Heads Above Water
Great piece on Fox News the other day. No, really.
It was a two-minute story on Fox’s Colorado affiliate (which is about as close as we get to serious documentaries on a major network these days), about the storm that had just dumped an unseasonable 16 inches of snow on Denver, the heaviest February storm in exactly 100 years. The headline -- "Scientists Research Link Between Extreme Weather and Climate Change" -- had me braced for the usual Fox fare. So did the opening lines from the reporter, Dave Young: "There’s a lot of people who have a hard time buying into the whole global warming thing, especially when they have two feet of snow still sitting in their front yard in early February." But what followed was a pleasant surprise.
The focus of the piece was the University of Colorado, where, Young said, "some of the most important work on climate change" is being done. He started with meteorologist Bob Henson of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, who laid out clearly how a warming atmosphere holds more water vapor and therefore leads to heavier storms. Next up was John Wahr, one of a team of physicists that has spent eight years measuring the loss of ice sheets in the Arctic. The scientists have "found them melting at an alarming rate," Young reported, showing us some satellite maps for greater dramatic effect. Since the study began, four billion tons of water have sluiced into the oceans, enough to cover the entire United States to the depth of one and a half feet and raise global sea levels by roughly half an inch. "Everyone should be worried about this," said Wahr in conclusion.
Now, half an inch may not sound like much if you live in Denver, a mile above sea level and a thousand miles from the ocean. But what I found so interesting about the Fox report was that it shared the headlines that same day with the violent removal of Mohamed Nasheed, the democratically elected president of the Maldives, one of the world epicenters of climate change and extreme weather. The country is an archipelago of 1,192 islands off the southwestern tip of India. A hundred and ninety three of these are inhabited. The total population is 300,000, most of them Sunni Muslims. The highest point in the Maldives is just eight feet above sea level, and the average is closer to four feet, so half an inch is a very big deal, bringing a growing threat of flooding, storm surges, coastal erosion, salination of freshwater supplies, and extreme weather events that will make the Denver snowstorm seem tame. During the 2004 Asian tsunami, the entire country was briefly submerged.
The military and police rebellion against Nasheed was prompted by his attacks on corruption, his purported departure from the principles of conservative Islam, and his arrest of the chief judge of the Maldives criminal court, an alleged crony of the country’s former dictator, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. The new government is stacked with supporters of Gayoom, who was in power for 30 years and was regularly "re-elected" with more than 90 percent of the vote, until Nasheed finally prevailed in a free and fair election in 2008.
Under Gayoom, Nasheed had been famous as a human rights activist. He was jailed repeatedly, and after being subjected to torture and 18 months of solitary confinement, he was adopted by Amnesty International as a Prisoner of Conscience. But after his election, his name became synonymous with action on climate change and a flair for publicity. On one celebrated occasion, to dramatize the problem, he held a cabinet meeting underwater, with the members outfitted in SCUBA gear. The story of Nasheed’s activism is told more fully in a new documentary, The Island President, which was supported in part by the Sundance Institute and the Ford Foundation and is due to open next month in New York. (I learned that from Fox News, too, by the way.)
As developing countries go, the Maldives is not one of the poorest, thanks to high-end tourism, which accounts for 60 percent of foreign exchange earnings. It’s not the kind of tourism that immediately seems to jibe with a leader of Nasheed’s political inclinations, with the likes of Madonna shelling out thousands of dollars a night for hotel rooms in paradise and 2-bedroom beachfront apartments starting at $3 million. But even these excesses have brought the Maldives some surprising environmental benefits. Two years ago, Nasheed announced that the entire nation would become a shark sanctuary. Not only did this lend momentum to the growing international movement to ban shark fishing, it was also a great example of "ecosystem services," the assignment of economic value to the health of the natural environment. According to Australian researchers, a single gray reef shark is worth $3,300 to the Maldivian tourist industry, against the one-time value of $32 that a fisherman would get from catching the shark, cutting off its fin, and selling it to make soup in a Chinese restaurant.
Nasheed steadily built the reputation of the Maldives as a global leader on climate change, together with other tiny island nations such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands, all of which may eventually go the way of Atlantis. All of them belong to AOSIS, the Alliance of Small Island States, and while they may sound like small fry on the world stage -- the four nations together have only about half a million people -- the 39-member AOSIS, which now includes bigger countries like Jamaica, Singapore, and the Dominican Republic, has become a significant voice for the developing world in the international climate debate. Most recently it has called for a "global insurance fund" that would help the most vulnerable nations cope with the worst effects of climate change.
I’ve rarely heard the problem laid out so plainly as it was in an interview with the president of the Maldives in 2008, just after the publication of his book, Paradise Drowning. "Civilization is under serious threat from the continued degradation of the environment and the resulting effects of global warming, climate change, and the rising sea levels. [We] are in the frontline of danger from the rising seas." Except here’s the kicker: it wasn’t Nasheed who said this, but the strongman, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, just before he was turned out of office. Gayoom had been issuing similar warnings about global warming at the UN since the late 1970s.
Truly, we live in interesting times. Fox reporters and a dictator with a taste for conservative Islam both seem to have got the message on global warming. Whatever next: the Republican Party?
