On Tue, 13 May 2008 06:39:12 -0700, 4075 Dead
<zepp22114075@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/11/8875/
>
>Civilization’s Last Chance
>The Planet Is Nearing a Tipping Point on Climate Change, and It Gets
>Much Worse, Fast.
AKA Chicken Little, the sequel.
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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
>
>--
>"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government
>talking
>about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order.
>Nothing has
>changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists,
>we're
>talking about getting a court order before we do so"
>-George W. Bush, April 20, 2004
>
>Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!
>Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.
>
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