| Summary: | Will we have to wait for a new generation of politicians before governments start dealing with global warming, asks GEOFFREY BARKER APEC leaders in Sydney were mightily pleased when they agreed to work towards a long-term aspirational goal for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. “An enormous diplomatic breakthrough”, crowed Foreign Affairs minister Alexander Downer in a fairly typical comment. Largely unnoticed during the APEC backslapping was a new (4 September) report on Arctic sea ice from the respected National Snow and Ice Data Centre at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “[I]t looks like this year’s sea ice melt season may herald a new and steeper rate of decline,” the NSIC reported. “If you asked me a couple of years ago when the Arctic could lose all of its ice, then I would have said 2100 or 2070 maybe. But now I think that 2030 is a reasonable estimate,” added NSIC arctic specialist, Dr Mark Serreze. The year 2030 is only 23 years away, and within the reasonably expectable lifetime of most healthy human beings aged up to 60 or thereabouts. What is in store for much of this large slice of humanity if the Artic ice vanishes while the global political order congratulates itself on avoiding anything more binding than aspirational goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions? There is as yet no uncontested answer to this question. Some assessments suggest the impact will be minimal; others predict catastrophic inundation of polar areas and the widespread inundation of low-lying land as far away as Florida. What seems well within the bounds of reasonable concern is the possibility that the disappearance of the Arctic ice could constitute a grave threat to the continued tolerable existence of millions of people. So, for many, it could constitute an existential threat comparable with the Cold War threat of a nuclear exchange between the superpowers. It raises the spectre of nation-states, or vast parts of them, ceasing to function as modern habitable societies. The nuclear threat was well recognised ...
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