Posted by
Aaron McLucas on Sunday, May 11, 2008 11:24:45 AM
Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and author, wrote a opiniion piece in the
LA Times today talking about how we need to get our CO2 back under 350 parts per million; hence his website,
www.350.org.
I am surpised his article was in the opinion section instead of plastered across the front page. He qoutes from
Dr. James Hansons latest scientific paper in making his case.
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."
The tipping point is now 350 PPM of CO2; we are currently at 385 PPM and we have little time to get below 350 before something bad happens.
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.
Unfortunantly, he did not tell us what will happen. If your cholesterol is high you will have a stroke. If our CO2 stays above 350 we will...
Here are the sacrifices we will have to make, just like we did with the Marshall plan:
-- 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.
Sounds like Communism to me.
I understand the worry, and we do need to reduce our CO2 emmisions, but once again we are telling people that we have such a short time to fix things. And under that kind of pressure, only a couple of scenerios can possible take place. Either we submit all power to our governments or to one world government to 'control' the climate, or we come up with horrible laws (like our current law of adding ethanol to our fuel) that could bankrupt our economies and do little to change the actual CO2 content of the atmoshpere (like Kyoto). And developing countries like China and India are, all by themselves, contributing huge amounts of CO2 to the Earth's atmosphere and could no longer be exempt from any future agreements.
I don't buy into the urgency and doomsday scenerios that some in the climate science field are pushing. Logical and well thought out solutions can be found and should be found, by the private sector, not handed to us by an overly powerful and suspect organization like the U.N. and the IPCC.