Preventing the Sparks From Igniting the Roofs of All Our Homes

In The Warrior's Honor, Canadian author-turned-politician Michael Ignatieff comments on the disconnect between the economic and security interests of the developed and underdeveloped portions of the globe, and on how tenuous is the link of conscience between rich and poor, North and South, zones of safety and zones of conflict.

Of the West's belated response to the horrors in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, Ignatieff writes:

"The real impediment to sustained solidarity ran deeper: in some deeply ingrained feeling that 'their' security and 'ours' are indeed divisible; that their fate and our ours are indeed severed, by history, fortune and good luck; and that if we owe them our pity, we do not share their fate. Most of us persist in the belief that while the fires far away are terrible things, we can keep them from our doors, and that while they may consume the roofs or our neighbors, the sparks will never leap to our own."

Re-reading the passage recently, I was struck by how applicable Ignatieff's words are to describe our inability to marshal a concerted global response to the climate crisis. Many observers have commented on how humanity ignores climate change because, though the threat is real and acknowledged as fact, it is not perceived to be urgent.

In a story published this week, The Economist asks how the world would respond if the slow-motion peril posed by climate change was replaced by the immediate threat of an asteroid hurtling toward the Earth. In a strikingly candid interview published at this website, U.S. Energy Secretary nominee Steve Chu compares our mindset to a homeowner who, upon discovering that his house has faulty wiring that may cause electrical fires and needs an expensive repair, frantically searches for the one second opinion from an engineer willing to tell him he need not do anything.

Both are accurate. But I think Ignatieff's analogy, re-purposed for the climate crisis, gets at what I fear is the parochialism preventing especially those of us in the developed world from mobilizing resources to act. I fear that we do feel that the fate of the Inuit hunter, or the rice farmer in Bangladesh, or the fisherman in Tuvalu is not ours. In short, I fear we feel we can will the flames from reaching our own roofs – Who knows, we seem to think, maybe the flames will burn out on their own.

I found myself ruminating on Ignatieff's analogy after the arrival this week of a truly sobering battery of studies documenting the alarmingly rapid disappearance of ice in the Arctic. On Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported that ice volume in the Arctic reached the lowest level ever recorded. And the collapse of a quarter of the ice shelves on Canada's Ellesmere Island, added to earlier meltdowns, has reduced ice cover in the region from 9,000 square km a century ago to just 1,000 square km today.

On Thursday, a team of NASA scientists presented satellite data at the American Geophysical Union conference, in San Francisco, California, documenting that more than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica, and Alaska have melted since 2003. And more than half of the loss of landlocked ice, according to measurements from NASA's GRACE satellite, has occurred in Greenland alone. The island is now adding about a half millimeter to global sea level rise annually. Combine Greenland's melt to the loss of land ice in Alaska and Antarctica and it accounts for a one-fifth of an inch rise in sea level in just the past five years.

"The pace of change is starting to outstrip our ability to keep up with it, in terms of our understanding of it," Mark Serreze, a researcher with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, told the Associated Press.

The last of the three distressing studies is from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). In Abrupt Climate Change, released Monday, researchers with the USGS' Climate Change Science Program report that sea level rise will "substantially exceed" projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report released just last year.

IPCC models projecting sea level rise have been made out of date, the USGS researchers write, by the faster-than-expected slide of glaciers on the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets into the sea. And, lest we be persuaded that climate changes will be restricted to the polar regions, Abrupt Climate Change warns that major climate disruptions are destined for temperate regions, too. In the Southwestern United States, for example, the report finds that models project a "permanent drying by the mid-21^st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts."

In other words, for residents of places like my longtime hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, the seemingly distant threat of my life being negatively impacted by climate change is soon to become very real.

So, a fitting resolution for 2009, I feel, is for all of us representing the more indifferent piece in Ignatieff's link of conscience – rich, from the North, living in zones of safety – to resolve to listen to what scientists are trying to tell us: that if we don't act quickly and forcefully to stanch the conflagration, we won't be able to stop the sparks from igniting the roofs of all our homes.

*Editor's Note: This commentary orginally appeared as my December 19, 2008, Weekly Roundup column. To read back issues of the column and to subscribe to the RSS feed, click here.