If your oldest child is seven, the window slams shut before he or she will be old enough for a driver’s license. If your first grandchild was born this year, cherish your posterity: that grandchild’s likely to be the last of your line. Unless….unless we force action now and over the next 100 months.
The Window Before Climate Change Closes Down Our Kids’ Future: 100 Months, Or Less?
Here’s why:
The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere today, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, is the highest it has been for the past 650,000 years. In the space of just 250 years, as a result of the coal-fired Industrial Revolution, and changes to land use such as the growth of cities and the felling of forests, we have released, cumulatively, more than 1,800bn tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Currently, approximately 1,000 tonnes of CO2 are released into the Earth’s atmosphere every second, due to human activity. Greenhouse gases trap incoming solar radiation, warming the atmosphere. When these gases accumulate beyond a certain level – often termed a “tipping point” – global warming will accelerate, potentially beyond control.
It’s a simple equation. There’s this much CO2 in the atmosphere. We add this much more each day. At some point it reaches the tipping point.
There is no credible debate about this among those who study the problem. The debate is when and how bad it becomes. The serious scientists keeping sending stronger and more frightening alarms while we dither.
The carbon industries, and their political cronies, are keeping the sense of doubt alive by getting the media to act as if the question about CO2 was still being debated.
There is, of course, only one time when it is OK to yell fire in a crowded theater — when the theater is on fire.
By a factor of at least 1000 water vapor is the greenhouse gas most prevalent in the earth’s atmosphere. That means that a 0.1% change in cloud cover would overwhelm a 100% change in CO2. Neither is very likely.
That guy Simms doesn’t even know the difference between positive and negative feedback. He thinks that positive feedback is good and scientists somehow subverted the meanings of positive and negative as a joke. Wow!
Arguing over the use of the term “feedback” is a red herring.
If Simms and the majority of climate scientists are right, but we do nothing about CO2, our grandchildren won’t survive to old age Ephraim.
If you’re right, but we do something about CO2 anyway, what”s the harm? The technology is here, we just prefer to do things the old way (fossil fuels). Changing how we do things would mean — even IF the climate weren’t an issue — less dependency on imported fuel, less pollution, new opportunities for high-tech companies.
Most of the fixes proposed, such as conserving gasoline, etc, would have no or little effect on global temperature. The effect would be to make poor people MUCH poorer. Think of $10 gasoline and higher food prices.
The real danger, as I see it, is that mankind will start something it can’t stop. See http://www.nmt.edu/mainpage/news/2008/7july01.html for one proposal. As I posted before, global cooling is MUCH more dangerous than global warming. In the ultimate would you rather have 20 feet more ocean or an ice sheet over much of Europe and North America. They’re both within 10 degrees C of here.
Fire!
Yes, it’s way past time, and I’m not just talking global warming: I’m talking peak oil, population growth, declining arable land, overfished and polluted oceans, rainforest destruction, habitat loss, species going extinct, etc. There are so many indicators that human activity is damaging the biosphere I think we’re in a bit of decision paralysis.
If the 1% policy is good enough for Dick Cheney to justify invading Iraq, it seems me we have at least a 1% probability that we’ve seriously screwed up our biosphere and we should do something about it. Unfortunately, I think it’s too late: there’s too much momentum in the system and everybody resists change, even when they know it’s necessary.
I think as long as you have people more interested in settling old scores or rolling the clock back 1300 years (or insisting that everything’s okay, let’s order another drink and rearrange the deckchairs), we’re screwed.
At least, that’s what the objective side of my mind says. The side that loves to look up at the stars and wants my children to grow up in better world is working and hoping for the best. I’m deeply convinced there’s a better way for us all to live and that we can get through this, but not until we admit we have problems and question some deeply held assumptions.
Like “The American way of life is not negotiable.” Screw that. It certainly is when you want to torture people, so why can’t we tell people to stop having large families, to start growing their own food, to turn off the A/C and open the windows, to turn off the TV and read a goddam book for a change.
Anyway, this was fun. Good topic, Ken: thanks!
Well said, Richard.
When BIll McKibben talked to a large group at UNM this spring, I asked him whether his worst-selling book was going to be reprinted in honor of our collective circumstances on this planet.
He grinned and said, Well, so few people agreed with you that the simplest way to cut your family’s carbon emissions is to limit yourselves to one child, that Maybe One is the only book I’ve published that is no longer available in paperback.
These are small things, giving up the four trips to the beach every year looms larger, but is literally the least we can do.
10 dollar gasoline is coming anyway. We are currently at or near peak oil production and the worlds standard of living continues to increase. So if the rest of the world follows our example there will be more cars and trucks along with an increased need for electric power generation.
Reduction of CO2 emissions is not necessarily a bad thing.
As I see it every reduction we make in energy consumption increases our standard of living since the money that would otherwise go to oil or power companies can be used for other things. For example I could live outside burning oil in a large drum and spend my entire paycheck for heat and still not be comfortable. Over time an insulated house uses fewer resources and is much more comfortable.
Likewise any efficiency improvement our industries achieve will make our products more competitive in the world marketplace since they will cost less to produce.
Renewable energy is cost effective. T. Boone Pickens is not an environmentalist. He’s an oil man and I can’t imagine he would propose a massive wind energy project if he didn’t think that he could make a profit. Again the more renewable energy sources we have in place the more competitive US industry will be when fossil fuel prices rise.
And fewer coal fired plants means less mercury in the environment.
Some renewable energy sources such as rooftop solar water heaters (soon to be required in Hawaii) and rooftop photovoltaic panels have an extremely small environmental impact after installation.
If what we have wasted in the middle east had instead been spent on power generation we could have been well into the process of bringing on several hundred thousand megawatts of renewable generation capacity by now.
By the way I’ve experimented with reducing my speed from 65MPH to 55MPH and I get about a 10% improvement in gas mileage. On most trips the time difference is only a couple of minutes since people will speed by me only to be caught by the next traffic slow down.
I think Edward Abbey had something with his statement. “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” The world can’t support several billion more people consuming resources at the current US consumption rate.
Extending your metaphor slightly:
Yelling FIRE! in a crowded theater will result in people dying. It’s a good idea to check if there’s really a fire in the men’s room or just the usher taking a cigarette break.
This means to me that doing something because we can is not a good strategy. People will die.
Even something as simple as keeping your tires properly inflated means that a whole new infrastructure will have to be established just for that. Just imagine the traffic through the new air stations if a law is passed that mandates pressure control. Air stations will be pressured to be free but the spirit of TANSTAAFL will win. Who’s going to pay for that infrastructure? Will there be air pressure police? Will the government have to subsidize them? What will an air pressure violation ticket cost?
Tesla worked on electricity at roughly the same time as Edison, and his inventions allowed for the creation of free electricity. Edison’s patents were used instead because wealthy people could make boocoo bucks selling electricity Edison’s way, while Tesla’s way didn’t make a lot of money for anyone. It is still possible to generate free electricity with a minimum cost for parts to get started, but don’t think the energy corporations are going to make it simple for us. Water as fuel for automobiles is another solution to our problems. But, of course, neither technology is getting enough attention or funding, because the powers that be don’t give fig about what happens to the future of our environment, and some hard core religious zealots even welcome “the end of days” as predicted in their Bible. What we need is to reach a tipping point of consciousness raising now, so that we do save our planet in time, as opposed to a tipping point of doom and destruction.
Am I to understand that it is not now possible for people to voluntarily keep their automobile tires properly inflated within the current level of bureaucracy?
Hey, if it helps in the war against global cooling I’ll go let some air out of my tires right now.
There is no credible debate about this among those who study the problem.
Truer that you know, Ken.
The basis for scientific inquiry is contrasting debate and study; those who attempted to pursue contrasting study were shouted down, not by the scientific community, but by the public.
The science behind global warming is so sketchy European schools are not allowed to show Gore’s “documentary.”
So far this has all the earmarks of the “Monkey Trials” with the possibility of institutionalized corruption; i.e. “Carbon Trading”, “Carbon Offset Payments”, “Carbon Footprint Offsets”.
And the Kyoto Protocols – for which we have roundly castigated Bush et al, promised to decimate our economy in exchange for pushing an arbitrary temperature target out by five years.
I have largely quit following the writings of “environmentalists” until I know whether they actually produce something or are simply highly paid shills for a buck chasing the next “environmental crisis” in pursuit of another days work. There is as much money in the environmental movement as in any large corporation – and yet we assume that they all wear Birkenstocks, are fundamentally honest, and well intentioned. Not so. Follow the money if you want to know the truth.
Way to bring out the trolls, Ken: There is as much money in the environmental movement as in any large corporation
That’s why we’re always reading about the billions in profit the “environmental movement” make each quarter. And even if the above were true, the “environmental movement” – as large as it may be – is minuscule in comparison to the oil and gas industry, the power generation companies, the automobile manufacturers, the fishing fleets, the corporate farms, the mining companies and the logging firms.
Meanwhile, $10 gas is the least of our worries for the poor, and it doesn’t even include the true costs of carbon emissions on our residents. The effects of pollution on our health and welfare are negative; the money we have to spend on defense to protect our interests in foreign oil are enormous; and out car-centric planning makes affordable housing development more difficult to implement.
Meanwhile, global warming deniers are happy to continue with the status quo: no efforts to reduce demand or increase efficiency in the U.S., while China and India continue to grow and hunger for more oil and gas. We should be pushing innovation as quickly as possible to fundamentally shift away from hydrocarbons, which will have two positive effects: keeping prices lower as demand in the U.S. subsides, and insulating us from spikes and shocks in global markets.
But, oh no, there’s nothing wrong – everything we’ve been doing the last 8 years has been such an obvious and resounding success.
Oh, wow — a differing opinion automatically equals “troll?”
Emmett and I don’t always agree on the issues (the environment is one where we typically diverge), but he is especially well-read and well-studied on the subject, and I’m always willing to listen to an educated opinion.
Name calling is counter-productive. As is a closed mind. In fact, those traits are two I usually associate with the rabid RIGHT wing.