THE GREENHOUSE GAS ZONE

And You Thought I Was Kidding About The Maldives

From MSNBC.com

Maldives calls attention to the threat climate change poses to island nation

Maldives Holds Underwater Cabinet Meeting

The Associated Press updated 7:26 a.m. CT, Sat., Oct . 17, 2009

GIRIFUSHI, Maldives - Members of the Maldives' Cabinet donned scuba gear and used hand signals Saturday at an underwater meeting staged to highlight the threat of global warming to the lowest-lying nation on earth.

President Mohammed Nasheed and 13 other government officials submerged and took their seats at a table on the sea floor — 20 feet below the surface of a lagoon off Girifushi, an island usually used for military training.

With a backdrop of coral, the meeting was a bid to draw attention to fears that rising sea levels caused by the melting of polar ice caps could swamp this Indian Ocean archipelago within a century. Its islands average 7 feet above sea level.

"What we are trying to make people realize is that the Maldives is a frontline state. This is not merely an issue for the Maldives but for the world," Nasheed said.

As bubbles floated up from their face masks, the president, vice president, Cabinet secretary and 11 ministers signed a document calling on all countries to cut their carbon dioxide emissions.

Urgency

The issue has taken on urgency ahead of a major U.N. climate change conference scheduled for December in Copenhagen. At that meeting countries will negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol with aims to cut the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that scientists blame for causing global warming by trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Wealthy nations want broad emissions cuts from all countries, while poorer ones say industrialized countries should carry most of the burden. Dozens of Maldives soldiers guarded the event Saturday, but the only intruders were groupers and other fish.

Nasheed had already announced plans for a fund to buy a new homeland for his people if the 1,192 low-lying coral islands are submerged. He has promised to make the Maldives, with a population of 350,000, the world's first carbon-neutral nation within a decade.

"We have to get the message across by being more imaginative, more creative and so this is what we are doing," he said in an interview on a boat en route to the dive site.

Nasheed, who has emerged as a key, and colorful, voice on climate change, is a certified diver, but the others had to take diving lessons in recent weeks.

Three ministers missed the underwater meeting because two were not given medical permission and another was abroad.

CLIMATE CHANGE

I want you to be an informed Blue Marble cruiser because like it or not, were all “on the same boat” for this trip. Do you remember some of Rod Serlings opening monologues for the TV show “The Twilight Zone”? We’ve modified one just a bit for future climate change postings”.

“There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call, the Green House Gas Zone.”

Much like the Twilight Zone, I fear the answers to the climate change debate likely lie in the “middle ground between light and shadow”. As for who is “right”, I don’t think either camp in the climate change debate can stake a claim to being armed with a full and complete understanding of the operation of the Marble’s climate engine. While there is consensus that climate is influenced by a number of complex drivers, it is the presumed impact of man’s role that has generated all the angst. Otherwise, no one would care.

Now, everyone needs to appreciate that once we humans abdicated our roll as mere tenants on the Marble to become the landlords, the neighborhood has never been quite the same (in a bad way). And, if you’re a purist wanting everything to be the way it was before man stumbled upon combustion, you must accept the fact that the human race will be in damage control in perpetuity along with a hefty price tag. We environmental types have a fancy name for that process: “sustainability”.

Here’s the climate change situation as of this writing. One camp is in full throttle appealing to the “pit of man's fears” with images of a global catastrophe. Good bye Miami, Bangladesh and the Maldives (really, keep an eye on the Maldives).

The other camp, possessing the “summit of his knowledge”, has historical data suggesting that climate is influenced by the Marble’s inner workings, celestial mechanics and the Sun and what we’re experiencing today is nothing more than the typical ebb and flow of our climate and largely unrelated to man’s activities.

There’s even a camp out there that advocates that temperatures today might not be the “best” for the existing biosphere and that some other climate may be more appropriate.

With all that in mind, let’s distill this down. We don’t know whether we’re coming or going but when we get there, we won’t be sure if it’s the right place.

Hey, how human is that?

So what does the future hold? I’m opting for being at the mercy of the various galactic comings and goings. You can take that to the bank. Well, let me reconsider that "bank thing" for a moment ..................

The signpost up ahead, the Green House Gas Zone.