4075 Dead wrote:
> http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/11/8875/
A site which has on its opening page the phrase "Breaking News for the
Progressive Community" has credibility problems with me, much as
Worldnet Daily does with most liberals.
> Civilization’s Last Chance
> The Planet Is Nearing a Tipping Point on Climate Change, and It Gets
> Much Worse, Fast.
> By Bill McKibben
>
> Even for Americans — who are constitutionally convinced that there
> will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that,
> and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a
> Brand New Start — even for us, the world looks a little terminal right
> now.
>
> It’s not just the economy: We’ve gone through swoons before. It’s that
> gas at $4 a gallon means we’re running out, at least of the cheap
> stuff that built our sprawling society. It’s that when we try to turn
> corn into gas, it helps send the price of a loaf of bread shooting
> upward and helps ignite food riots on three continents. It’s that
> everything is so tied together. It’s that, all of a sudden, those grim
> Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about
> the “limits to growth” suddenly seem … how best to put it, right.
>
> All of a sudden it isn’t morning in America, it’s dusk on planet
> Earth.
>
> There’s a number — a new number — that makes this point most
> powerfully. It may now be the most im****tant number on Earth: 350. As
> in parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
yet the climate hasn't warmed in 10 years.
> A few weeks ago, NASA’s chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a
> paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract
> attached to it argued — and I have never read stronger language in a
> scientific paper — that “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet
> similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on
> Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change
> suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to
> at most 350 ppm.”
>
> Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points — massive sea level rise
> and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them — that we’ll pass if
> we don’t get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by
> last summer’s insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.
>
> So it’s a tough diagnosis. It’s like the doctor telling you that your
> cholesterol is way too high and, if you don’t bring it down right
> away, you’re going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear
> off the cheese, and, if you’re lucky, you get back into the safety
> zone before the coronary. It’s like watching the tachometer edge into
> the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas
> before you hear that clunk up front.
>
> In this case, though, it’s worse than that because we’re not taking
> the pill and we are stomping on the gas — hard. Instead of slowing
> down, we’re pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came
> the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per
> million last year — two decades ago, it was going up barely half that
> fast.
>
> And suddenly the news arrives that the amount of methane, another
> potent greenhouse gas ac***ulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly
> begun to soar as well. It appears that we’ve managed to warm the far
> north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost, and massive
> quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.
Yet the climate hasn't warmed in 10 years.
> And don’t forget: China is building more power plants; India is
> pioneering the $2,500 car; and Americans are buying TVs the size of
> wind****elds, which suck juice ever faster.
>
> Here’s the thing. Hansen didn’t just say that if we didn’t act, there
> was trouble coming. He didn’t just say that if we didn’t yet know what
> was best for us, we’d certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon
> dioxide in the atmosphere.
>
> His phrase was: “if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on
> which civilization developed.” A planet with billions of people living
> near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever-more
> vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has
> already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous
> infestation across the northern reaches of Canada this year. This
> means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms
> Canada’s efforts to comply with the Kyoto protocol, which was already
> in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the U.S.
> from Alberta’s tar sands.)
>
> We’re the ones who kicked the warming off; now the planet is starting
> to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and
> suddenly the nice white ****eld that reflected 80% of incoming solar
> radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of
> the sun’s heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the
> sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.
>
> And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them — to reverse
> course. Here’s the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri,
> who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel
> on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the
> Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his
> predecessor): “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What
> we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This
> is the defining moment.”
>
> In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed
> to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto accord (which, for
> the record, has never been approved by the United States — the only
> industrial nation that has failed to do so). When December 2009 rolls
> around, heads of state are supposed to converge on Copenhagen to sign
> a treaty — a treaty that would go into effect at the last plausible
> moment to heed the most basic and crucial of limits on atmospheric
> CO2.
>
> If we did everything right, Hansen says, we could see carbon emissions
> start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that
> CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out, we might even
> be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those
> tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very
> edge of the cliff.
>
> More likely, though, we’re the coyote — because “doing everything
> right” means that political systems around the world would have to
> take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new
> coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones
> already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way
> they’re supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as
> nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out
> efficient hybrids next year, just the way U.S. automakers made them
> turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means
> making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.
>
> It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time
> and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And
> hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing
> resources and technology freely with the poorest ones so that they can
> develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.
>
> It’s possible. The United States launched a Marshall Plan once, and
> could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But at a time when
> the president has, once more, urged drilling in the Arctic National
> Wildlife Refuge, it seems unlikely. At a time when the alluring phrase
> “gas tax holiday” — which would actually encourage more driving and
> more energy consumption — has danced into our vocabulary, it’s hard to
> see. And if it’s hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where
> people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as Americans do.
>
> Still, as long as it’s not impossible, we’ve got a duty to try to push
> those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality. In fact,
> it’s about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.
>
> After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can’t do this one
> lightbulb at a time.
>
> We do have one thing going for us — the Web — which at least allows
> you to imagine something like a grass-roots global effort. If the
> Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number,
> for making people understand that “350? stands for a kind of safety, a
> kind of possibility, a kind of future.
>
> Hansen’s words were well-chosen: “a planet similar to that on which
> civilization developed.” People will doubtless survive on a non-350
> planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the
> endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that
> civilization may not.
>
> Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security
> provided by a workable relation****p with the natural world. That
> margin won’t exist, at least not for long, as long as we remain on the
> wrong side of 350. That’s the limit we face.
>
> Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the
> author, most recently, of “The Bill McKibben Reader,” is the
> co-founder of Project 350, devoted to reducing carbon dioxide in the
> atmosphere to 350 parts per million. A longer version of this article
> appears at Tomdispatch.com.
>
> © 2008 Los
The idea that a society of around 7 billion people can affect Earth's
climate, is a rational one. the idea that a gas which makes about 1/3d
of 1% of the atmosphere is going to cause unstoppable warming, is hard
to swallow. Currently, it does not appear that the scientific community
has proven that this is going to happen.
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