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Winds of Change Newsletter, September 2008 See sidebar for table of contents
The Ethics of Climate Change - Pay Now or Pay Later, But We All Pay
by Mel Tyree
When it comes to priority lists, climate change is
rarely at the top. People typically rank gas prices, the economy, health
care, the Iraq war and terrorism as their main concerns.
Its just human nature; those problems are immediate and
urgent, whereas climate change doesnt affect most peoples paychecks
just yet. Plus, climate change is sneaky. For the most part its only
noticeable if you compare weather patterns in an area over periods of
decades.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change consists of a group of about 2,500 climate scientists from over
100 countries. It was their consensus in 2007 that we have less than a
10 percent chance of avoiding climatic catastrophe from global warming.
Catastrophic climate change is a fairly abstract term.
What exactly would that be like?
In the world we may create for our descendents, cyclones
like the one that killed more than 100,000 people and left another
million homeless in Burma (Myanmar) would be more commonplace. Droughts
would last decades. Rising sea levels would create over two billion
environmental refugees from coastal regions. One-third to one-half of
all the Earths plant and animal species would die before this centurys
end, leaving us a world impoverished biologically beyond imagination.
Finally, if we are so foolish as to delay taking action
in time, the planets permafrost will begin to melt irreversibly,
causing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases to nearly
double due to the release of methane from rotting vegetation.
This situation requires us to make some profound ethical
decisions. How much are todays prosperity and standard of living worth
compared with that of the next generation? Are this generations
comforts more important than the potential deaths of hundreds of
millions of our descendants? Is their nonexistence such a bad thing?
These questions are further explored in the article
The Ethics of Climate Change: Pay Now or Pay More Later, in the May
2008 issue of Scientific American.
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