THE WELL OF VALOR
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
November 29, 2004
In a protest in London's Trafalgar Square, a feeble-bodied man stands defiantly against the war-mongers. He embraces the families of the dead and speaks a truth that so many continue to refuse to hear.
The US-led war on Iraq is based on lies, said Stephen Hawking, the most famous British scientist, who suffers from motor neurone disease. Except for the ability to move some fingers, Hawking is totally paralyzed. Yet as he spoke and led the London protest, he did not need arms or legs or speech.
"It has been a tragedy for all the families that have lost members," said Hawking during the protest, shaming the actively unconcerned. "As many as 100,000 people have died, half of them women and children. If that is not a war crime, what is?"[1]
Resistance is eternal and imperial rule ephemeral in the brief history of time. "One person with a belief," John Stuart Mill once said, "is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests." Perhaps even equal to a force ten times greater. Or more.
From the bell tower of St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem, Mordechai Vanunu gazes at the expanse below, pulls at the center bell and speaks: "Down there is where they sentenced me to 18 years in prison. This is my way of saying I am still here." [2]
While working as a technician at the Dimona nuclear plant in the Negev desert, Vanunu became disquieted by his discovery of Israel's clandestine nuclear weapons program. Despite his awareness of the risks, Vanunu took photos of the plant and smuggled them out and sought the help of media in exposing to the world Israel's illegal factories of weapons of mass destruction. A short time later, the whistle blower was kidnapped and shipped back to Israel by the Mossad - Israel's thugs - with the help of agents from the intelligence services of America, Britain and Italy.
In the first 11 years of his captivity, Vanunu was kept in solitary confinement. How did he survive? "I decided from the beginning that they could have my body in prison but my spirit, mind, brain, I would keep free, under my control; that would be my way out," said Vanunu. When he finally stepped out of Israel's prison, among Vanunu's first words were two simple declarations of fact: "They have not broken me. Israel's illegal nuclear weapons program must be shut down."
Seven months after his release, Vanunu was re-arrested, then released again. But released to what? Vanunu is forbidden to leave Israel, forbidden to approach any of Israel's borders, forbidden to associate with foreigners, forbidden to talk to journalists, forbidden to speak, forbidden to live the normal life, forbidden to spread his message.
"I want to continue to seek the abolition of nuclear weapons around the world, not only in Israel . . . I also plan to find a woman and have a family," said Vanunu in a recent interview he knows he is not allowed to have.
"I don't know what is the best way to overcome [the Israeli government's] restrictions," said Vanunu. "Is it by silence or is it by speaking? I decided it was by speaking. If I speak . . . I am teaching them that they cannot silence anyone ... If they take away your right to speak, you are not a human being any more . . . [T]hey could kill me. If they want to do something, it's not a big problem for them but I am not in fear, I am just living my life. Fear will not help me."
Fear will not help any of us either. And neither will indifference.
In the far reaches of Hong Kong, a Filipina mother toils day and night for a family she is not a member of. She sweeps their floor, cleans their toilets, takes care of their children, cooks their daily meals and wipes their tables and chairs and desks, changes their bed sheets and does their laundry and takes out their trash. Over and over without let up.
After all this, Loretta Brunio has as much time left as she has energy - very little and close to nothing. And yet somehow the mother of three finds both time and energy to attend to the needs of the Coalition for Migrant Rights (CMR), an organization she helped form in 1999 from idea to fruition while working full time as a domestic help. Along with her equally dedicated colleagues, Loretta Brunio saw to it that the first composition of CMR was not just Filipinos but included as well Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Thais, Nepalese and Indians.
Where does she find the time to do all this? Rest should take up the remainder of the day after her work: the body needs pause and the soul needs respite in order to shore up the walls that hem in the cloister of heartaches and loneliness. Yet she always finds time.[3]
The Filipina mother turns on its head the biblical adage "to whom much is given, much is expected in return." Given close to nothing, Loretta Brunio gives everything and expects nothing in return.
A man imprisoned for close to eternity whose dreams continue to travel around the world and who still longs only to find a woman to fall in love with; a totally paralyzed man whose heart has somehow surpassed the heights reached by his towering intellect; a poor woman who does battle daily with back-breaking work and isolation all the while armed with dignity.
In a world imprisoned by self-inflicted ignorance, among people sedated by affluence, inside communities immobilized by fear, the conduct of three imperfect individuals reminds us today of the essence from which springs acts that we have come to know as that glorious but seemingly unattainable thing called heroism.
We honor our heroes not merely by erecting monuments in their likeness. We celebrate them, too, by recognizing that they were not uncommon women and men but ordinary people like us who carried attributes that we, too, in truth possess: extraordinary hope, will and heart.
NOTES:
[1] "Scientist Stephen Hawking decries war," USA Today, November 3, 2004.
[2] "Long walk to freedom," Duncan Campbell, The Guardian-UK, November 15, 2004.
[3] "Loretta Brunio: Filipino," Renato Redentor Constantino, Today, January 12, 2004.
Recent political and travel essays by Renato Redentor Constantino. Email Red at redcosmo(at)gmail(dot)com.
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Saturday, November 20, 2004
THE RHYME OF REPETITIVE REDUNDANCIES
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
November 22, 2004
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, Winston Churchill once said. Most times he will pick himself up and carry on.
"The more forces United States imperialism throws into Asia," the Chinese government paper People's Daily wrote in 1966," the more will it be bogged down there and the deeper will be the grave it digs for itself."
What's another name for Asia? Hmmm. The Middle East? Close. Use 'bog' in a sentence: "While we'll try to find every snake in the swamp," said US Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz on September 27, 2001, "the essence of the strategy is draining the swamp." Aha!
Contestant Sheikh Abdullah Janabi, use "swamp" in a sentence. Janabi: "It is only the beginning, from a military point of view . . . We have succeeded in drawing [the Americans] into the quagmire of Fallujah."[1] The Iraqi Sunni cleric's a show-off.
The enemy "cannot drive us out of Indochina," said Sen. J. William Fulbright, Chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on April 2, 1970. "But they can force on us the choice of either plunging in altogether or getting out altogether."[2] Aha.
What's another word for Iraq? Shiites in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City were writing it on their walls last June: "Vietnam Street." "This is called Vietnam Street," the Shiites explained, "because this is where we kill Americans."[3]
No, no, no! said Bush the Elder, who exulted at the time of the first American Gulf War: "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome!" Really, Daddykins.
"We're certainly encountering very similar insurgency practices, methods, techniques, tactics, a mind-set that we did see in Indochina," said Michael Ware, the Baghdad bureau chief of Time Magazine. "Something that resonates with me to this day is interviews I've done with senior insurgent leaders, the upper echelons. And they talk to me about reading Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general. They talk to me about reading Che Guevara, Mao Zedong . . . They're bringing it straight from the Vietnam and the broader insurgency playbook."[4]
Jim Krane of the Associated Press: "The ominous thumping of American helicopters roaring over Baghdad's rooftops is becoming as emblematic of this war as it was of Vietnam."[5]
But it isn't all verbatim Indochina; nothing is always exactly the same.
"In Vietnam, the Americans destroyed the village to save it. In Iraq we destroy the city to save it," wrote Simon Jenkins of the British Sunday Times in reference to America's second assault on Fallujah.[6] "The occupying force is entombed in bases it can barely defend or supply. Occasional patrols are target practice for terrorists. Iraq is a desert in which the Americans and British rule nothing but their forts, like the French Foreign Legion in the Sahara."
Here's Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder Newspapers writing from Iraq: "The hotel has become a prison, and every foray outside its fortified gates is tinged with anxiety about returning in one piece. Baghdad has never been tougher for journalists . . . Even a jaunt to the grocery store is a meticulously planned affair. Do you have a radio? A flak vest? A second car to watch for kidnappers?"[7]
"The United States is bringing 'democracy' to Iraq on the same terms that the Russians imposed its federal mandate on Chechnya, a region which has Iraq's future written in its rubble," wrote US intellectual Alexander Cockburn.[8] Accurate words, as far as US Capt. Joe Jasper, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Brigade, is concerned. "The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind," said Capt. Jasper after America's failed attack on Fallujah in April, "would be to kill the entire population."[9]
And the outcome of the second Fallujah assault? The Iraqi Red Crescent Society, which is supported by the Red Cross and UNICEF, called the situation in Fallujah "a big disaster."
"No one can say how many of the 1,200 'rebels' U.S. forces claim to have killed inside Fallujah are civilians, or whether the death toll is higher," reported Dahr Jamail from Iraq on November 15.[10] The next day, Jamail wrote: "The [US] military stopped the Red Crescent at the gates of the city and are not allowing them in. They allowed some bodies to be buried, but others are being eaten by dogs and cats in the streets."[11]
All this for what? The attack on Fallujah, wrote Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post, will "clear the way" for elections to take place in Iraq. Great.
Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant, said Tacitus once upon a time. They made a wasteland and called it peace. In Iraq, the esteemed author Jonathan Schell reminds us, "it was left to the United States to update the formula: They made a wasteland and called it democracy."[12]
NOTES:
[1] "Troops move to quell insurgency in Mosul," Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, November 16, 2004. Many thanks again to Tom Engelhardt for the recent series of pieces on Iraq in tomdispatch.com that said more and bled more. Tom's site remains a top go-to site for the latest news and keen analysis.
[2] From "The war spreads," Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, Monthly Review, May 1970, quoted in "Is Iraq another Vietnam?" The Editors, Monthly Review, Vol. 56, No. 2, June 2004.
[3] "Draining the swamp," Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com, November 19, 2004.
[4] Transcript of Michael Ware interview, in Hardball with Chris Matthews, MSNBC TV, November 16, 2004.
[5] Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, on the eve of the invasion of Falluja, Tom Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com, November 7, 2004.
[6] "A wrecked nation, a desert, a ghost town. And this will be called victory," Simon Jenkins, The Sunday Times-UK, November 17, 2004.
[7] "Draining the swamp," Tom Engelhardt.
[8] "Let them drink sand," Alexander Cockburn, counterpunch.org, November 13/14, 2004.
[9] "Sovereignty: 'If they want it that bad, they can have it!'" Tom Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com, July 25, 2004.
[10] "The other face of U.S. 'success' in Fallujah," Dahr Jamail, Znet, November 15, 2004.
[11] "Dogs eating bodies in Fallujah," Dahr Jamail, November 16, 2004, ZNet.
[12] "What Happened to hearts?" Jonathan Schell, tomdispatch.com, November 17, 2004.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
November 22, 2004
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, Winston Churchill once said. Most times he will pick himself up and carry on.
"The more forces United States imperialism throws into Asia," the Chinese government paper People's Daily wrote in 1966," the more will it be bogged down there and the deeper will be the grave it digs for itself."
What's another name for Asia? Hmmm. The Middle East? Close. Use 'bog' in a sentence: "While we'll try to find every snake in the swamp," said US Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz on September 27, 2001, "the essence of the strategy is draining the swamp." Aha!
Contestant Sheikh Abdullah Janabi, use "swamp" in a sentence. Janabi: "It is only the beginning, from a military point of view . . . We have succeeded in drawing [the Americans] into the quagmire of Fallujah."[1] The Iraqi Sunni cleric's a show-off.
The enemy "cannot drive us out of Indochina," said Sen. J. William Fulbright, Chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on April 2, 1970. "But they can force on us the choice of either plunging in altogether or getting out altogether."[2] Aha.
What's another word for Iraq? Shiites in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City were writing it on their walls last June: "Vietnam Street." "This is called Vietnam Street," the Shiites explained, "because this is where we kill Americans."[3]
No, no, no! said Bush the Elder, who exulted at the time of the first American Gulf War: "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome!" Really, Daddykins.
"We're certainly encountering very similar insurgency practices, methods, techniques, tactics, a mind-set that we did see in Indochina," said Michael Ware, the Baghdad bureau chief of Time Magazine. "Something that resonates with me to this day is interviews I've done with senior insurgent leaders, the upper echelons. And they talk to me about reading Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general. They talk to me about reading Che Guevara, Mao Zedong . . . They're bringing it straight from the Vietnam and the broader insurgency playbook."[4]
Jim Krane of the Associated Press: "The ominous thumping of American helicopters roaring over Baghdad's rooftops is becoming as emblematic of this war as it was of Vietnam."[5]
But it isn't all verbatim Indochina; nothing is always exactly the same.
"In Vietnam, the Americans destroyed the village to save it. In Iraq we destroy the city to save it," wrote Simon Jenkins of the British Sunday Times in reference to America's second assault on Fallujah.[6] "The occupying force is entombed in bases it can barely defend or supply. Occasional patrols are target practice for terrorists. Iraq is a desert in which the Americans and British rule nothing but their forts, like the French Foreign Legion in the Sahara."
Here's Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder Newspapers writing from Iraq: "The hotel has become a prison, and every foray outside its fortified gates is tinged with anxiety about returning in one piece. Baghdad has never been tougher for journalists . . . Even a jaunt to the grocery store is a meticulously planned affair. Do you have a radio? A flak vest? A second car to watch for kidnappers?"[7]
"The United States is bringing 'democracy' to Iraq on the same terms that the Russians imposed its federal mandate on Chechnya, a region which has Iraq's future written in its rubble," wrote US intellectual Alexander Cockburn.[8] Accurate words, as far as US Capt. Joe Jasper, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Brigade, is concerned. "The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind," said Capt. Jasper after America's failed attack on Fallujah in April, "would be to kill the entire population."[9]
And the outcome of the second Fallujah assault? The Iraqi Red Crescent Society, which is supported by the Red Cross and UNICEF, called the situation in Fallujah "a big disaster."
"No one can say how many of the 1,200 'rebels' U.S. forces claim to have killed inside Fallujah are civilians, or whether the death toll is higher," reported Dahr Jamail from Iraq on November 15.[10] The next day, Jamail wrote: "The [US] military stopped the Red Crescent at the gates of the city and are not allowing them in. They allowed some bodies to be buried, but others are being eaten by dogs and cats in the streets."[11]
All this for what? The attack on Fallujah, wrote Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post, will "clear the way" for elections to take place in Iraq. Great.
Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant, said Tacitus once upon a time. They made a wasteland and called it peace. In Iraq, the esteemed author Jonathan Schell reminds us, "it was left to the United States to update the formula: They made a wasteland and called it democracy."[12]
NOTES:
[1] "Troops move to quell insurgency in Mosul," Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, November 16, 2004. Many thanks again to Tom Engelhardt for the recent series of pieces on Iraq in tomdispatch.com that said more and bled more. Tom's site remains a top go-to site for the latest news and keen analysis.
[2] From "The war spreads," Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, Monthly Review, May 1970, quoted in "Is Iraq another Vietnam?" The Editors, Monthly Review, Vol. 56, No. 2, June 2004.
[3] "Draining the swamp," Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com, November 19, 2004.
[4] Transcript of Michael Ware interview, in Hardball with Chris Matthews, MSNBC TV, November 16, 2004.
[5] Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, on the eve of the invasion of Falluja, Tom Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com, November 7, 2004.
[6] "A wrecked nation, a desert, a ghost town. And this will be called victory," Simon Jenkins, The Sunday Times-UK, November 17, 2004.
[7] "Draining the swamp," Tom Engelhardt.
[8] "Let them drink sand," Alexander Cockburn, counterpunch.org, November 13/14, 2004.
[9] "Sovereignty: 'If they want it that bad, they can have it!'" Tom Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com, July 25, 2004.
[10] "The other face of U.S. 'success' in Fallujah," Dahr Jamail, Znet, November 15, 2004.
[11] "Dogs eating bodies in Fallujah," Dahr Jamail, November 16, 2004, ZNet.
[12] "What Happened to hearts?" Jonathan Schell, tomdispatch.com, November 17, 2004.
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
DISPATCHES FROM THE WEATHER FRONT
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
November 1, 2004
"We sometimes get the feeling they are going to let us die," said Enele Soponga the other year. Soponga is the ambassador to the UN of Tuvalu, an island nation with a population of 12,000 that is projected to be the first island state to go under water. Tuvalu's main island has already been inundated three times in 2003; vegetable plots were washed away along with the island's drinking water.[i]
Soponga, who is also the chairperson of the Association of Small Island States, is not alone in his sentiment.
Climate change is not a smart bomb. Like weapons of mass destruction, human-induced climate change will hit the environment and smash people's lives indiscriminately, punishing the vulnerable and the weak the hardest. The warning signs are everywhere.
The three hottest years in recorded history - 1998, 2002 and 2003 - all occurred in the last six years. The 1990s remain the warmest decade on record.[ii]
Weeks ago Japan suffered from its fourth major storm since late August. It was reportedly "the most powerful to hit Okinawa since 1972."
In March, a hurricane hit the Brazilian coast - the first ever recorded in the South Atlantic. The Brazilian weather service, with no established naming sequence, had no idea what to call it. The agency eventually settled on Catarina, after the state where the hurricane made landfall.
According to a recent scientific study, because of increasing global temperatures, "hurricanes will grow stronger and wetter as a result of global warming."[iii] The study, said Dr. Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "is by far and away the most comprehensive effort" to assess the problem. The study "clinches the issue," Emanuel said, concerning the link between the warming of tropical oceans and storm intensity.[iv]
Other scientists agree. According to Tom Knutson and Bob Tuleya, tropical climate modelers at the Princeton, New Jersey-based Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, large parts of the world "can expect a 20 percent increase in rainfall, and damage due to increased wind speeds might rise as much as 10 percent. That 10 or 20 percent may not sound like much, but add it to a top-ranked Category 5 monster headed for Mobile, Alabama and you've got a major disaster in the making . . . [In addition,] a greenhouse gas-induced warming may lead to a gradually increasing risk in the occurrence of highly-destructive Category 5 storms."[v]
Warming temperatures have resulted in massive ice loss. On the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory floats the 3,000-year old tens of meters thick Ward Hunt Ice Shelf.[vi] The reporter Jane George recounted last year that "when the British Arctic Expedition traveled there in 1875 and Robert E. Peary explored the area in 1907, the shelf of land-fast ice was still intact, but, by 1982, 90 per cent of the shelf had been lost." Changes in the ice shelf have also drained the 30-km-by-5-km Lake Disraeli of its fresh water.[vii]
In the Pyrenees, glacier surface has decreased from 1779 hectares in 1894 to 290 hectares in 2001. Glacial mass in the region shrunk by 52 percent from 1980-2001.[viii] The European Environment Agency has recently issued a report estimating that three-quarters of glaciers in the Swiss Alps are likely to disappear by 2050.
According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the rapid melting of the world's highest ice fields is "driving up sea levels, increasing floods and turning verdant mountain slopes into deserts." The Chinese scientists recently published the most detailed study ever undertaken of China's glaciers, which are said to account for 15 percent of the planet's ice. The study, the Glacier Inventory, was approved for publication last week after a quarter of a century of exploration in China and Tibet.
In the past 24 years, the Chinese scientists have measured glacier loss "equivalent to more than 3,000 sq km." Among the most marked changes has been the 500metre retreat of the glacier at the source of the Yangtze on the Tibet-Qinghai plateau. If the climate continued to change at the current pace, scientists predict that two-thirds of China's glaciers would disappear by the end of the 2050s
The consequences for ecosystems and humans are nothing short of ominous.
"In the short term," said Yao Tandong, who led 50 scientists in studying the decline of the Himalayan glaciers, "the water from the ice would fill reservoirs and lead to more flooding - as was already the case in Nepal and downstream areas of China." Yao predicted that in the future, "the end of the glaciers would deprive the mountain ecology of its main life source and hasten the desertification that threatens western China, particularly in Gansu and Xinjiang provinces." Once the mountain ice disappears, "rivers would start to dry up and ocean levels would rise, threatening coastal cities."
The Chinese study confirmed earlier studies of Everest, "which showed the world's tallest peak more than 1.3 meters shorter than in 1953, when it was first scaled by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay."[ix]
Climate change, said the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is "a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power that it radically alters human existence."
It's time for the world to wean itself away from fossil fuels such as oil and coal, the burning of which releases massive amounts of C02, the greenhouse gas mainly responsible for global warming. It's high time that we embrace the solution to the problem - a solution that is by no means difficult to embrace.
The European Renewable Energy Council has shown that with the right support policies from government, renewable energy from wind, geothermal, small hydro, modern biomass and solar power can provide 50 percent of global energy supply by 2040.
Traditional energy economists say that renewable energy is too expensive and that we can't afford to develop it. The truth is, wrote a young environmentalist in the South China Morning Post recently, "we cannot afford not to.[x]
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
November 1, 2004
"We sometimes get the feeling they are going to let us die," said Enele Soponga the other year. Soponga is the ambassador to the UN of Tuvalu, an island nation with a population of 12,000 that is projected to be the first island state to go under water. Tuvalu's main island has already been inundated three times in 2003; vegetable plots were washed away along with the island's drinking water.[i]
Soponga, who is also the chairperson of the Association of Small Island States, is not alone in his sentiment.
Climate change is not a smart bomb. Like weapons of mass destruction, human-induced climate change will hit the environment and smash people's lives indiscriminately, punishing the vulnerable and the weak the hardest. The warning signs are everywhere.
The three hottest years in recorded history - 1998, 2002 and 2003 - all occurred in the last six years. The 1990s remain the warmest decade on record.[ii]
Weeks ago Japan suffered from its fourth major storm since late August. It was reportedly "the most powerful to hit Okinawa since 1972."
In March, a hurricane hit the Brazilian coast - the first ever recorded in the South Atlantic. The Brazilian weather service, with no established naming sequence, had no idea what to call it. The agency eventually settled on Catarina, after the state where the hurricane made landfall.
According to a recent scientific study, because of increasing global temperatures, "hurricanes will grow stronger and wetter as a result of global warming."[iii] The study, said Dr. Kerry A. Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "is by far and away the most comprehensive effort" to assess the problem. The study "clinches the issue," Emanuel said, concerning the link between the warming of tropical oceans and storm intensity.[iv]
Other scientists agree. According to Tom Knutson and Bob Tuleya, tropical climate modelers at the Princeton, New Jersey-based Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, large parts of the world "can expect a 20 percent increase in rainfall, and damage due to increased wind speeds might rise as much as 10 percent. That 10 or 20 percent may not sound like much, but add it to a top-ranked Category 5 monster headed for Mobile, Alabama and you've got a major disaster in the making . . . [In addition,] a greenhouse gas-induced warming may lead to a gradually increasing risk in the occurrence of highly-destructive Category 5 storms."[v]
Warming temperatures have resulted in massive ice loss. On the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory floats the 3,000-year old tens of meters thick Ward Hunt Ice Shelf.[vi] The reporter Jane George recounted last year that "when the British Arctic Expedition traveled there in 1875 and Robert E. Peary explored the area in 1907, the shelf of land-fast ice was still intact, but, by 1982, 90 per cent of the shelf had been lost." Changes in the ice shelf have also drained the 30-km-by-5-km Lake Disraeli of its fresh water.[vii]
In the Pyrenees, glacier surface has decreased from 1779 hectares in 1894 to 290 hectares in 2001. Glacial mass in the region shrunk by 52 percent from 1980-2001.[viii] The European Environment Agency has recently issued a report estimating that three-quarters of glaciers in the Swiss Alps are likely to disappear by 2050.
According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the rapid melting of the world's highest ice fields is "driving up sea levels, increasing floods and turning verdant mountain slopes into deserts." The Chinese scientists recently published the most detailed study ever undertaken of China's glaciers, which are said to account for 15 percent of the planet's ice. The study, the Glacier Inventory, was approved for publication last week after a quarter of a century of exploration in China and Tibet.
In the past 24 years, the Chinese scientists have measured glacier loss "equivalent to more than 3,000 sq km." Among the most marked changes has been the 500metre retreat of the glacier at the source of the Yangtze on the Tibet-Qinghai plateau. If the climate continued to change at the current pace, scientists predict that two-thirds of China's glaciers would disappear by the end of the 2050s
The consequences for ecosystems and humans are nothing short of ominous.
"In the short term," said Yao Tandong, who led 50 scientists in studying the decline of the Himalayan glaciers, "the water from the ice would fill reservoirs and lead to more flooding - as was already the case in Nepal and downstream areas of China." Yao predicted that in the future, "the end of the glaciers would deprive the mountain ecology of its main life source and hasten the desertification that threatens western China, particularly in Gansu and Xinjiang provinces." Once the mountain ice disappears, "rivers would start to dry up and ocean levels would rise, threatening coastal cities."
The Chinese study confirmed earlier studies of Everest, "which showed the world's tallest peak more than 1.3 meters shorter than in 1953, when it was first scaled by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay."[ix]
Climate change, said the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is "a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power that it radically alters human existence."
It's time for the world to wean itself away from fossil fuels such as oil and coal, the burning of which releases massive amounts of C02, the greenhouse gas mainly responsible for global warming. It's high time that we embrace the solution to the problem - a solution that is by no means difficult to embrace.
The European Renewable Energy Council has shown that with the right support policies from government, renewable energy from wind, geothermal, small hydro, modern biomass and solar power can provide 50 percent of global energy supply by 2040.
Traditional energy economists say that renewable energy is too expensive and that we can't afford to develop it. The truth is, wrote a young environmentalist in the South China Morning Post recently, "we cannot afford not to.[x]
NOTES:
[i] "Sinking islands battle for climate aid cash," The Sun-Herald, December 14, 2003.
[ii] "Global warnings," Greenpeace International, September 17, 2004.
[iii] The study was published online on Tuesday by The Journal of Climate and can be found at www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/bibliography/2004/tk0401.pdf
[iv] "Global Warming Is Expected to Raise Hurricane Intensity," Andrew Revkin, The New York Times, September 30, 2004.
[v] "Warning in the Winds," Mark Lynas, The Washington Post, September 19, 2004
[vi] "Arctic ice shelf splits," BBC News World Edition, September 23, 2003.
[vii] Ellesmere Island's ice shelf broken into pieces: Changes may mark rapid global warming," Jane George, Nunatsiaq News, July 30, 2004.
[viii] More interesting multimedia information in the climate pages of Greenpeace International
[ix] Highest icefields will not last 100 years, study finds; China's glacier research warns of deserts and floods due to warming," Jonathan Watts, The Guardian-UK, September 24, 2004.
[x] "How to blow away China's pollution," Gloria Chang, South China Morning Post, September 18, 2004.
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