National Geographic: Six Degrees Could Change the World Page #4

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And hurricanes derive their rocket fuel

from the warming of the ocean.

scientists are still

investigating a connection

between global warming

and hurricane strength.

The summer of 2005 would bring

dramatic new evidence.

In late August,

a hurricane hunter aircraft

is dispatched over the Gulf of Mexico.

A colossal storm is building

and tracking straight

for the city of New Orleans.

Anyone left there has only

one word in mind: Katrina.

By Sunday, August 28th,

Katrina's winds reach

Thermal imagery along the storm track

reveals Katrina's clout.

Orange and red indicate

the sea temperature has risen

to 82 degrees Fahrenheit,

a full degree higher than normal.

Dropping pressure within the eye wall

is the fourth lowest ever recorded

for an Atlantic storm.

It revs Katrina even more.

When Hurricane Katrina makes

landfall in New Orleans,

it unleashes a terrible fury.

Within six hours, the storm

is on its way out of the city.

But the destruction of

New Orleans only gets worse,

transforming the natural disaster

into a national tragedy.

Jazz trumpeter Irvin Mayfield

grew up in New Orleans.

The storm surge and a breach

at the London Avenue canal

sent eight feet of water

into Mayfield's neighborhood.

His father stays

to protect the family home.

His body won't be found for weeks.

When someone

has lost their high school,

their junior high school,

elementary school,

their pictures, their video tapes,

their clothes, their friend's house,

their friend's mother's house,

barber shop,

the place they had their first kiss,

when you lose all that,

and some people lost loved ones.

When you have all

of that come together, it's...

You can't imagine the type of tragedy,

a city-wide catastrophe,

not even rivaled

by September 11th.

It's impossible to directly link

Katrina to global warming.

The process that forms

hurricanes is too complex.

But if the planet warms

by three degrees,

we could be in for a new generation

of super-storm.

If the Earth reaches

plus-three degrees,

over the next 40 or 50 years,

the planet's basic life-support systems

could begin to break down.

But beyond three degrees,

the science of global warming

becomes more and more speculative

and more and more frightening.

If the world warms by four degrees,

oceans rise, overtaking

heavily populated deltas,

home to a billion people.

Bangladesh, washed away.

Egypt, inundated.

Venice, submerged.

Glaciers disappear, shutting off

the flow of fresh water

to billions more.

Northern Canada becomes

one of the planet's most

bountiful agricultural zones,

while a beach in Scandinavia

could be the next St. Tropez.

The entire west Antarctic

ice sheet could collapse,

sending sea levels rising even further.

This could be our world

plus four degrees.

At four degrees, we really

do begin to see a planet

which is completely unrecognizable

from the one we know today.

We would see the possible drying up

of some of the most important

rivers in the world,

and this will endanger the survival

of tens and even hundreds

of millions of people.

if the planet

is ever four degrees warmer,

one of its great rivers

will be self-destructing,

at both ends,

from a high mountain glacier

to the Indian Ocean.

Locals call it "Mother Ganges,"

the holiest river in India,

perhaps in all the world.

Millions of devout pilgrims

gather each year

in a mass ritual to celebrate

the river's birthday,

when it is said,

the Goddess Ganga came to Earth

to save her people from drought.

Himalayan rivers

are the wellspring of life

for over a billion people

in China, Nepal and India.

Unless we begin to slow global warming,

in fewer than four decades,

the Ganges could be a river

fighting for its very life.

The battle will be fought here

in the vast crystalline ice fields

of the Himalayan glaciers,

the planet's largest store

of fresh water

outside of the polar ice caps.

Himalayan glaciers are receding,

the fastest of any in the world.

Few have ventured here,

to the headwaters of the Ganges,

as often as one man.

Swami Sundaranand,

an 80-year-old holy man known

as the "swami who clicks,"

has been photographing

the glaciers above the Ganges

for 50 years.

The first photo I took

of the glacier was in 1956.

After 1962, I started to worry

about the changes I was seeing

in the glacier.

I went to this glacier on foot in 1965,

to the base of Meru Peak.

When I went back after 15 years,

the glacier had vanished.

When I saw the glacier receding,

I became very worried

and started crying.

If the holy Ganges is not

in existence in the future,

the entire world will seem

like it has become an orphan.

The swami's trove of icescapes

documents 50 years of change

to this magnificent glacier.

Now NASA satellite imagery

confirms the rate of loss.

Side by side, the high

and low-tech images

tell a similar story,

one that spells danger for the future.

This was all glacier once,

before it started shrinking

Just a century ago,

this stone marked the edge

of the ice field

that has retreated

high up the mountain.

If the world warms five degrees,

two massive uninhabitable zones

spread into once-temperate regions

of the northern

and southern hemispheres.

Snow-pack and aquifers

that feed the world's great cities,

Los Angeles, Cairo, Lima, Bombay,

are drying out.

Climate refugees number

in the hundreds of millions.

This could be our world

plus-five degrees.

If we allow global warming

to take off that far,

I really see a situation where we have

conflict across vast areas of the globe

as the people who remain

and the people who survive

fight it out with each other for what

remains of the world's resources.

And it can get even worse.

If the world warms

by six degrees,

from a distance, the oceans

may appear bright blue.

But they are marine wastelands.

Deserts march across continents

like conquering armies.

Natural disasters

become common events.

Some of the world's great cities

are flooded and abandoned.

This could be our world

plus six degrees.

Warmings of six degrees over longer

time periods have been associated

with some of the most devastating mass

extinctions which have ever taken place.

It's fair to assume that

if temperatures soar by six degrees

within less than a century

that we're going to face nothing

less than a global wipeout.

Six degrees of warming has

been called "the doomsday scenario."

Our lives would never be the same again.

But it's not all doom and gloom, yet.

Most experts believe we can

awaken from the nightmare.

Right now, the average temperature

has only risen 0.8 degrees Celsius.

But we don't have much time.

We're talking about turning

around the energy supply

for most of humanity

within the space of a decade.

For anyone looking for solutions,

there's no place like home.

This is the Cohen residence,

a pleasant three-bedroom

in Snowmass, Colorado.

But lurking beneath the surface,

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