An Unwelcome Heat Wave

SURE, THERE'S SNOW on the ground now. Maybe even more soon to come. But think back just a few weeks to a December that saw students walking to class in t-shirts. To one of the warmest Christmases on the books in much of the Northeast. To one of Cambridge's warmest autumns on record: 10 days of record-setting temperatures since October.

But the relatively mild winter may well not be cause for celebration or, given this week's temperatures, nostalgia. Many scientists are now claiming that the consequences of the long-predicted "Greenhouse effect"--the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from air pollution causing temperature increases--are finally being felt. They assert that it is more than coincidence that the greatest temperature rises in the past few years have occurred Boston, New York and Los Angeles--cities with the most severe pollution problems.

Unusual climate throughout the nation over the past ten months prompted the National Research Council to conduct intensive studies of the greenhouse effect. Their findings--which have been substantiated by numerous independent researchers--suggest that the pollution problem can have immediate and dramatic effects. The council asserts that the impact of the greenhouse effect could be felt at anytime, with "diverse consequences for human society."

The scientific community has been caught off-guard by the immediacy of the greenhouse effect because the long-held view that increasing carbon-dioxide levels could be predicted by looking at pollution levels has been shattered. Scientists have discovered that there are innumerable factors that cause a given amount of pollution to cause a greater build-up of carbon dioxide. Deforestation and the decreasing ability of ocean sediments to absorb carbon dioxide ,for example, has severely disrupted the carbon cycle--the process by which terrestrial life absorbs and breaks down carbon compounds and emits pure carbon into the atmosphere. Climatologists assert that the unexpectedly high atmospheric carbon dioxide level that has been recorded in recent years is in large part due to massive deforestation projects in South America and the Soviet Union.

The committee's prediction that the greenhouse effect could have "diverse consequences for human society" meanwhile is based on a newfound respect for the potentially devastating impact of the greenhouse effect. It has long been suspected that increasing carbon dioxide levels would melt the polse ice caps leading to massive costial flooding and seriously disruption agricultural production, but recent studies have turned a possibility into a probability. The greenhouse effect has already caused glacier movements in the Canadian Arctic and Antarctica. Still, more foreboding is that recent studies of the Ice Age 40,000 years ago suggest that the last glacier, movement coincided with a 50 percent rise in carbon dioxide levels. Given that the carbon dioxide level has risen by over 25 percent in the past 25 years and is expected to rise by at least 100 percent by 2090, it would be a grave mistake to ignore the ecological impact of the greenhouse effect.

UNFORTUNATELY, there is a limit to how much can be done to stem the tide of increasing pollution. A worldwide consensus on the problem is unlikely given that the risks of a climate change differ from nation to nation. Unilateral action seems even more unlikely given the industrial nations economic dependency on the polluting industries. An Environmental Protection. Agency report released in October this concluded." It is extremely unlikely that any substantial actions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions would of would be taken unilaterally.

As a result, the National Research Council may be right when it advises that the only thing we can do to adjust to the greenhouse effect is to adjust climate patterns. We are destroying the environmental are rare faster than over the imagined and here in Cambridge we have the dubious honor of among the first to feel the effects of that destruction.