Climate books: Atlas of Disappearing Places
Jack Hamilton interviews a climate expert about book's main themes.
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(John Maxwell Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent who has covered the environment, is the Hopkins P. Breazeale Professor of Journalism at Louisiana State University, and a Global Fellow in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Callaway Climate Insights) — Global warming is a crisis, as the people who read Callaway Climate Insights know. But where it is heading is uncertain, not least of all because we do not know what people will do to slow the process or how they will adjust to it.
Human behavior can be perverse. A rational community in a coastal flood plain that is sure to be inundated repeatedly should move. Except residents can game the system. They can build more dwellings and businesses in the most vulnerable areas in hopes of forcing the federal government to construct higher levees that will give them a few more years of added protection.
“Expensive half measures are taking the place of difficult conversations,” Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros write in their new book, The Atlas of Disappearing Places. As they make clear, some countries can buy their way out of misery, at least temporarily. But others cannot. The vivid maps The Atlas of Disappearing Places are sobering.
To provide more color on this question, I sought out a climate economist with an unusual pedigree. Gaël Giraud is the director of Georgetown University’s Environmental Justice Program, an interdisciplinary effort to study the impact of climate change on human beings. He also is a Jesuit priest and has been a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and chief economist of the French Development Bank.
Here is an edited summary of the conversation we had recently in Washington, DC.
Hamilton: Regions of the world will become unbearably hot, some sooner than others. Based on your models, where are the first places that will become uninhabitable?
Giraud: The first thing to say is that it is not so much the heat, but rather the combination of heat and humidity. This is what makes it unbearable for the human body. For instance, if you have more than 40°C., which is about 120°F., and if you have more than 25% relative humidity, and if you're exposed to this for more than six hours a day, you die. You cannot cool down. You cannot rely on air conditioning as a permanent solution because air conditioning reinforces global warming.
If we think in these terms of heat and humidity, if we keep not really reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, the entire Amazon Basin will be uninhabitable by the end of the century. People there would be exposed to lethal combinations of heat and humidity virtually every day. The same applies to most of Central America.
On the southeastern coast of the United States, people would be exposed to a lethal combination of heat and humidity approximately every third day. So, we can expect a lot of migrations inside the country. The Congo basin will not be touched until the next century, but the entire literal of India and somewhat deep inside India will be. Billions of people there will be forced to migrate. We also will see gigantic migrations inside China.
The same will happen in the major parts of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia especially. Indonesia will be the martyr country. With the rise of sea level, Jakarta is already disappearing, and that's why Jakarta will shortly no longer be the capital city. Also, there will be a lack of drinkable water, and Indonesia will be subject to earthquakes and volcanic activity because of its seismic coast and to typhoons from the Pacific. If changes are not made to reduce global warming, Indonesia would be empty before the end of this century. The question is, of course, where are poor Indonesians going to migrate?
Hamilton: Talk about the collateral issues, for instance, about the economic impact of the rise of sea levels.
Giraud: We have many examples to consider. When parts of Louisiana are underwater, what do you do with the infrastructure and where will the people go? Venice will be underwater. What will happen to this hotspot of tourism for Italy? A dike is under consideration, but it is not yet ready and it’s unclear when it will. Venice needs a mobile dike that can be adjusted when currents change. Who is going to pay for this? Another example is the Mekong Delta in the south of Vietnam. Officials here are worried about just getting to 2050, when the entire delta is underwater. Since this gigantic lagoon is the rice loft of the country, this is a national emergency for Vietnam.
Hamilton: What about weather disruptions?
Giraud: Global warming is changing rain patterns. Well before the end of the century, in the next two decades, we will see a decrease in fresh water availability in parts of the world.
Europe is not concerned with heat and humidity, because it’s not sufficiently humid in Europe. But especially Spain, Portugal, and Italy will lack water. France will be also concerned. The French might lose up to 20% of its access to fresh water by 2040.
The solution is desalination of seawater. Countries like France can manage this, if they start soon enough, but other countries are disadvantaged. Desalination requires electricity. Morocco has built a large solar power plant in the city of Ouarzazate that will help with this. But Tunisia has no such plans, and this will impact agriculture to the point it is a national emergency.
Hamilton: What else?
Giraud: There’s a third aspect, minerals that will become scarce. Only a few people seem to care about that, but it’s a huge question.
Copper is going to be one of the critical minerals in the coming decades. We might reach the peak of extraction of copper at the world level before 2060. I don’t mean there won't be any copper after 2060. But the density of the copper reserves is declining, so it will be prohibitively costly in terms of energy and water to extract more copper.
Before we reach this limit, we need to do more to recycle copper and we need to find alternatives.
Hamilton: Explain why this is important from an environmental point of view.
Giraud: It might seem paradoxical, but infrastructure linked to renewable energy is more copper intensive than the old fossil infrastructures linked to the industrial revolution,
It would be stupid not to plan for this, but it requires a major shift. Think about these beautiful objects, like this iPhone, which is recording me. Cell phones are using up copper that needs to be saved for green environmental solutions. It is not practical to recycle cell phones to get copper or any of the minerals they contain. We have to find alternatives for these phones in order to save copper. This is true not just for copper, but also for rare earth and a number of other minerals. Since the 1980s we have increased the number of minerals that we use from 40 to something close to 70 on the periodic table of elements.
We have to shift from a high-tech society based on small-as-possible gadgets. This iPhone is incredibly powerful, but honestly, we don’t need that in our daily life. We should reserve the use of these rare elements for hospitals, defense, research, these kinds of things.
We still need to use a lot of advanced technology, but it needs to be oriented in the right direction.
Hamilton: You have said that pandemics will become more common.
Giraud: Global warming will spread out the number of tropical diseases, including malaria, because these diseases are moving from the equator toward the poles. There will also be another source of big diseases that we should worry about, which is the melting of the permafrost in Siberia. A number of pathogens are frozen in the permafrost, and as the permafrost melts, they can be released. The Spanish flu, for instance, could come back. Anthrax is another buried threat.
Besides, of course, the melting of the permafrost is liberating a huge amount of methane, which is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases.
Hamilton: One can’t help wondering, where people should want to live in a world heading in the direction that it is.
Giraud: That's a big question. I would certainly look at the elements I was describing before, access to fresh water, energy, minerals. Also capacity for food production. But many elements have to be taken into account.
A number of wealthy people dream of Sweden as a haven, because it is cold. But thanks to global warming, forest fires and pandemics will be a problem.
There are experiments showing that if the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere reaches 1,000 parts per million — it is now 412 — people’s brains on average will lose 25% of their routine functions and 50% of the sophisticated functions.
The solution is to prevent this catastrophe from happening and not to dream about living on an isolated desert island.