 Global Connections
with David Suzuki
Media's short attention span
Watching television news today it seems our attention spans have dipped to near zero and the networks are more than happy to give us our fix. In the past month alone, the media's roving eye has swung from such earth-shattering events as Martha Stewart's jail release to the Michael Jackson trial. In between, we learned of celebrity scandals and breakups, television ratings and opening weekend grosses for movies.
Recently, in the midst of all this, came two new studies on the effects of climate change. They barely made a blip on the media radar, but their implications are quite profound. According to these new studies, even if we stopped burning oil, coal and other fossil fuels immediately, the built-up emissions in the atmosphere from our activities will continue to cause temperatures to climb, and sea levels to rise, for at least the next hundred years.
The studies, conducted by the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, looked at a problem that had never before been quantified - the delayed response of the oceans to climate change. Water heats up more slowly than land and also cools down more slowly. This "thermal inertia" means that warming oceans will keep putting out heat long after we've reduced or even stopped pumping heat-trapping emissions into the atmosphere.
Those opposed to reducing the heat-trapping emissions that cause the problem will undoubtedly pounce on these studies as "proof" that plans like the Kyoto Protocol, designed to reduce emissions, are useless because the planet will keep heating up anyway.
Such an attitude is dangerous and misguided. The Kyoto Protocol alone was never meant to stop global warming - just to get us started on the right path that will enable us to shift to a clean-energy economy that will prevent dangerous climate change. Choosing to do nothing will put us on a path of continued rising emissions, which will make the problem much, much worse.
Environmental problems often occur gradually over time, building up like slow-moving catastrophes, so planning ahead pays off.
When scientists told us we were damaging the atmosphere's protective ozone layer with harmful chemicals, the international community worked together to ban them. That was over 15 years ago, and the ozone layer still has not fully healed. In fact, it's taking longer than expected to recover - but it is recovering.
Solving our environmental problems will take time. It will take patience and foresight. The longer we put off taking action, the worse these problems will become. Celebrity scandals and pop culture may be distracting and fun in the short term, but the really important things in life take a while. For the sake of our future, we need to get started on them now.
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