“Global Disruption” More Accurately Describes Climate Change, Not “Global Warming”
July 3, 2008
Leading scientist John Holdren says “global warming” is not the correct term to use; he prefers “global disruption.” “‘Global warming’ [is] misleading. It implies something that’s mainly about temperature, that’s gradual, and that’s uniform across the planet,” says Holdren. “In fact, temperature is only one of the things that’s changing. It’s a sort of an index of the state of the climate. The whole climate is changing: the winds, the ocean currents, the storm patterns, snow packs, snowmelt, flooding, droughts. Temperature is just a bit of it.”
Guest:
John Holdren, professor of environmental policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is the director of the Woods Hole Research Center and just completed a term as board chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
AMY GOODMAN: This term “global warming,” you don’t like it.
JOHN HOLDREN: I don’t like the term “global warming,” because it’s misleading. It implies something that’s mainly about temperature, that’s gradual, and that’s uniform across the planet. And in fact, temperature is only one of the things that’s changing. It’s a sort of an index of the state of climate. The whole climate is changing: the winds, the ocean currents, the storm patterns, snow packs, snowmelt, flooding, droughts. Temperature is just a bit of it.
It’s also highly non-uniform. The largest changes are occurring in the far north in the Arctic, in the Antarctic Peninsula in the far south. It is certainly not gradual, in the sense that it is rapid compared to the capacity of ecosystems to adjust. It’s rapid compared to the capacity of human systems to adjust.
AMY GOODMAN: How extreme is the situation right now?
JOHN HOLDREN: I think that most people, even most scientists, continue to underestimate how far down the path to climate catastrophe we’ve already traveled. We are committed, the United States and 190 other countries are committed, under the Framework Convention on Climate Change to avoid dangerous human interference in the climate system. And the fact is, it’s already too late to do that. We’re already experiencing dangerous interference. Floods, major floods, are up all over the world. Wildfires are up in almost every region of the world where wildfires have been a problem. Wildfires erupt fourfold in the last thirty years in the western United States.
AMY GOODMAN: What causes wildfires?
JOHN HOLDREN: Wildfires are a result of temperature conditions, of soil moisture conditions, and of course something has to start it. It may be lightning. It may be a stray match or a cigarette. But the point is, when it is drier and hotter, you get more wildfires, and that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing more heat waves. We’re seeing more droughts. We’re seeing impacts on food production in China and India as a result of changes in the monsoons.
The World Health Organization estimated that climate change was already causing more than 150,000 deaths per year in 2000. The World Health Organization is engaged in an update of that work. We’ll soon have a new estimate, a more recent estimate, and it will be larger, in terms of how many people are already being killed by climate change, by floods, by heat waves, by droughts, by expanded range of malaria, and much more.
Complete Interview Transcript:
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