Ways to meet global warming

S. PATHIRAVITANA

Will President Bush, who refuses to accept that global warming is due to carbon emissions from industries, change his stance now as his rival Gore has won the Nobel Award? Read on..

Cuddlesome looking polar bears living in their icy habitats have come to a pretty pass today. The ice on which they were prancing around has suddenly begun to melt. This happens often in summer time, but the melting of ice has begun to increase in the last fifty years and observers predict that the summer ice may disappear before 2050.

This news reached the ears of President Bush and the normally recalcitrant heart of Mr Bush, to judge by his first reaction, also began to melt. He has ordered his administrators to set about preparing the necessary legislation, which is said to take about a year to complete, to designate the polar bear a protected animal in the United States alongside of the buffalo, the prairie dog and the bald eagle.

The surprise is that the President, who has been frowning on the idea that global warming is due to industrial activities and refusing to endorse the Kyoto Declaration, seems to be back-tracking on his earlier decision about global warming in trying to make the polar bear a protected animal.

In doing this he would have to order the US industrial enterprises to be cautious about releasing carbon into the atmosphere that causes global warming, which in turn melts the summer ice of the polar bear and changing its life style.

The environmentalists in the US maintain, however, that this is a forward step the President has taken. For, as one spokesman for this group predicted, “This is the beginning of a sea change in the way this country addresses global warming. There is still time to save polar bears but we must reduce global warming pollution immediately.”.

Whatever intention Bush and his administrators may have, the fact is that global warming is now changing the lifestyle of the polar bear. For one thing observers have noticed a population decline within the last twenty years in the Hudson Bay and the Beaufort Sea areas, a decline of 22% and 17% respectively.

The National Data Centre for Ice in the US describes the change that has taken place in the past four years of sea ice in the US area as “stunning.” Observers who have also been watching the behaviour of polar bears during these changes have noticed that hunting for food has become difficult for them. Summer is the time they hunt for seals, but with the ice breaking up so dramatically they have little chances of catching their prey.

As a result bears have had to look for food closer to human habitations. That means a change of diet and summer is the time they fill up with mainly fatty foods to resist the bitter cold in the next eight months. And the lack of sufficient food has begun to show up in their bodies which have lost their cuddlesome-ness and become leaner instead. Observers have also come across three instances of cannibalism among polar bears.

Meanwhile the global warming message that is coming more frequently now, alerted Britain’ top economist, Nicholas Stern. He submitted some time back a startling report on the cost of global warming. Blair who was the Premier then praised this report saying, “the most important report on the future published by the government in our time in office.”

The gist of the report as reported by Time is that “humanity will find it much cheaper to make slight shifts in energy use now...than risk the potentially huge costs from unchecked climate change decades from now.” Nicholas Stern is back in Britain after a global tour acquainting governments with his proposals for a better future.

Whether governments, especially those in the developing world, will make these ‘slight shifts in energy’ remains to be seen. We have already invested in a project in Norochcholai to boost our energy intake but this is not perhaps how Nicholas Stern is planning for a future world.

As we can see, Governments elected to power, promising to give this and that to the electorate may not be thinking in terms of ‘slight shifts in energy.’ It may be relevant here to mention in passing how Britain survived even a greater immediate economic crisis soon after World War II ended. Though she was a winner in that war, the victory was more like what the Greeks call a pyrrhic victory.

Looking back now on the scarcities we went through in our early Seventies when Mrs Bandaranaike was faced with a food scarcity and the comparatively innocuous methods she adopted to tackle them, but how did the people respond? They were egged on by self interested politicians to shout slogans of protest like ‘miris polla’ and ‘haal polla.’ How will these same crowds respond if we ever have to experience Nicholas Sterns’ proposal for ‘slight shifts in energy’?

The Global warming message has been taken seriously by some countries in the Western world where already some measures have been introduced to meet the impending crisis. They have also appealed to their citizens how they in turn can help to avoid this crisis by adopting a new life style.

In countries where the public transport is working well citizens are encouraged to use the public transport system. The private car to be used less.

This will also help to relieve the overcrowding of traffic on the streets which will not only help to lower the global warming but also relieve the national budgets of underdeveloped countries where millions of dollars could be saved from being eaten up by the internal combustion engine.

Planting of trees wherever possible and protecting the existing trees is another means of keeping global warming down. Walking and the use of the bicycle are being encouraged both for one’s health and the incidental contribution to lessen global warming.

In the use of electrical home appliances you are told to look for the labels on them which tell you that they are energy efficient. Wind power is being made use of wherever possible.

The New York University is planning to install a 110 million k.w. hours of wind power.

If our Hantana hills permit the use of wind power our Peradeniya university could follow the example of the New York University to have their own energy resources. Incidentally, Denmark by resorting to wind power, now makes a ten per cent contribution to the national grid. There are three English words now being highlighted in certain states in the US to tackle the global warming.

They are Reduce, Re-use and Re-cycle. The wisest of them is Reduce and this is what we need in this age of the consumer society as our new living style.