OTTAWA - Hurricane Floyd is a quick and angry summary of the disastrous climate that pollution will bring us in the future, says a United Nations environmental forecast for the new millennium. Earth will face more and bigger hurricanes, floods and tornadoes caused by a warming climate in the century to come, says the report from the UN Environmental Program.
"Natural disasters appear to be becoming more frequent and their effects more severe," it says. "Rising global temperatures are likely to ... raise the incidence of extreme weather events, including storms and heavy rainfall, cyclones and drought."
The 400-page book is a summary of all the environmental problems the next generation of humans will face, and it warns that with many problems, especially global warming, "time is running out." Man-made pollutants, mainly from burning fuel, soak up and retain more of the sun's heat each year. And that energy, trapped in our air and water, has to find an outlet - exploding outwards in increasingly bursts of violent and dangerous weather, says the UN Environmental Program. For the tropics, that means hurricane and monsoon seasons. Farther north and south, it threatens people differently - with droughts interspersed with heavy, flooding rains.
"The Americans have more violent weather than we have, and if global warming brings that northward it will shake up Canadians," says David Phillips, senior climatologist at Environment Canada.
Strangely, climate warming can make some regions dangerously cold. Melt too much of the Arctic ice, the scientists warn, and we could break up familiar currents such as the Gulf Stream, plunging half of Europe into a deep freeze. The UN's Global Environmental Outlook 2000, released today, says there are other planetary threats for the millennium as well: pesticides and fertilizers that taint soil and water, radioactive waste, loss of forests, huge urban slums, and extinction of wildlife.
"Full-scale emergencies now exist on a number of issues," it says: Land degradation has hurt food production; smog kills people; fisheries are depleted. And worse than all of those, two-thirds of the world's population will face water shortages by 2025. But it's the climate that matters most to the UN. And it blames the climate changes on our growing thirst for energy from coal, oil and gas. And it accuses the world's powers of fiddling while Earth burns. Canada, for instance, promised to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide in the period from 1990 to 2000. But it relied on asking people to voluntarily to give up their cars and to use less energy at home and work, and this never happened. As a direct result, "emissions have continued to increase and in the year 2000 will significantly exceed 1990 levels," likely by about 8.2 per cent. "Government spend more than $700 billion US a year subsidizing environmentally unsound pratices in the use of water, agriculture, energy and road transport," the report says. Even where governments do create environmental agencies, these new offices "have to compete for staff and budgets with older and more powerful agencies."
The chief "greenhouse" gas, so named because they trap the sun's heat, is carbon dioxide from burning these fuels. With the huge industrial growth of the past few decades, we produce more and more of it. 1n 1950, all the cars, furnaces and factories on Earth produced five billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. Even at that rate, there was a steady buildup of the gas in our air. Today we produce some 23.9 billion tonnes a year. The report says there are many national and international agreements to repair environmental damage. But some aren't funded, and many lack political will.
The report also lists some victories:
But we still face climate change. Add it up, say Environmental Canada's Phillips, and the picture isn't pretty. "If they could vote on it, I think Canadians would vote for the weather we have and not the weather we're going to get."