Mariette Di Christina

Mark Worden (Standard British accent):

Mariette Di Christina is the editor of Scientific American. We asked her about the threats posed by climate change:

Mariette Di Christina (Standard American accent):

One thing we can say is the world would be very different and we’re already seeing evidence of a different world today and we can also say that that world would be less easy to live in than the world is today, or at least less easy for where people live today. For instance, in the United States there’s a large belt across the country called  “the Breadbasket”: this is where a lot of grains and food and wheat are grown. If climate change continues, and that location of that band of fertile area shifts, that doesn’t mean it disappears, what it means is the people who lived where they lived, their lives are now disrupted, so then urban areas could end up – you know, let’s say the cities of Chicago and so on, end up where now it would be a better place to grow crops, but we have all this city infrastructure there, but the climate has shifted.

Another thing that happens is a lot of us in the United States, something like 50 per cent of the people live within 50 miles of the coasts, so our coasts have our most dense urban concentrations of people. And if sea levels rise, then those people will be displaced, or they’ll be inconvenienced, or the land will change, it doesn’t mean they’re all going to die! You know, we shouldn’t be so dire about what global climate change means. It means things will be different and that it will be costly because right now all our infrastructure, right like here in New York, New York is right on sea level and there’s a lot of buildings here: if the sea level rises, what happens to all those buildings? They’re still going to be there with a lot of water on them, then how do you manage that?  Do you put in pumps and pump the water out? Anything else we would do would be more expensive to manage than what it is today.

Another way things are changing is the Arctic climate is clearly warming, there’s more vegetation, in Arctic areas, Scientific American has an article coming up on that very soon, and those create other kinds of climate shifts in those areas for the animals that live in those areas, you know, the ones that rely on permafrost and a certain temperature, for those ecosystems to remain stable. So I think what we can expect to see is water where we didn’t want it, or expect it, drier air where we didn’t expect it and some places will be warmer and some will be colder, one might expect less predictable weather in general. So human beings are not all going to disappear, but our lives will change, and the planet, by the way, will be here. The planet’s been evolving for billions of years and it’ll continue, whether or not humans are successful and live comfortable lives on it.

(Mariette Di Christina was talking to Lorenza Cerbini)

LINKS:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/

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