Leading the 2007 teleconference discussion was Ray Suarez, a senior correspondent with the PBS Jim Lehrer NewsHour.
SUAREZ: To help us consider the issues, we have three distinguished experts, Suzanne Hunt, Cynthia Rosenzweig, and Stephen Schneider. In addition to our expert panel, we will go to Ames, Iowa and have a conversation with the winner of this year’s prestigious World Food Prize, Dr. Phillip Nelson. However, before I introduce the panel, let’s review the format of this three-hour program.
The first hour is devoted to our panel discussion and the interview with Dr. Nelson. During the second hour, viewers at participating sites are expected to review the issues raised by the first hour’s discussion and prepare questions for our panel. At the same time, various stations and networks will view two films related to today’s topic. In the third hour we’ll return to our studios here in Washington and allow our panel to answer your questions. Please make sure you e-mail in your questions. I can’t repeat enough how vital your questions are to the success of that final hour of the program, so when you hear things during the conversation that raise follow up questions in your mind, share them with your group and make sure they are e-mailed to us at the program so we can pose them in the third hour.
And now to the topic at hand --climate change and especially its impact on the poor. Suzanne Hunt is an independent consultant working with FAO and several other institutions; Cynthia Rosenzweig is a research scientist and leader of the Climate Impact Group at the NASA Goddard Institute. Professor Stephen Schneider of Stanford University is author and team leader for the Intergovernmental UN Panel on Climate Change which has just issued its fourth report, and if you’ve been following the news just in the last several days the Panel was notified that it’s a co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Dr. Schneider, could you summarize for us the latest research, the latest science on climate change.
SCHNEIDER: The Intergovernmental Panel that you mentioned, Ray, which we’ll call IPPC. You’re going to hear that a lot, that’s what it means, basically is broken into three groups. The first group looks at what might happen in the future, the second group asks so what, what are the impacts, the third group says therefore what – what do we do about it. The first group basically said in words very rare for scientists, that it was unequivocal that the warming that we’ve observed, about 1.4 degrees fahrenheit, in the last century, century and a half, is there and it’s unusual and the warmest in a thousand years at least.
The second thing it said is that the last 40 years is where we’ve really taken off in warming; that very likely, there is more than a 90% chance that most of that is due to human activities. What activities? Clearing land which puts greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but primarily burning of fossil fuels which puts in heat-trapping gases. What else did it say? It said that we’re less certain about precipitation. Areas like the dry sub-tropics which already have some food stress, will probably get drier, very high latitudes will probably get wetter. Beyond that things are more speculative. What did we say about impacts? We said who’s going to get hurt most? Poorer people in hot countries, people in hurricane alley as hurricanes become more intense from warmer waters. People in high mountains near glaciers, Arctic communities in sea levels and that there is a very, very mild distribution of those impacts across rich and poor and people with capacity to adapt.
Finally, what do we do about it? What we have to do. We have to start using more clean energy and less dirty but then we have a real problem. What do you do with China, India and other countries where per person there are a factor of five or ten less emitting than we are. They want to catch up to us and improve their standard of living but if they do it the old way using coal and oil then it builds up in the atmosphere and causes a problem.
So now we need an international cooperative set of agreements to deal with it and that raises the problem of how much that costs, who pays, how do we get through transitions and again people will not be hurt uniformly by that. Some will be helped by these policies, others hurt, and therefore we need an international cooperation solution. And that’s a fast summary of about this thick a set of books that were written over three years.
SUAREZ: Very early on you mentioned 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit, and I’m sure at our sites a lot of people are sitting there thinking well that doesn’t seem like very much. How could all these calamitous effects be growing from a 1.4 degree increase in the ambient temperature?
SCHNEIDER: About 15,000 years ago there was a lot of ice in the world. Twenty thousand years ago we were in the grip of an ice age and we got out of it. It surprises most people but it was only about 10 degrees fahrenheit cooler in an ice age than it is now, so one to two degrees is actually significant. It changes growing seasons, it changes when plants bloom in the spring, when animals come back on migration. All the crops that we grow, and Cynthia Rosenzweig will tell you all about that in detail, depend upon the climate. One to two degrees is not trivial. When you start getting way beyond that, though, remember we’ve got 1.4 now. The very best that we can foresee is that we’ll be up in fahrenheit something like 3 or 4. That’s the best scenario that we can imagine. We can see scenarios as much as 10, so we’re on the road to pretty large change and unless we change our ways, we’re heading down a track that’s pretty dangerous, so that from a planetary prospective it is not a small number.
SUAREZ: Professor, thanks. More on that later. We’re now joined by Dr. Phillip Nelson in Ames, Iowa, winner of the World Food Prize. Professor Nelson, congratulations first off on your award and thank you for taking the time to be with us on World Food Day. Let’s begin by explaining to people who are listening to this program at the various sites what your research has been focused on in food security.
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