did. "There's not a single experiment that
proves human emissions cause climate change," says John Pastor, a
University of Minnesota-Duluth researcher who has studied the response of
forests to climate change. "For a long time, it also wasn't proven that
smoking causes cancer. But there is such a thing as the cumulative weight of
evidence."
And new evidence keeps emerging, with crucial studies published almost
monthly since the release of the IPCC report. Perhaps the most interesting
was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's disclosure that
over the past 80 years, "extreme weather" has become more common
around the world--and that the change has occurred in just the way the
global-warming models predict. Precipitation, for example, now happens less
frequently, in bigger downpours, and in winter more than summer.
The NOAA extreme-weather study team was headed by Robert Quayle, a
fairly prominent "climate agnostic." In 1991, he said that it would take at
least another four decades to validate the theory of human-induced
greenhouse warming. Last year, Quayle told the magazine International
Wildlife he had revised that estimate: Chances were 19 out of 20, he said,
that what was being observed was indeed global warming. "I'm not
particularly agnostic anymore," he said. "There is such a convergence of data
it gets to be a little spooky."
Why should we care? That people have changed the climate may be
philosophically crucial--you can't, if you let the fact sink in, look at storms or
other "acts of God" the same way again--but so far, it doesn't seem to have
made much of a tangible difference.
Or has it? That's the trouble with the law of averages. The researchers can
tell you that somewhere, there's a river that wouldn't have overflowed
without global warming, a drought that would have ended sooner, a storm
that wouldn't have been so severe. But they can't and won't say whether it
was the Red River of '97 or the Mississippi of '95, the storm that blacked out
South Minneapolis last week or the heat wave that killed 500 in Chicago two
years ago. Nor will they ever: Climate, it's been said, is what you predict.
Weather is what you get.
Every prediction needs a starting point; right now, most of the forecasts
assume that between 2050 and 2100, CO2 in the atmosphere will reach a
level twice as great as before the Industrial Revolution. This, the IPCC
estimates, will send average global temperatures up an additional 2.5 to 6.5
degrees. Most forecasters split the difference and estimate an increase of 4
to 5 degrees, with the warming distributed unevenly around the world. On
the models' crude regional scale, the Twin Cities look to get right about the
average increase, becoming 4 degrees warmer and somewhat drier. It would,
in effect, look more like Omaha around here.
If that seems unremarkable, consider the historical precedent. Through all of
the time humans have been recording their stories, there is not a single
instance of warming even approaching the level predicted now, and far lesser
climate ripples have split societies apart. Egypt's Old Kingdom ended when
the Sahara's freshwater lakes dried up after the winds shifted slightly south.
The "Little Ice Age," a mere 1-degree cooling from circa 1400 to 1850, sent
Europe into a cycle of war, famine, pestilence and mass migration to the New
World.
Granted, the people of those times may have been more susceptible to
climate change than we (at least those with air conditioners and food
supplies carted in from thousands of miles away) are now. But from what's
known so far, average temperature is just the start of global climate change-
-or, as many researchers prefer to call it, just plain "global change."
To start with, there is a nasty rule that says a slight increase in the average
means an exponential rise in extremes. If Minneapolis/St. Paul get only a
little warmer, days with a "heat index" of 95 degrees or more--the kind that
can kill the old, the young, and the sick--could come four times to 10 times
as often.
If flooding becomes just a little more common, extreme floods increase that
much more; a 100-year-flood plain can become a 10-year-flood plain. The
same goes for 100-year droughts, and so on.
One of the reasons why researchers now speak of "global climate change"
rather than "global warming" is that warmer temperatures change the way
air and precipitation move. Minnesota, as it happens, sits at the intersection
of three major climate forces--warm, moist air from the Gulf, winds from the
West, and the Alberta clippers. A slight shift in one or all of them could bring
anything from a little extra snowfall to a new tornado alley. Stanford
University climatologist Stephen Schneider calls the region "ground zero of
climate change" for precisely that reason.
As climate shifts, so do the boundaries within which plants and animals can
live. University of Minnesota researchers have been studying samples drilled
from deep lakes and forest floors for traces (plant pollen, fossilized fly wings,
ash from prairie fires) of eras long gone. They've found that through geologic
time, trees like spruce and oak have pulsed back and forth across the region,
crossing vast territories in pursuit of favorable climate; in fact, the forests
growing here now may have evolved precisely in response to constant
climate change at the glacial boundary.
But those changes were gentle compared to what's down the road. Margaret
Davis, a University of Minnesota regents' professor in ecology, says even at
their fastest rate, the trees she studied moved no more than two-thirds of a
mile per year. Under current climate projections, "we're asking them to go
about ten times that fast. And I fear that a lot of species won't be able to
keep up."
How exactly the landscape will change is hard to forecast. UMD's John Pastor
has run calculations which suggest that at the IPCC's projected rate of
warming, spruce, maple, birch, oak and pine could all but disappear from
sandy soils in northern Minnesota. There's nothing unduly apocalyptic, the
data indicates, in envisioning parts of Voyageurs National Park and the
Boundary Waters, which now make up the southern edge of the "northern
boreal forest," as landscapes of stumps.
Dying forests, of course, would be at much greater risk of burning. The
Canadian Forest Service has found that forest fires were up almost fourfold in
the mid-1990s from a decade earlier; Minnesota, too, has seen a record
number of blazes. Fires, in turn, release carbon the trees have heretofore
been storing--more greenhouse-enhancing CO2.
And don't forget the peat bogs that cover much of the Arctic and chunks of
northern Minnesota. They contain, says UM regents' professor Eville Gorham,
about one-third again as much carbon as there is in the world's atmosphere
now. Even a slight warming could cause many peat bogs to dry up and
release CO2; or the permafrost below some of them could thaw and release
another potent greenhouse gas, methane. In a worst-case scenario, vast
tracts of peat could catch fire, smoldering for years at a time in what Gorham
calls the "Kuwait of the North."
But the plants of most immediate concern in global-warming scenarios are
agricultural crops. There are those who argue that there's nothing to worry
about. Avowed "climate skeptic" Sherwood Idso notes that CO2, besides
warming the atmosphere, serves as an airborne fertilizer. Thus, humans
should celebrate fossil-fuel burning--because it heralds a "rebirth of the
biosphere," the return to a "paradise lost" of lush growth.
Most ag researchers are not so sure. Aside from the matter of how long crops
could sustain a CO2-induced growth spurt, changed weather patterns are
almost guaranteed to affect production. Crop failures are likely in portions of
the world's corn belts as rains fail to show or heat spikes wilt crops. As far
back as 1988, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calculated that crop
acreage in the Midwest could decline by 25 percent under the global-warming
projections of the time. In one scenario, a string of severe droughts could
turn Kansas into a desert in as little as a decade. What's more, warmer
temperatures bring better conditions for pests, from grasshoppers to corn
borers.
There is an easy answer: Farming will just have to move north. It looks a lot
less attractive when you consider the upheaval involved (ask any small town
in southern Minnesota). Nor is it clear that the sandy soils of, say, northern
Minnesota and Alberta could perform the way the Central Plains' deep-down
black dirt has. And even if it all works out, a transition period of dicey
harvests could be bad news at a time when the world's food supply looks
increasingly uncertain.
And that's just the story of the North--which, according to the models, is in
for a much better time of it than the Southern Hemisphere. For much of
Africa and Latin America, the models forecast average temperature increases
up to twice as high as those of North America, Europe, and much of Asia.
That means more droughts for parts of the world that already suffer from
chronic water shortages. A mild shift in monsoon patterns could wipe out
entire regions where farmers barely get by now. This is known as the "green
north-brown south" pattern; the consequences for migration alone are
staggering.
There are, however, two great equalizers: the oceans and the bugs. Both
have ways of evading containment, and neither is very well understood.
Ocean waters are slower to react to atmospheric changes than the air. But
they have, the IPCC reported, been getting warmer. That may have caused
the 70-percent die-off California researchers discovered two years ago
among the tiny sea organisms called plankton. And if plankton is in trouble,
so are the fish that eat it--as well as the 30 percent of humanity that rely on
fish for food and agricultural fertilizer. (Closer to home, a University of
Minnesota biologist estimates that at the predicted rate of warming,
something like 40 percent of the walleye and northerns could disappear from
the lake country.)
Tropical storms--hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones--by contrast, like warm
water. They don't even form in places where the surface temperature isn't at
least 78 degrees. Researchers aren't far enough along with the models to say
for sure that global warming will bring more storms, but the insurance
industry has been taking notice.
Meanwhile, on mountain ranges from the Rockies to the Alps, glaciers have
been pulling back, in some places as fast as 100 feet or more each year. In
Austria, the retreating ice exposed the body of a man who'd tried to cross the
mountains the last time the glacier was this small--before the Roman Empire.
Melting ice, along with the fact that warm water expands, is the most likely
explanation for the last 100 years' ocean-level rise. And there's more to
come: The IPCC projects that if current trends continue, the seas will rise 12
inches by 2050, flooding most of the East Coast's beaches and up to one-fifth
of countries like Bangladesh and the Netherlands.
As for the bugs, first the good news: Researchers expect that as climate
warms, fewer people in North America and Europe will die of cold-season
illnesses, including flu. Most of the rest of humanity's predators, however,
stand to see global warming as a boon. Right now, about 45 percent of the
world is suitable habitat for the mosquito that carries malaria. With a 5-
degree average warming, the insect could expand its range to 60 percent of
the globe, reaching upland mega-cities like Nairobi, Kenya and Harare,
Zimbabwe, as well as to a good part of the central United States. In the past
few years, the mosquito has been found 1,700 feet up on Latin American
mountains where it never used to climb above 1,000 feet.
Similar projections apply for the bug that carries dengue hemorrhagic fever,
an illness that starts with headaches and ends with fatal internal bleeding. It,
too, has been moving north and uphill, bringing an epidemic that began in
Argentina to much of Mexico and into the States. Hantavirus, which has killed
60 people in the United States since it appeared in the Southwest four years
ago, was handed outbreak conditions by a series of odd-weather years in
which mice multiplied.
The world's lead killers, waterborne microbes, also thrive in warmer waters,
and they love to be sloshed around by floods. The Third World, where 6
million children already die each year for lack of clean water, will feel the
consequences first. But Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Miami also know what it
means to be water-starved; even Minneapolis has reason to consider the
effects of pollution and microbes in the Mississippi River water it drinks.
And that's only the devil we know. It doesn't take much to figure out that as
weather conditions push plants and animals to their limit, new diseases are
likely to be carried out of the interiors of forests; or that climate stress, like
any other kind, can weaken the immune systems of humans, plants, and
animals, making them more susceptible to disease just when they can least
afford to be. Perhaps, some public-health researchers figure, it will be
disease that finally puts global warming front and center.
Beyond all the predictions, though, one more great unknown lingers. Wily as
it seems, climate is actually an astonishingly balanced system. Winds work to
even out air temperatures between the poles and the tropics. Plants and tiny
mollusks store carbon that would otherwise float in the atmosphere. The
oceans swallow massive amounts of heat and move it around, with
pachydermal speed, in currents larger than all the world's rivers put
together.
But just as those forces balance each other, they can also feed on each
other. Feedback crescendos, researchers believe, are what caused past
climate "flips," in which the globe switched from one state of relative
equilibrium to another--not, as it used to be thought, in millions or even
thousands of years, but in as little as a few decades. That's what happened
some 11,000 years ago, during an event called the Younger Dryas--a kind of
climatic hiccup at the end of the last Ice Age. Meltwater from the shrinking
glaciers diluted salty ocean waters and set off a chain reaction in the way
warm and cold water masses moved around. In a nutshell, the Gulf Stream
that keeps northern Europe comfortable took an unpredictable turn, and
glaciers returned to much of the continent. And in Minnesota, mammoth and
mastodon disappeared as the forests they roamed became deep freezes.
What the coming climate has in store by way of climate flips is unclear. But
there are scenarios pointing just about any possible direction--one, by UM
associate professor Robert Johnson, suggests that global warming could
actually send the glaciers that once covered Minnesota creeping back from
the Arctic. "Climate is an angry beast," Wallace Broecker of Columbia
University's Lamond-Doherty Earth Observatory has said, "and we are poking
it with sticks."
One thing researchers know for sure is that carbon dioxide is a remarkably
long-lived gas. Almost all the CO2 humans have been sending into the
atmosphere for the past century is still up there (minus, that is, the 50
percent or so plants have obligingly extracted), and will affect climate for
another century or more. Children born now may see the rate of climate
change slow down, if they live long lives and if most fossil-fuel burning stops
immediately.
Which, of course, will not happen. But coal and oil consumption could come
down--drastically if desired, slowly otherwise. This is something the IPCC
considered. One of the most interesting graphics in its 1995 report shows
just how much warming is likely, both for this generation and the next few,
under various "emissions scenarios."
Under the most benevolent of those scenarios, humans would put the brakes
on fossil-fuel burning to the point where CO2 emissions would increase just a
little for the next 25 years, and then begin declining. By about 2100 they'd
be back to where they were in 1960 and keep going down. This is what the
science panel called the "safe trajectory"--not because it would avoid global
warming, but because average temperatures would rise a mere 2.5 degrees
over the next 100 years. The commission figured that was the upper range
to which humans and ecosystems could more or less adjust.
For a moment, it looked as if the world's politicians were listening. In a 1992
convention signed by, among others, George Bush, the governments of 157
nations promised to "achieve... stabilization of greenhouse gas
concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous
anthropogenic interference in the climate system." As a first step, by 2000
they would all rein in their carbon emissions to 1990 rates. And by 1997,
they would get together to determine "legally binding" targets for the next
century. A meeting to do just that is set for December in Kyoto, Japan.
Judging from the performance of the first five years, the signatories aren't
doing too well. Worldwide, carbon emissions are up some 6 percent over the
1990 level, and rising; the U.S. is in the lead, set to overshoot the target by
as much as 11 percent. (It's also the world's biggest carbon user, period:
The average American is responsible for some five tons of CO2 each year,
compared to 2.5 for the average Japanese and a mere 0.25 tons for the
average East Indian.) Bill Clinton came into office promising to get serious
about emissions reduction; yet when international negotiations turn to how
much and how fast, the American delegation has a reputation for blocking
any firm targets. It's thus earned itself the designation of "chief of the carbon
club."
It's not until you start reading the international press that you realize just
how far out of step that position is. Not that the U.S. is alone in wanting to
keep burning fossil fuels; everyone does, with varying degrees of hypocrisy.
But no other industrialized nation seems to cling to the notion that climate
change is just a theory. Which, in turn, reveals the depth of the public-
relations war that has shaped debate here.
One recent effort was particularly instructive: In 1994, a group called the
Information Council on the Environment (ICE) launched a campaign aimed
explicitly at "repositioning global warming as theory rather than fact." It
included, according to internal memos, locating and funding scientists who
would question global warming; getting them interviewed by the press; and
producing ads that asked things like "If the earth is getting warmer, why is
Minneapolis getting colder?" Those spots, a campaign memo noted, should
be aired on shows appealing to "older and less educated men" and "young,
low-income women" in districts that got their electricity from coal plants and,
if possible, had a representative on one of Congress's energy committees.
ICE was sponsored by coal-industry trade groups, who called off the whole
endeavor after its existence became known. But kindred efforts have
continued, chiefly by way of funding and publicizing a small but vocal group
of researchers known as the "climate skeptics." The best-known are Patrick
Michaels of the University of Virginia, Richard Lindzen of MIT, and "rebirth of
the biosphere" theorist Idso.
Contrary to what some greenhouse activists like to claim, these are not
uncredentialed kooks. Their research, when it appears in scientific journals, is
subjected to the same scrutiny as anyone else's, and in many cases it opens
interesting questions about the climate puzzle. What it does not do is balance
the weight of evidence on the other side--unless, that is, the voices of the
skeptics are amplified beyond what their number would warrant.
Other key bits of information, by contrast, haven't been nearly as well
publicized. A number of economists calculate that industrialized countries
could cut their CO2 emissions by up to 30 percent at no net cost. Even
further reductions are feasible with technology allowing cars and power
plants to run on "fuel cells" in which natural gas is converted to energy
without being burned. As the IPCC noted, each factory, power plant, and
office building will be replaced at least once within the next century anyway,
"offering opportunities to change the energy system without premature
retirement of capital stock."
So far, though, advocates of what author Russ Gelbspan (The Heat is On)
calls "a Manhattan Project to rewire the world's energy system" have been
less than successful. Oil and coal firms have little sympathy for obvious
reasons. Utilities, still smarting from their underperforming nuclear
investments, are leery of taking chances. Some European countries have
adopted "carbon taxes" to give business a little extra push. But in the U.S.,
the Clinton administration's faint attempt at such a tax failed miserably in
1993. (A carbon-tax proposal in Minnesota, developed by the advocacy group
ME3, could come to the Legislature next year.)
Lately, though, advocates of climate action have found an unexpected and
ironic ally: natural disasters. According to the Federal Emergency
Management Association, federally insured catastrophes are up fourfold from
a decade ago; and while the politics of disaster relief may play into that
figure, the trend in floods, droughts, and storms is also up elsewhere.
Worldwide, insurers shelled out $57 billion worth of weather-related disaster
claims in the first half of the 1990s. That was three times as much as they
paid over the entire preceding decade--giving rise to statements like that of
Franklin Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America, to a
trade group last year. "The insurance industry is first in line to be affected by
climate change," Nutter said. "[It] could bankrupt the industry." Other
executives have been talking similarly tough, raising the specter of a whole
new battle on the climate scene: Big Oil vs. Big Insurance.
There is, of course, another possibility: If politics doesn't get a hold on
climate change, climate might get a hold on politics. How long, Gelbspan
asked a St. Paul audience this spring, until the U.S. political system feels the
effects of "more Hurricane Andrews, more Ohio River flooding, more Red
Rivers and more crop-destroying droughts?
"This is not the kind of climate in which democracy flourishes. This is the kind
of climate that could easily lead to food rationing with its associated black-
market crime. It could lead to a military takeover of relief operations [like the
Federal Emergency Management Agency] to maintain order in the face of
natural disruptions. Social unrest arising from a series of natural disasters
could easily lead to a significant expansion of our internal security forces."
William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the Environmental Protection
Agency and now the CEO of garbage giant Browning-Ferris Industries, said as
much some time ago. "Long before the systems of the planets collapse," he
told Gelbspan once, "the processes of democracy will buckle under the
weight of the series of ecological emergencies."
Related Internet Links:
• Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at The University of Minnesota
• EPA's Global Warming Web Site
• Middle school student diagrams Greenhouse Effect, explains Greenhouse Gasses
• Minnesota Geological Survey