Avoiding Our Carbon Induced Catastrophe

It was a cold day in Washington, D.C. and Bill McKibben was there. The prospect of catastrophe was quite real, and the window of opportunity to avoid such catastrophe closing rapidly.

Those prospects remain the day after civil disobedience at Kapitol Koal. Such prospects have been anticipateed by many, including by this blog. (Whoops! There goes another tipping point.) Bill McKibben recently described them:

So far, the planet’s temperature has gone up little more than one degree Fahrenheit,1 but Earth is more finely balanced than we’d realized, and that one degree has been enough to knock it off-kilter. Hydrological cycles have been destabilized—we see massive increases in both droughts and flooding because warm air holds more water vapor than cold. We see increasingly intense storms. And in the last two years we’ve seen a jaw-dropping sight: the runaway melt of Arctic sea ice. This is a sign that the warming human beings kick-started has begun to take on a life of its own; the open Northwest Passage not only proves that the planet is heating up but, because blue water absorbs sunlight that the white ice once reflected, amps up the warming.

One degree so far, but the consensus suggests that, without truly dramatic action very soon, Earth’s temperature will rise by something on the order of an additional five degrees within this century. And if anything like that happens? Picture this: monsoons shifted off their historic paths. Sea levels rising so high and so fast that you can pretty much forget the coastlines where civilization developed. In fact, we may well end up losing much of civilization.

That strikes you as overblown, right? Yet the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s James Hansen, our foremost climatologist, wrote in 2008 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 carbon dioxide will need to be reduced” 2 to no more than 350 parts per million.

The key word in that sentence is the last one: reduced. Almost all climate policy work has focused on the idea that we’ll eventually need to cap the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, at 550 parts per million, say, or 450 parts per million. But the melt of the Arctic should kill those cozy plans. We’re at 385 parts per million of carbon dioxide right now, up from 275 before the industrial revolution. Hansen says that any number above 350 parts per million will push us past all the tipping points. We’re like the guy whose doctor says, “Your cholesterol is too high.” Not, “It will be too high if you go on like this,” but too damn high right now—you’re in the zone where strokes and heart attacks happen.

When the doctor says that, some percentage of smart people go cold turkey. They stop messing around with half measures and start eating a healthy diet, even if they don’t much care for it, and spending an hour a day on the treadmill, even if they’d rather be lying on the sofa watching TV. If they’re lucky, they get their cholesterol numbers down and avoid a stroke.


From right to left, Bill McKibben, Jim Hansen and Wendell Barry protesting at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, DC on 2 March 2009

So what, if anything changed by a gathering on a day, when the weather was a delight to every denier and delayer watching? It was a moment to speak truth to dirty power. It was a defining moment in our story, as it was for the Civil Rights movement, as it was for the fight against fascism by the Greatest Generation.

The talking kept going and the marching and demonstrations have started. McKibben writes:

We’ve got colleagues on every continent organizing marches and actions and art and music. We are raising consciousness, which sounds less important than raising windmills and solar panels but in fact is even more crucial. You can’t make the math work one lightbulb at a time, so we need to change the system.

And, the leaders of the Climate Action movement have their sights set upon another critical moment, “when the world again comes together in Copenhagen, in December 2009, to strike a new climate deal, a successor to the Kyoto treaty.”

Che was asked how he could resolve being a violent revolutionary with his being a physician and ascribing to the Hippocratic Oath. Google his response. I daresay that you might get a similar response if you asked a certain scientist (the dude in the white hat), who has relegated empiricism for activism.

Continue reading here: Drought Eases in Southeast for Now

Was this article helpful?

0 0