Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
financial circles; 7 that's a big reason why the richest Americans have gotten much richer in the past
few years, while most regular folks are treading water at best. 8
This go-for-broke policy is called quantitative easing (QE); it's poorly understood by the general
public and provokes strong reactions from many economists. Some think QE must lead to hyper-
inflation (it hasn't so far, and it's been going on since late 2008). Others think that, in principle, it
could be used (if differently organized and applied) to solve all our debt problems. 9
Be that as it may, what has the too-big-to-fail, too-greedy-not-to financial system done with the
Fed's trillions in free money? Blown another stock market bubble and piled up more leveraged bets.
No one knows when the latest bubble will pop, but when it does the ensuing crisis may be much
worse than that of 2008. Will central banks then be able to jam more fingers into the leaky levee?
Will they have enough fingers?
3. Global Warming “Pause”
The threat of climate change needs no introduction—it's the mother of all impending environmental
crises. And we are already seeing serious impacts, including superstorms, droughts, and the melting
of the north polar ice cap. Nevertheless, it's all not as bad as it might be, were it not for the fact that
the warming of Earth's surface air temperatures has slowed since 1998 (which was an anomalously
hot year). 10
Climate change deniers have seized upon evidence of this “pause” to argue that global warming
has essentially stopped. 11 After all, if the greenhouse-gas-laden atmosphere were in fact trapping
more heat, where could all that heat be hiding?
Turns out, very little of Earth's trapped heat warms the atmosphere and land surface; most of it
(more than 90 percent) is absorbed by the oceans. Part of the explanation for the slowdown in sur-
face warming lies in the heating of deep ocean waters. 12 Global warming hasn't really “paused”; it's
just gone to the depths. At the same time, there has been a recent downswing in the Pacific Ocean's
natural temperature cycle, which has also correlated with a cluster of La Niña years (usually associ-
ated with a cooling of ocean surface waters). This temperature cycle masks the underlying warming
trend. 13 So it appears that, for now at least, Mother Earth herself is playing “The Hero of Haarlem.”
There's no way to know how long this current cool cycle will last, though the previous Pacific
cool phase, which started in the 1940s, continued for about 30 years. If the present cycle is of the
same duration, then in about 15 years much of the heat currently being dumped in deep oceans may
begin instead to remain in the atmosphere. At that point we will likely see unprecedented rates of
climate warming, and far worse episodes of extreme weather. 14
The fact that climate change is complex and nonlinear makes it hard to communicate the ur-
gency of the problem even to scientifically literate audiences. Arthur Petersen, chief scientist at the
Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and part of the Dutch delegation that reviewed the
latest IPCC report, 15 was quoted by the BBC as saying: “It is a major feat that we have been able
to produce such a document which is such an adequate assessment of the science. That being said,
it is virtually unreadable!” 16
Making the Most of Borrowed Time
In the story of the Dutch boy, adults in the village eventually find the brave child and repair the dike.
But for the three leaky systems discussed above, the necessary repairs aren't being made. Most gov-
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