On Tue, 13 May 2008 09:45:43 -0500, David Hartung
<d_hartung@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>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.
That's nice. I doubt anyone cares, but thank you for sharing.
>
>> 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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An ex-Republican.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=8827
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