Konrad Steffen: The Global Warming Prophet

A one-meter (three-foot) rise in sea levels over the next 93 years would have enormous consequences, flooding low-lying coastal areas and megadeltas, such as the Nile and the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh, where millions of people live. Presumably, developed countries such as the U.S. and the Netherlands would be able to cope with sea-level increases by building new systems. But hundreds of millions of impoverished coastal dwellers in vulnerable places like Bangladesh, Indonesia and the west coast of sub-Saharan Africa could become refugees. One recent study predicts that the dramatic effects of climate change could push the number of displaced people globally to at least one billion.

In the Arctic, by far the fastest-warming place on Earth, rising air temperatures have already brought more fog, snow and spring rain to the people who live around Greenland's habitable fringe. This in turn causes more melting of the ice cap, which sends more freshwater into the ocean, disrupting currents and bringing more warm water to the bays, which breaks up more sea ice . . . and so it continues, in an ever-warming cycle. "When I visit my friends in the villages," Steffen says, "I realize it's not just about the melting ice cap. It changes the climate along the coast, and it changes everything going along with it."

On much of the coast, the polar bears relocated and the sea ice disappeared earlier this decade. Steffen expects the mosquito population to explode, making summer a misery. In the Greenland village of Ilulissat, locals can't use their sled dogs to travel to other villages or to hunt the whales and seals that used to get trapped in frozen bays. Dogs in native communities in the Arctic are working animals; with no work for them to do and no seal scraps to feed them, their owners are killing off the canine population by the hundreds.

HOW TO BE AN OPTIMIST
It can't be easy to herald a potential planet-wide catastrophe. But despite all the bleak data being mined from Steffen's network, he says he is enjoying his work more than ever.
"For one thing," he says, "people are starting to listen, to pay attention to science. Even politicians are starting

to understand that we have a higher level of CO2 in the atmosphere than at any time in the past 600,000 years, and that our future depends on whether we can get greenhouse-gas emissions under control.

"We are at a fork in the road," he continues. "We could take action now and reduce our carbon footprint. That doesn't mean reducing our standard of living or going backward. We can move forward, but in more efficient ways. We can still make money by building and selling the cleanest technology possible. But if we continue to build coal plants and sell them to China and India, then we are thinking short-term; we are not thinking of our children."