Excerpt from Boiling Point by Ross Gelbspan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Today, however, the residue of corporate enthusiasm resides primarily within the Pew Center for Climate Change, under the direction of Eileen Claussen, a major climate policymaker in the Clinton White House. While the center has enlisted some high-profile corporate players, its potential seems minimized by the fact that policy changes by individual companies are limited unless there are similar commitments by all the major players within their industries.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the nation's business leaders, intent on securing political benefits for their companies and industries, continue, as always, to take their cues from the current center of political power.

The ultimate message seems to be that the corporate community is not the place to look for political leadership. The corporate centers of innovation, productivity, and economic growth are concerned only secondarily, if at all, with public policy-most typically, only if that policy directly affects a particular company or industry. Political change does not emanate from corporate boardrooms. As BP chief John Browne wrote in 2002: 'People expect big companies to act and to use their skills and access to technology to provide better choices......'

But he emphasized: 'The lesson is not that individual private companies can solve the problem-they cannot.'

 

 

Snapshots of the Warming No. 5

There is one group of creatures for whom global warming is a boon. Of all of the systems of nature, one of the most responsive to temperature changes is insects. Warming accelerates the breeding rates and the biting rate of insects. It accelerates the maturation of the pathogens they carry. It expands the range of insects, allowing them to live longer at higher altitudes and higher latitudes. As a result, climate change is fueling the spread of a wide array of insect-borne diseases among populations, species, and entire ecosystems all over the planet.

Those diseases are already passing from ecosystems to people--and the World Health Organization now projects that millions of people will die from climate-related diseases and other impacts in the next few decades.

In 2002, a team of researchers reported that rising temperatures are increasing both the geographical range and the virulence of diseases. The implication is a future of more widespread and devastating epidemics for humans, animals, and plants.

As the Boston Globe reported: 'Researchers have long accepted that global warming will affect a wide range of organisms, but they are only now beginning to predict what those will be. While climate change scientists have studied a handful of human diseases, [this] report was the first to study dozens of diseases in both humans and nonhumans.

'We are seeing lots of anecdotes and they are beginning to tell a story,' said Andrew P. Dobson, professor at Princeton University's department of ecology and evolutionary biology and one of the authors. 'It's a much more scary threat than bioterrorism.'

The researchers reported that the climate-driven spread of diseases will 'contribute to population or species declines, especially for generalist pathogens infecting multiple host species. The greatest impacts of disease may result from a relatively small number of emergent pathogens. Epidemics caused when these infect new hosts with little resistance or tolerance may lead to population declines, such as those that followed tree pathogen invasions in North America during the last century.'

'The most detectable effects of directional climate warming on disease relate to geographic range expansion of pathogens such as Rift Valley fever, dengue, and Eastern oyster disease. Factors other than climate change--such as changes in land use, vegetation, pollution, or increase in drug-resistant strains--may underlie these range expansions. Nonetheless, the numerous mechanisms linking climate warming and disease spread support the hypothesis that climate warming is contributing to ongoing range expansions.'

From Boiling Point by Ross Gelbspan, pages 93-126 of the hardcover edition.  Reprinted with Permission from Basic Books – Copyright 2004.