Conscious Choice: Climate

New Reviews

TRUTH, TORTURE, AND THE AMERICAN WAY: The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture, by Jennifer K. Harbury (Beacon Press, $14)

When Jennifer K. Harbury intended to dig up the body of her husband Everado — a top ranking Mayan resistance leader killed in a Guatemalan battle — she found the skeleton of an 18-year-old boy in the casket. Everado had been 35 when he had supposedly died.

After learning her husband was alive and being held and tortured at a military base somewhere in Guatemala, Harbury turned to the U.S. government for help. Officials denied any knowledge or involvement in the affair, though the truth would later prove otherwise.

Three years passed and in 1995, a U.S. representative finally informed Harbury that Everado had died after two years of captivity. Later, she said, she learned he had been killed on the orders of a paid CIA informant.

Since then, Harbury has fought to make known what happened both to her husband and to countless other torture victims around the world, even chronicling her own experience in her first book, Searching for Everado.

Now, in Truth, Torture, and the American Way, Harbury takes on the daunting topic of America’s own past and present involvement in torture. With a handful of horrific tales that have already emerged from the war in Iraq, she calls attention to the depraved tactics used by the American military against prisoners of war, often at the bidding of the CIA. And though the government insists that, in cases such as the Abu Ghraib scandal, the torture of prisoners was the doing of a few rogue agents, Harbury believes differently. Throughout the book, Harbury examines the history of the CIA ’s involvement in torture, detailing the eerie parallels between the torture stories emerging from the war in Iraq and those that emerged from Latin America’s “Dirty Wars,” where American involvement was undeniable.

Sometimes difficult to stomach because of the subject matter, Harbury’s book concludes by focusing on what the continued use of torture could mean for the future of the United States. Harbury has created a thought-provoking, investigative and intriguing work, one that addresses not only the involvement of the U.S. in torture, but also what can be done to ensure that it stops.
(Christine Mangan)

THE BEST AMERICAN SPIRITUAL WRITING 2005, Edited by Philip Zaleski, introduction by Barry Lopez (Houghton Mifflin, $14).

Barry Lopez, who has taught many of us to pay closer attention, defines spiritual writing this way: “It seems to me that this experience with the numinous, of release into a world that stands outside human comprehension, is what lies at the heart of ‘spiritual writing.’”

The 34 writers in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005 take on many topics: connection to nature, connection to a mentor, connection to faith, connection to travel, connection to avocation, connection to God. Patricia Hample writes about being an American tourist in an area where gawking attention is not wanted. Margaret Erhard, an entomologist, writes about the dilemma she faces in her profession: “If I can catch it, I do, in order to kill it.” Natalie Goldberg, everyone’s favorite writing guru, tells about losing her Buddhist mentor to cancer. Heather King writes about choosing to live intentionally as a poor person to become more aware. Essays and poems are included.

This book will appeal to those on a spiritual quest. It should also appeal to readers who believe that this country has taken a bad turn. As Lopez writes, “What we must ask of spiritual writing, I think, is that it be of some practical value in a culture as ethically conflicted as ours.” These works are just that — valuable. (Deborah Straw)

February 2006 | Conscious Reading

Climate

The Force That Shapes Our World
and the Future of Life on Earth

By George Ochoa, Jennifer Hoffman, Ph.D., and Tina Tin, Ph.D.

It is even harder to determine what is causing climate-related events. On the broadest scale, climate is influenced by five components: The atmosphere (air), the lithosphere (solid Earth), the hydrosphere (liquid water), the cryosphere (ice and snow), and the biosphere (the totality of life on Earth). These can be considered five parts of one climate system, with the Sun as the power source that drives most of the phenomenon. The interplay of these factors is extremely complex. Causation is difficult to trace.

Hard Evidence Everywhere

The news has been full of stories about climate change; many contend that it is driven by human activity. Global warming, they claim, is being caused by the burning of fossil fuels that emit heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Some scientists say global warming can cause fiercer hurricanes, but does that mean that hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne were caused by climate change? Are rising sea levels, which will make hurricanes more damaging, also caused by climate change?

For many years now, evidence from around the world has been mounting that the global climate is indeed changing. Conditions and events that have been documented by climate researchers indicate that temperatures are rising around the globe. Glaciers are melting faster, and the danger to low-lying coasts like those of the South Pacific islands is real. The patterns of winds around the Antarctic are changing, dragging rain away from Australia and bringing drought. The fires ravaging Europe’s forests, though likely aggravated by poor land use practices, are being fed by growing dryness, growing heat. Global warming is melting the pack ice on which polar bears depend.

Is human activity contributing to this change? Or could it be part of a natural cycle? Is it different from past climate changes?

The answer to the first question has become increasingly clear as evidence continues to mount. That answer is yes. Human activity is indeed contributing to climate change; natural processes alone cannot account for the massive changes that scientists have observed worldwide.

Since 1988, The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has involved over 3,000 scientists worldwide to examine our understanding of climate change. In 2001, it reported that, “Earth’s climate system has demonstrably changed on both global and regional scales since the pre-industrial era, with some of these changes attributable to human activity.” The level of carbon dioxide — a gas normally present in the atmosphere but also produced from burning fossil fuels — is higher now than it has been for millennia. Scientists have little doubt that this, and other gases released by human activity, is preventing heat from escaping from the planet, causing global temperatures to rise faster than at any time during the past thousand years.

The Long View

The climate is getting warmer, and human activity is contributing to that warming — that much is clear. What, if anything, can be done to slow or stop global warming? How bad will it get if nothing is done — or not enough? What consequences has climate change had in the past? And how can people help themselves and the world’s ecosystems to adapt to changes that are already too late to prevent?

To try to answer these questions, it is helpful to take a long view. Earth’s climate went through many radical changes, traveling between ice ages and hothouse periods, long before humans appeared on the scene. The present crisis makes some sense in the context of that history, which shows that the forces that shape climate are complex, and that climate’s effects on people and other living things are far-ranging and profound. The aim of this book is to provide that long view, the necessary perspective for grappling with the changes and challenges now confronting humankind.

This book is the story of Earth’s climate, from the formation of the atmosphere to the beginning of modern industrial society. It explores how climate influenced the evolution of life, the emergence of humans, and the history of civilization; and how living things, including people, have influenced climate. It surveys the world’s present climates, from Amazon rainforests to coastal metropolitan areas to the Arctic, not only as we have known them but also as they are becoming under the influence of climate change. Finally, these pages examine how human actions during the past century have driven climate change, how these changes have affected local weather and ecosystems, and how people are adapting to these changes.

Looking to the future, Climate explores the effects human-driven climate change are likely to have on people’s everyday lives — and on the survival of Earth’s species — if the current trends continue. Finally, it considers what can be done to reduce the extent of this climate change, and how human society can adapt to those changes that are inevitable.

If nothing is done to arrest the current global warming, the pace of change in the natural world will likely quicken dramatically; the price may be heavier than our society is willing or able to pay. The cost of change will be measured not only economically but also in intangible ways — not only agricultural losses from droughts and insurance costs from floods, but also increased deaths from heat stroke and malaria epidemics and the extinction of species that are valuable to humans for what they provide or symbolize — including, perhaps, iconic ones like the polar bear. Climate attempts to provide the background to understand the impact our actions today can have on our common future, and to suggest what we still have the power to do, in order to avert the worst while there is still time.

Climate Change

At any moment in time, the climate appears stable. Weather may vary, but climate in a given age seems fixed: the Sahara is dry and the South Pole is icy. Yet there have been times when the Sahara was lush and verdant and there were no glaciers at the South Pole.

Climate change is rarely caused by a single element; usually numerous factors interact in a complex way. A change in any variable in a climate system causes feedback, positive or negative. Positive feedback moves a climate system further in the direction it was already going. For example, when increased cold causes ice caps to grow, the ice or snow reflects more sunlight than ice-free terrain would, which makes the planet even colder, causing further freezing. Negative feedback reverses the direction of change, thus tending to stabilize the system. For example, a warming climate may promote photosynthesis (the process by which plants convert the energy from sunlight and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into food), thereby reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and helping to counteract the warming process.

Ocean Changes

The vast reservoirs of the oceans hold 97 percent of the Earth’s water, and they are the main sources of water evaporated by the Sun’s heat. In fact, the oceans generally lose more water by evaporation than they gain by precipitation, while the opposite is true for land. But this inequality balances out in what is called the hydrologic cycle. Water evaporates from the ocean, is transported as vapor through the atmosphere, condenses as clouds, falls as precipitation onto land, flows into rivers as runoff, and from there returns to the sea. Some water flows underground or stays on the land. But the total amount of water on land, underground, and in the oceans remains more or less constant.

Climate can be powerfully influenced by changes in the flow of ocean waters — including both surface currents, such as the Gulf Stream, and deeper-reaching movements such as the thermohaline circulation, also known as the great ocean conveyor belt.

This vast system of water movement depends on the fact that cold, salty water, such as is found in the North Atlantic and the Antarctic, is denser than warmer, less salty water and tends to sink beneath it. That deeper water then moves slowly toward the equator, while warmer water from lower latitudes moves toward the poles to replace it. The motion is like a conveyor belt — eventually the cold water finds its way to the surface as warm water that becomes cold and dense again as the cycle continues. By moving warm water from lower to higher latitudes, the great ocean conveyor belt keeps some mid- and high-latitude regions warmer than they would otherwise be. If it stops the results are potentially catastrophic. The North Atlantic circulation stopped about 12,900 years ago, possibly because of an upset in the ocean’s salt balance caused by an influx of too much fresh water from melting ice. The result was a period of glaciation — the Younger Dryas event. In a decade or less, this event plunged the world from temperatures similar to today’s into an ice age.

Excerpted with permission from Climate: The Force That Shapes Our World and the Future of Life on Earth, by George Ochoa, Jennifer Hoffman, Ph.D., and Tina Tin, Ph.D. Rodale Books, hardcover, $35. Visit rodale.com.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends:

February 2006 | Conscious Reading

Climate

The Force That Shapes Our Worldand the Future of Life on Earth

By George Ochoa, Jennifer Hoffman, Ph.D., and Tina Tin, Ph.D.

The Force That Shapes Our World
and the Future of Life on Earth