After experiencing its warmest winter in 108 years, Tokyo finally receives its first snow, in the middle of March. Places around the globe, including Shanghai, Beijing, Harbin, Sweden and Italy, all break records for their warmest winters. A climate report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States in March states that people living in the Earth’s northern hemisphere just lived through the Earth’s warmest winter since records began in 1880. Winter is not what it used to be.

Compiling the research of over two thousand of the world’s leading scientists, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report issued an ominous warning that the mercury is rising and nothing can be done to stop it. The IPCC projects that the Earth’s average temperature could climb by up to 6.4 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.

“Warming has put the Earth in a state of utter chaos.” Here in Taiwan, Environmental Protection Administration Minister Kow-Lung Chang, who cut his teeth in the environmental movement, is worried, and his frank description reflects an even deeper pessimism than that of the IPCC when it comes to the question of the maximum temperature at which the Earth will peak.

And it looks as though there is little reason for optimism in Taiwan.

Cheng Ming-dean, whose twenty-five years of climate research have found him running the Research and Development Center at Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau, illustrates Taiwan’s predicament when he points out that Taiwan is among those nations comprising the IPCC’s high-risk group for climate change. Taiwan’s average temperature has climbed 1.3 degrees Celsius over the last century. This rate of heating is two times greater than that recorded for the Earth as a whole and outpaces the rise witnessed in such neighboring countries as Japan and China. Moreover, people in Taipei City are experiencing average nighttime temperatures that are already nearly 2 degrees Celsius hotter than a century ago.(see chart 1)

Just why is Taiwan “burning” so much more intensely?

Shaw C. Liu, who worked previously for NOAA in the United States and serves now as director of the Academia Sinica’s Research Center for Environmental Changes, has pursued this issue for the last five to six years. His conclusion is that, in addition to the effects of the worldwide phenomenon of climate warming, the crux of the matter is that Taiwan’s population density is the second highest in the world and its energy consumption is the third highest per capita.

Taiwan’s Carbon Breath

Looking at carbon dioxide, the chief culprit among the greenhouse gases causing global warming, Taiwan pumped 111% more of this gas into the atmosphere in 2004 than it did in 1990. This marks a rate of increase four times higher than the world average. In excess of 12 tons of carbon dioxide are released annually for every citizen of Taiwan, a volume three times greater than the global average. While such emissions might seem extreme, they are dwarfed by the output of Kaohsiung, a major petrochemical industry center. According to the Kaohsiung City Environmental Protection Bureau, the city “contributes” 34.7 tons of carbon dioxide yearly for every one of its residents - eight times the world average, and enough to give it a world ranking of number one in per-capita carbon dioxide emissions.(see chart 4)

It is the end of March and the modern streetlights the city has stylishly installed along Love River cast a lazy gleam as the night scene unfurls. As the first Taiwanese city to join the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, Kaohsiung City made the move three years ago to replace road signs, streetlights, and traffic signals on certain sections of its streets with three-in-one solar-powered systems. The city government took the step as well of calling on such massive carbon emitters as China Steel Corporation and Chinese Petroleum Corporation to cut their emissions in order to help the city rid itself sooner rather than later of the infamous label of the world’s top carbon city.

The Academia Sinica’s Shaw C. Liu has discovered that, while Taiwan is experiencing rising temperatures and pumping massive volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it has also suffered a fifteen percent decrease in the amount of sunlight it receives over the last decade. The frequency of light drizzle, as well as fog in urban areas, has dropped significantly as well. Those natural scenes that create a romantic atmosphere are gradually vanishing.

What’s so bad about less sunlight and fewer days of fog? The temperature rises a “mere” one or two degrees and everybody is shaking in their boots - isn’t that a bit like screaming the sky is falling? Will climate warming really have an effect on Taiwan?

Impact One: Uneven Rainfall - Wet in the North, Dry in the South

When it comes to the climate changes that will result from continued warming in Taiwan, what gives genuine cause for concern is the alternating cycle of flood and drought we are seeing. According to the observations of Ching-pin Tung, a bioenvironmental systems engineering professor at National Taiwan University, Taiwan has endured extreme climate changes in recent years. If there has not been too much rain, then there has been too little. In 2001, Typhoon Nari dumped 650 millimeters of rain on Taipei City in a single day, breaking a century-old record in the process. The next year, the river flowing out of Shimen Reservoir ran dry. It had fallen victim to the area’s worst drought in thirty years.

“This bizarre phenomenon of flooding one year and drought the next may become the norm,” predicts Professor Tung.

Flooding One Year, Drought the Next

This prognostication is not surprising. Taiwan ranks eighteenth worldwide in lack of water. Although the overall volume of rainfall in Taiwan has not declined, according to long-term tracking analysis conducted by researcher Chung-ho Wang at the Academia Sinica’s Institute of Earth Sciences, precipitation has increased twenty percent in northern Taiwan, while declining ten percent in the south. The trend of flooding in the north and drought in the south is striking. What’s more, the actual number of days with rain has fallen steadily in both northern and southern Taiwan. This means Taiwan’s rainfall is more concentrated and more intense when it does come. “This is a serious warning,” says Wang.

It is not only Taiwan that is being affected. The risk of drought faced across Asia is increasing in severity. Due to global warming, the ice stored in the Himalayas is forecast to shrink to just one-fifth of its present volume within twenty years. When it does, 400 million people across Asia will suffer from a lack of water.(see chart 2)

Impact Two: Sea Levels Rise, Taiwan Gets Thinner

Some say these are the words of scaremongers.

Former United States vice president Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” describes how global warming has sped up the melting of glaciers in the Arctic and Greenland and how the increasing volume of water flowing into oceans coupled with the expansion of seawater due to its rising temperature means such major cities as New York, Tokyo and Shanghai, all currently less than ten meters above sea level, will lie as sunken ruins under the sea.

The IPCC is obviously siding with Gore on this issue. If we accept the worst-case scenarios scientists such as James Hensen have generated through computer simulations, then by the end of the century sea levels could be six to thirty-five meters higher than they are now.

If in the end the Earth should act out the script detailed in these most pessimistic projections, just what would the scene in Taiwan be like in a hundred years?

Will the Rising Sea Submerge All of Tainan?

It is only early April and associate professor Lay Jinn-guey is already wearing short-sleeves. His laboratory in the National Taiwan University Department of Geology is covered with computer-simulated maps of Taiwan. Lay’s talent lies in geographic information systems (GIS) and he has simulated maps of how Taiwan would appear if it were submerged under six meters of seawater.

With the maps showing Tainan almost completely inundated by the sea, it is this historic city that would bear the brunt of mounting sea levels in Taiwan.

What about the Taipei Basin? Two hundred thousand years ago, it lay at the bottom of a lake. These days, lower sea levels allow it to stand dry four meters above sea level. Regardless, if the ocean were to rise six meters, the Danshui River would channel a flood of seawater directly into Taipei City, leaving million-dollar luxury apartments and billion-dollar commercial buildings jutting uselessly from the surface of “Lake Taipei.“

The sea around Kaohsiung is already rising at a rate of 0.06 centimeters per year. With further global warming, Taiwan’s second-largest city would be drowned and need to be renamed “Shoushan Island,” after its highest point.

If these predictions come to pass, a quarter of the Taiwanese population would find itself classified as what the United Nations refers to as “environmental refugees.“

Confronted with the impending encroachment of the sea, countries around the globe have begun conducting desktop simulations in preparation for future contingencies. These governments are now considering the impact of climate warming from the point of view of national security.

As one of the Low Countries, it is no wonder the Netherlands is working at the forefront of this issue. The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has already decided to relocate fields sustaining the small nation’s US$1 billion tulip industry to areas farther inland, opting to surrender to the sea land gained originally through reclamation. Moreover, due to flooding expected to come with rising sea levels, the agency has even begun to devise plans for rerouting the Rhine River toward the north to permit it to enter the sea from higher ground.

Floating Houses

With the waves expected to be lapping at our ankles, we can imagine a day when we will need to resort to living in floating communities.

This is not science fiction. The Netherlands, clearly the nation most conscious of the crisis of global warming, is currently constructing a fleet of “amphibious houses” that can accommodate the rising sea by floating as it rises. In the future, this community might play soccer on a field suspended on the water like a lily pad.

Perhaps these floating communities will not actually come for some time, but green architecture, an approach emphasizing energy efficiency and carbon reduction, has long been mainstream thinking in contemporary architecture. According to the statistics of the Ministry of the Interior Architecture and Building Research Institute, though Taiwan’s first “green building” went up just eight years ago, there are now one thousand around the island. Together, these buildings have saved NT$1 billion in electricity costs and allowed 265,000 fewer tons of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere.

Impact Three: Broken Eco-chain, Fleeing Species

The way National Taiwan University Global Change Research Center director Chung-Ming Liu breaks it down, climate warming is threatening already fragile ecological systems with annihilation. Warmer sea surface water along with ocean acidification caused by higher carbon dioxide concentrations have left 20% of the world’s coral reefs severely damaged. These lifeless, white skeletons permit the proliferation of toxic marine algae that can poison humans who have the misfortune of eating reef fish that have taken in these algae. Statistics show 50,000 people suffer poisoning after consuming reef fish every year.

Still, before humanity ends up a mass of environmental refugees, refugee species are already silently on the run.

Without making a sound, plant communities are migrating to latitudes farther from the equator in order to acclimate to rising global temperatures. They will need to travel distances of five to six hundred kilometers. An increase of two degrees Celsius in ocean temperatures will see fishing grounds for such fish species as mullet, Pacific saury, and mackerel shifting farther north, away from Taiwan. The nation’s catch of mullet is already shrinking year by year. Butterflies are on the move as well. Following two years of continuous observation, the National Taiwan University Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology was shocked to discover that tropical butterflies from Southeast Asia that had never appeared in Taiwan before had moved north and intruded on the territories of temperate butterflies.

Impact Four: Skyrocketing Insurance Claims, Slumping Economy

Seven hundred pages thick and cited by British prime minister Tony Blair as “the most important document on the future” he has read since taking office, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, released by former chief economist of the World Bank Sir Nicholas Stern in October 2006, lays out in exacting detail the impact of global warming on the world economy.

Stern predicts global economic production would fall by 3% should temperatures rise by just two degrees Celsius. The way he sees it, the world economy is set to pay a price of US$7 trillion for global warming over the coming decade.

As things heat up, insurance companies are finding themselves direct victims. Over the last fifteen years, worldwide insurance compensation payments for damages resulting from extreme climate changes have multiplied fifteen times. In Taiwan, insurance payouts for weather-related disasters have soared from a negligible NT$27 million in 2003 to NT$1.27 billion in 2005. This marks a forty-seven-fold increase over the brief period of just three years.(see chart 3)

According to Stern’s calculations, every ton of carbon dioxide humans pump into the atmosphere will lead to damages of at least US$85. The impact of this on industry is that “carbon content” is coming to be viewed the same as other business costs and will need to be appraised carefully.

Having closely followed the carbon-reduction targets adopted by different nations over the years, Young Chea-yuan, director of the Environmental Protection Administration’s Department of Air Quality Protection and Noise Control, reminds us that the primary export markets for Taiwanese products, namely Europe, North America and Japan, are instituting increasingly stringent criteria for cutting carbon emissions and are “still continually raising reduction volumes.” Young maintains this trend towards carbon reduction will eventually have its effect on Taiwan’s economy.

With the Kyoto Protocol having taken force in 2005, we have entered “the century of carbon restrictions,” an era in which the ability to lower carbon emissions will become a new indicator of business competitiveness. In the future, companies will finally have to confront the pressure to cut carbon. Governments must now take climate change and the limiting of greenhouse gases into consideration when formulating policy.

Anti-warming Profits on the Rise

From another angle, global warming does not have to be completely detrimental to the economy, and it is the emergence of industries that profit by addressing the challenges of climate change that stands as the most positive example of this.

Due to a continuing influx of venture capital, the 180 “concept stocks” around the world centered on countering the greenhouse effect have enjoyed an increase in their stock prices of over ten percent since just the beginning of the year. James Lee, general manager of Sinonar Corp., the first company in Taiwan to fabricate solar cells, points out that the photovoltaic industry has experienced thirty-percent annual growth over the last decade.

“There would be no solar energy industry if it weren’t for global warming,” asserts Motech Industries, Inc. chief executive officer Y. Simon Tsuo when discussing the issue. With global warming having provided the spark that previously launched his company to the top of the Taiwan Stock Exchange, Tsuo can only “thank the heavens.“

Five Minutes to Midnight

It is likely warming will even lead to the creation of new professions. NTU’s Chung-Ming Liu raises the example of how the young people of the future could find themselves having to apply for such unprecedented jobs as carbon emissions traders or climatic fengshui masters. “This is not a fashion, it’s a fact,” says Liu unequivocally, adding that everything you see in the future will be “definitely related to global warming.“

Definitely?

Popular American science-fiction and suspense novelist Michael Crichton is an influential standard-bearer in the effort to debunk the claims of those that endlessly promote the concept of global warming. He stands opposed to scientists continuously harping on the threat of global warming and has criticized global warming “authorities” as crying wolf. The only thing is, in this war of words, it is the global warming camp that is winning.

Backed by the endorsement of eighteen Nobel Prize laureates, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this year pushed its Doomsday Clock two minutes forward expressly to highlight the danger of global warming and listed climate change along with the prospect of nuclear war as the two greatest threats to human civilization. This decision leaves humanity now just five minutes to midnight on the conceptual clock.

National Taiwan University Department of Atmospheric Sciences professor Hsu Huang-hsiung regrets the controversy and feels that global warming is not purely a scientific question, that there is no right or wrong on this issue. Hsu sees it as a choice: “It’s like purchasing insurance for the Earth. You won’t regret it after buying it.“

As far as Taiwan is concerned, “when it comes to climate change, the important thing isn’t change, but the swiftness [of the change].” This is how the Central Weather Bureau’s Cheng Ming-dean sums up the issue. The climate will not display the stability it has in the past. Extreme climate fluctuations that in earlier times would have required ten to twenty thousand years to manifest themselves might appear within just fifty years if current trends continue.

“There’s a huge difference between being prepared and not,” declares Cheng with absolute certainty.

The EPA, shortly after Minister Chang took up his post in June of 2005, presented the “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act” and managed to deliver it to the Legislative Yuan for review in 2006. However, the law failed to be brought to deliberation during the latest legislative session and, to this day, the government has yet to set specific targets or timetables for limiting the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Determined to be the world’s most environmentally friendly city, London is a model when it comes to preparing for a rainy day. Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has announced that his city will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by sixty percent within twenty years and will impose a “zero-carbon” requirement on all new housing. London has also begun a pilot Green Homes “concierge service” to help the city’s citizens live low-carbon lives.H121H120

It is estimated that a rise in sea levels of only two meters will leave London submerged. This has prompted the city to invest the equivalent of more than NT$240 billion to repair and strengthen floodgates containing the River Thames.

Even before the water rises and our lives become defined by decisions over whether or not to limit carbon, you might first need to prepare yourself for an unbearably sweltering summer this year.

British meteorologist Phil Jones speculates that this year we are in for the hottest summer in recorded history, due to the effects of global warming converging with the El Nino phenomenon. This is hardly surprising, though. This record has been broken just about every year for the last twelve years.

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Of course English romantic poet Percy Shelley could not know that in the two hundred years since his death, winter has tended to arrive late and end early. The way things are going, these eternal words from the “Ode to the West Winds” may soon need to be revised to, “If winter never comes, can there be a spring?“

Translated from the Chinese by Stan Blewett

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EPA Minister Kow-Lung Chang:

Building a New Relationship between Mankind and the Environment

Carbon dioxide is a severe problem worldwide. We should all forge a consensus and establish a target that by a certain year carbon dioxide emissions are not allowed to increase anymore.

In Taiwan the EPA also very much hopes to have the power to set a target for the reduction of greenhouse gases, but that would require coordinating the considerations of different cabinet agencies.

When the EPA wants to set a reduction target and makes reasonable designs to achieve that target, the corporate world and the Ministry of Economic Affairs all voice different opinions. Strictly speaking, corporations are extremely unwilling to be regulated. The fewer regulations they have when setting up factories, the lower their costs will be. Companies can easily achieve carbon dioxide reduction. By simply burning natural gas instead of coal or oil, they can immediately decrease carbon dioxide emissions by one third.

We have not been able to reach a consensus on this issue in four conferences over the past years !V ranging from the first national energy conference in 1998, to the second energy conference two years ago, to last year’s conference on sustainable development and the subsequent conference on sustaining Taiwan’s economic development.

I don’t think that Taiwan’s policy of becoming a “nuclear-free homeland ” will change. Taiwan’s nuclear energy policy is no longer a simple technical and academic problem !V it has already become a political one. Presently, the differences among Taiwan’s political parties are so difficult to solve that not a single party is willing to bring up any political issue that could further complicate the situation.

Regarding the nuclear-free homeland policy, there is a broad consensus that from now on there will be no further increase in the number of Taiwan’s nuclear power plants. As long as the legislature does not adopt any new resolutions, I don’t think that there will be any change in that policy.

The EPA and some civic groups have always hoped that Taiwan’s economy will be able to develop toward high value-added industries that consume little energy or water and cause little pollution, thus upgrading Taiwan’s industrial structure. In the future, the EPA will continue to promote policies in that direction. But we also hope that the media and non-governmental organizations will be sufficiently vocally in their support of the EPA’s stance.

We need to pay a price for the material civilization we enjoy today. That is why environmental education is a must. Environmental education is a very broad concept. It includes the cultivation of good individual behavior, and religion as well. It’s like embracing a new faith in building a new relationship between humankind and nature. This faith means finding out how to use the least amount of natural resources, while still living the most satisfying, most serene life.(Compiled by Rui-Chen Liao)

 

Taipei mayor and former EPA minister Lung-Bin Hau:

Saving Energy Doesn’t Equal Saving Money

No matter whether a country has signed the Kyoto Protocol, it is the basic responsibility of citizens around the globe to pay attention to the greenhouse effect which causes global warming. Taiwan has always accepted the American mindset when it comes to energy. Since water and electricity are very cheap, people use them immoderately. Energy-saving is not about paying lip service !V most importantly we need to change our way of thinking.

We definitely need to accept the idea that saving energy does not equal saving money. We might even have to spend more to improve the environment. But it’s worth paying higher water or electricity fees, since the benefits for the public from an improved environment are much greater.

The Taipei City government is presently switching to energy-saving light bulbs and procuring energy-saving means of transportation. In the beginning these measures will incur higher costs, but they will also allow us to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and thus lower the city’s average temperature. Eventually, we may be able to use less electricity due to lower temperatures, so that all in all we will not necessarily spend more money.

In the future, for official purposes Taipei City will use hybrid vehicles that combine conventional and electric engines, or vehicles that use biofuels. The city’s Department of Urban Development is also encouraging the residential and commercial sectors to use green buildings. We are also doing urban greening projects throughout the city, because every additional 1% of vegetation coverage will lower the city’s temperature. Taipei City Hall and the Taipei City Council building will also be converted into model energy-efficient buildings. We will install rainwater harvesting systems, replace conventional light bulbs with energy-saving lamps, have the windows insulated against heat and be fitted with solar photovoltaic systems. We have even adopted a goal of cutting the City Government’s electricity bill by 1% every year.

Furthermore, in addition to reducing waste, we also generate electricity from methane and the heat produced by waste incinerators. This allows us to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 120,000 tons.

The carbon dioxide emission volume of Taipei City is on the decline. In 2005 greenhouse gases were reduced by 8%. Taipei City is also taking the lead in setting a 2% annual reduction target for emissions. It is estimated that by the year 2030, emissions will have been reduced by 25%.

Energy-saving Fengshui Consultants

In Taipei City the major sources of greenhouse gases are still the residential and commercial sectors, accounting for 70% of total emissions, while the remaining 30% are caused by transportation. We will ask fengshui experts to advise the city’s major power consumers on energy conservation.

We still need to start with energy saving in our own daily lives if we truly want to slow down global warming and bring down temperatures in Taipei City.

In my own home we recently switched to an energy-saving air conditioning system and energy-saving light bulbs. We compost all our kitchen waste at home. I also planned to install solar cells on the roof, but after doing some calculations I found that these could still generate only a very limited amount of electricity. So we’re just going to insulate the floors and the windows against heat as much as possible.

Global warming became serious only over the past two or three decades. If no one pays attention to this phenomenon, the eventual consequences will be very grave. But if we pay attention and take certain measures, we may be able to make the Earth slowly cool down again.

Translated from the Chinese by Susanne Ganz