|
Civilization's last chance
The planet is nearing a
tipping point on climate change, and it gets
much worse, fast.
Los Angeles Times
By Bill McKibben
May 11, 2008
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.
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 important 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 accumulating 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 windshields, 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 shield 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 relationship 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 (
www.350.org),
devoted to reducing carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere to 350 parts per million. A
longer version of this article appears at
Tomdispatch.com.
|
