Warming threatens our future.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Werner Fornos For The Register-Guard

Now that Oregonians have finished digging out from the biggest snowstorm in a decade, it may be time to give serious thought to an 1897 Charles Dudley Warner editorial in the Hartford Courant that claimed: "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."

Warner's point was to lament the powerlessness of human ingenuity against the deleterious forces of nature. More than a century later, we know that human activity has a great deal to do with provoking the ferocity of recent disturbing weather patterns, and a change in our behavior will be required to reverse these trends.

Doubts about the existence of global warming have been subdued, if not laid to rest, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international body made up of more than 2,500 scientists, that reported "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate."

The Sierra Club has placed the "discernible human influence" in three categories: cars and trucks, power plants and deforestation - all of which release industrial gases into the atmosphere to create the so-called "greenhouse effect" by trapping heat and increasing global temperatures. Concentrations of greenhouse gases have risen well above levels of 100 years ago: a 30 percent increase in carbon dioxide, from burning of fossil fuels and deforestation; a 145 percent increase in methane, from landfills, pipeline leakage, coal, rice paddies and cattle; and a 15 percent increase in nitrous oxide, from burning fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers.

The average car on the road today, during its lifetime, emits 50 tons of carbon dioxide pollution. But automotive pollution could be dramatically reduced by raising U.S. fuel economy standards to 45 miles per gallon for cars and 34 mpg for light trucks.

The Eugene area already is setting an excellent example in this regard, as the University of Oregon has more bicycles per capita than any other national university, but young people across the country must become the leaders of a conservation generation.

Power plants that burn coal, oil and, to a lesser extent, natural gas contribute greatly to global warming. As large numbers of people are added to the planet, more power plants must be built to accommodate their electricity requirements. Coal is the worst offender, producing twice as much carbon dioxide per unit of heat as natural gas, and a third more than oil.

When forests are cut down or burned to create more agricultural land and residential and commercial tracts, trees that served as a buffer against global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide release the gas into the atmosphere. Deforestation has been identified as a significant catalyst of the greenhouse effect. The world has lost half of its forest cover in the past century.

Devastating consequences of global warming include rising sea levels, extreme weather and infectious disease epidemics. In the past century, sea levels already have risen by a foot. They are projected to increase by another foot by 2050, a matter of no small concern in coastal areas such as Lane County. Fourteen of the world's 25 largest cities are on seacoasts.

Extreme weather - including both floods and droughts - is expected to become both commonplace and harsher than ever, jeopardizing agricultural production. In addition, the movement of people to cities has been perhaps the most dramatic demographic phenomenon of the past 50 years. Today, 47 percent of the world's inhabitants live in urban areas, where people are particularly vulnerable to severe climate conditions.

The higher temperatures in our future will enable disease-carrying insects and vermin to live in places where they were previously unable to survive. Already, there have been outbreaks of malaria and dengue fever in regions where they previously have not been a problem, including the United States.

The consequences of global warming may yet be curtailed by restricting the use of fossil fuels, by using alternative energy sources including solar and wind power, and by growing new forests around the world.

The long-term solution for preventing global warming, however, is a combination of population stabilization and cutting back on wasteful human consumption. These remedies may strike most of us as easier said than done because they entail changes in lifestyles, but the sacrifices we will have to make are not nearly as striking as the enormous changes the alternatives portend.

Werner Fornos is president of the Population Institute.