By Rick Ruffin
The challenge of the future will be properly managing an exponentially growing series of crises or disasters. Of these disasters, which will come in all shapes and forms, those that are weather-related will have the greatest impact.
Others high on the list are environmental degradation, pollution, pestilence, economic depression, social upheaval, famine, loss of biodiversity ― all related to or exacerbated by man's increasing impact on the surrounding world.
Islands in the Bay of Bengal and the Kiribati Archipelago have already been completely wiped out by rising sea levels. Native peoples on the North Slope of Alaska have been forced to relocate their villages, and the Maldives and other low-lying island nations are threatened by rising sea levels.
However, most of the world is poorly prepared for disaster management. When the Hebei Spirit dumped 10,500 tons of fuel oil into the West Sea, the Korean minister of maritime affairs said not to worry, that the oil would not affect Korean beaches. This is the sort of shortsightedness that plagues not just Koreans, but leaders throughout the world.
As I wrote previously in this paper, the subsequent cleanup of the Hebei Spirit oil spill brought an unprecedented number of volunteers, who left an unprecedented amount of rubbish on West Sea beaches. Hence one crisis begot another, in a classic case of a positive feedback loop.
According to experts around the world, managing disasters such as the Hebei Spirit oil spill ― of which there will be more ― and dealing with costs of diminishing agricultural yields due to floods, typhoons, dwindling resources and environmental degradation, will run into the billions ― perhaps trillions ― of dollars.
Last year, Seoul spent 208 billion won combating air pollution. This year the municipal government has expanded its budget to 260 billion won to fight atmospheric haze and pollution. One of the reasons air pollution in Korea is getting worse is because the high pressure cell that normally blows cold air out of Siberia and Manchuria and keeps Korea's winter skies blue is weakening, due to ― you guessed it ― global warming.
While climate change will affect everyone, it will affect those in developing nations the most, and the poor everywhere, including in rich countries such as the U.S.
When hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, it was the poor who felt it the most. All of those who could afford to had already jumped in their cars and left the low-lying city behind, headed for higher ground.
From 2002 to 2003, worldwide insurance claims for climate-related disasters jumped almost 100%. Experts around the world agree a steadily warming planet has influenced these disasters.
The whole way we go about managing disasters is completely backwards. The U.S. government is set to enact a series of measures to jumpstart the beleaguered U.S. economy. However, one analyst at Merril Lynch says let the economy run its course ― even if it means recession. Better recession now than depression later.
And often we don't see disasters for what they really are. A recent fire killed around thirty people in a warehouse in Incheon. However, these people didn't burn to death, they died from smoke inhalation ― urethane smoke inhalation, the same urethane that litters most of Korea. This was not a simple fire, it was death by pollution.
The challenge of the future, according to the U.N., will be to maintain sustainable (and the emphasis is on sustainable) development in light of continuing environmental degradation, accompanied by increasing storms and floods caused by global warming.
But the human population, forecast to reach 9 billion by the middle of this century, will put increasing strain on resources, and contribute to further environmental deterioration. What is even more serious is that as people become richer, their buying power increases, and they put even greater stress on resources and the environment.
Because we take at least one international airplane flight every year, my wife and I emit about 17 tons of carbon into the atmosphere annually. That is more than the average American, and we don't even own a car.
In fact, air travel is expected to double in the next fifteen years. As it is, air travel currently contributes six percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.
In Naples, Italy, there is a garbage crisis. There is no more room for the garbage in the local landfills, so it has been piling up in the streets for months and months. The people don't want household waste on their doorstep, but they don't want the local landfill reopened either. The government of Italy doesn't want to export the garbage to another place. There is only one answer. Recycle and use less. But nobody wants to recycle or use less. It is, as Al Gore points out, ``inconvenient."
The incoming government of Lee Myung-bak, to the best of my knowledge, has not even paid token lip service to sustainable growth or the real threat of global warming.
Greg Craven, a high school science teacher from the U.S. has mapped out a contingency plan for future crises. ``What's the wisest thing to do, given the uncertainties and risks (regarding global warming)?''
``If we act now,'' he goes on, ``and there is no problem in the future, we are out only time and money. If we don't act now, and there is a problem in the future, we will be in a heap of trouble, and left wishing we had acted when we had a chance to do so.''
We had better act.
The writer, a graduate of University of Texas, Austin, now writes from Gangneung, Gangwon Province. He can be reached at rick_ruffin@yahoo.com.