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by Peter A. Belmont / 2009-03-30
© 2009 Peter Belmont
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Comment on ”Three Mile Island, the NRC and Obama” by Christian Parenti, The Nation, March 27, 2009
The partial melt-down at Three Mile Island required a quick response and even that response was not sufficient to avoid all unpleasant consequences, though the worst was avoided.
Global Warming also requires immediate and massive response, but it is not getting it. Our ignorance of possible short-term catastrophic consequences and the comforting fiction that we have lots of time to respond combine to give us—politicians, media, industry, finance, education, and the people—a false sense of non-emergency.
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Christian Parenti’s article “Three Mile Island, the NRC and Obama” invites comparison between reactor meltdown emergencies and global warming.
The partial-meltdown at Three Mile Island resulted, as the article said, from: mis-used hardware (valves inappropriately open), unreliable instrumentation (valve indicator failing to indicate that valve was open), and human stupidity (operators relying on the faulty indicator and ignoring other available information).
Fortunately, Three Mile Island had protection—its massive containment building. Otherwise, had the accident been worse, much of the USA could have been wiped out in a Chernobyl-style debacle.
With GLOBAL WARMING we have no protection. There is no containment building.
But we do have faulty hardware—all that greenhouse-gas producing hardware, all those industrial meat-growing and methane-producing “farms”, all that burning of coal-oil-gas.
(And, to make it all more painful to contemplate, we still have energy companies asking permission to drill new wells, to produce more oil and more gas, to exploit new sources of fossil fuels—such as tar sands and methane clathrates—and articles about these things which never even utter the two-word phrase, “global warming.” What world are these people living in, anyway?)
And we do have the unreliable instrumentation—it is only in the last 10-20 years that people have been noticing the on-rush of global warming.
And, especially, we do have human stupidity—among politicians, among industrialists, among media decision-makers, and with our under-educated and under-informed public. Even our insurance companies (on whom we should rely for warnings of impending disasters) have been relatively silent about global warming (perhaps being more concerned with the disappearing value of their investments and with their anti-actuarial insuring of the prices of “toxic securities”).
Seemingly, the time-scales are different. A nuclear reactor melt-down event takes places very quickly, whereas the build-up to global warming is slow.
With an incipient meltdown event, a quick reaction is absolutely necessary, and this necessity is perfectly clear, as all agree. With global warming, in apparent contrast, no quick reaction is necessary, we have all the time in the world in which to react.
But this perception of the differing time-scales is misleading, and, clearly, we are misled by it.
The lead-up to global-warming may be slow, but it is cumulative and irreversible as far as is known today. Last year’s greenhouse-gas contributions are still up there. This year’s will join them. They haven’t gone away. Each year, the rate of warming increases a bit. Some gases are absorbed by the ocean, it is true, but far from being purely helpful, this absorption raises oceanic acidity levels with attendant perils for sea-life. And this acidity gets worse each year. The “melt-down” is not entirely in the future—it is happening today.
Under President Bush, the government (and, in effect, everyone) was “under orders” not to be aware of global warming, not to thionk about it, not to plan for remediation, and especially not to do anything to remediate.
Who’s giving the orders today?
And what about timing?
A reactor meltdown is prevented by an action taken in a few seconds. Close that valve, and the job is done. Close that valve, and there is no melt-down—the horrible future event is immediately forestalled.
The valve to shut-down global warming is well-known—just stop burning fossil fuels. But it is taking decades to accomplish, and the problem has been growing worse (with the well-predicted worst effects comfortably many years away and thus yet to be felt, but on-rushing nonetheless). The sense that the onset of adverse consequences is gradual has diminished most people’s sense of emergency about global warming.
(“Emergency? What emergency? Mr. Belmont, please stop shouting ‘fire’ on a crowded earth! You might start a panic. Really, it’s all right, folks, there is nothing to be worried about, nothing at all!”)
But here, too, the comparison with Three Mile Island may be more apt than at first it seems. There are many possible warming-caused events that scientists worry about which may be sudden in their onset, dreadful in their effects, and occur far sooner than other events consequential to global warming . Our knowledge is not sufficient, today, to predict them with “scientific certainty.” For example, a polar-warming-caused shut-down of the oceanic conveyor (see here), which might plunge Eastern North America and Western Europe into a sudden-onset ice-age (see also here) could happen in a few years—as the very-quickly melting polar ice changes northern ocean temperatures and salt concentrations—rather than in the 50 years or 100 years in which global warming warnings are usually so comfortingly and reassuringly couched.
Our lack of knowledge of the possible sudden—and early—effects of global warming is comparable to the Three-Mile Island operators’ failure to know that the valve was open (although they, at least, had other information available to them, and so headed off disaster).
Because we do not know with precision the timing of the disastrous consequences of global warming, but do know enough to realize that we should be acting today, our responsibility, I respectfully submit, is to act quickly—as quickly as possible—rather than wait to find out whether or not we guessed wrong.
We know we must “wean” ourselves from fossil fuels. Let’s get on with it. Nothing is gained by waiting. And unknown disasters may be avoided by quick action. And wouldn’t you rather be in a position to say, after we went cold-turkey on fossil-fuels, “How nice that we may perhaps have avoided an ice-age around the North Atlantic” than to have to say, some years later, after we failed to go cold-turkey, and after we have somehow begun to heat our homes in winter without burning coal or oil or gas, “Gee its cold. I thought they said warming.”
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