McKibben outlines climate change effects

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350: McKibben outlines climate change effects
By Global Warming Action Coalition
Thu Feb 19, 2009, 06:00 AM EST


Lexington - In a recent letter, author and Lexington native Bill McKibben began: “Act now, we’re told, if we want to save the planet from a climate catastrophe. Trouble is, it might be too late. The science is settled, and the damage has already begun. The only question now is whether we will stop playing political games and embrace the few imperfect options we have left.”

The letter addresses seven widely held misconceptions about climate change.

A synopsis of the first three misconceptions — Scientists Are Divided, We Have Time, and Climate Change Will Help as Many Places as It Hurts — ran in this column Feb. 5.

Here is the letter in its entirety.

1. Scientists are divided. There has been astounding consensus throughout the scientific community that global warming is real, dangerous, and caused by humans. Although the details of future forecasts remain unclear, there’s no serious question about the general shape of what’s to come.

By September 2007, there was 25 percent less ice in the Arctic Ocean than ever measured before. By the end of the summer season in 2008, so much ice had melted that both the Northwest and Northeast passages were open.

Scientists are breathless. The computer models said this shouldn’t have happened until sometime late in the 21st century. Even skeptics can’t dispute such alarming events.

2. We have time. The melting Arctic ice will help speed up global warming. The white ice that reflects 80 percent of incoming solar radiation back to space is being replaced with blue water that is absorbing 80 percent of the sunshine. As northern permafrost thaws, huge amounts of methane gas (an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) long trapped below the ice are escaping into the atmosphere.

Economist Rajendra Pachauri said recently that we must begin to make fundamental reforms by 2012 or watch the climate system spin out of control; NASA scientist James Hansen, who blew the whistle on climate change in the late 1980s, has said that we must stop burning coal by 2030. Period.

The Copenhagen climate change talks set to take place in December 2009 couldn’t be more urgent. At issue is the level of carbon dioxide in the air.

Hansen argues that 350 parts per million is the highest level we can maintain “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” We’re already past that mark — carbon dioxide levels are currently about 387 parts per million and growing.

Global warming suddenly feels less like a huge problem, and more like an Oh-My-God Emergency.

3. Climate change will help as many places as it hurts. Recent models are showing that after a certain point almost everyone on the planet will suffer. Crops might be easier to grow in some places for a few decades as the danger of frost recedes, but over time the threat of heat stress and drought will almost certainly be stronger.

A 2003 Pentagon report forecasts the possibility of violent storms across Europe, megadroughts across the Southwest United States and Mexico, and unpredictable monsoons causing food shortages in China.

The scenario suggests that as the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies will reemerge. Warfare may again come to define human life.

4. It’s China’s fault. China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s biggest carbon dioxide (CO2) producer, and everyone has read about the pace of power plant construction there. But a lot of that CO2 was emitted to build products for Western consumption.

Furthermore, China has four times the population of the U.S., and per capita it’s really the only way to think about these emissions. By that standard, each Chinese person now emits just over a quarter of the CO2 that each American does.

Not only that, CO2 lives in the atmosphere for more than a century. China has been at it in a big way less than 20 years, so it will be many, many years before the Chinese are as responsible for global warming as Americans.

Also, unlike many counterparts in the U.S., Chinese officials have begun a concerted effort to reduce emissions in the midst of their country’s staggering growth. China now leads the world in the deployment of renewable energy — barely a car made in the U.S. meets China’s tougher fuel-economy standards.

Climate change is neither any one country’s fault, nor any one country’s responsibility. It will require sacrifice from everyone.

Call it a Marshall Plan for the environment, which makes eminent moral and practical sense and could probably be structured so as to bolster emerging green energy industries in the West.

5. Climate Change is an environmental problem. While environmentalists were the first to sound the alarm, CO2 is not like traditional pollutant. There’s no Clean Air Act that can solve it.

We must make fundamental transformations in shifting away from fossil fuels to something else. For the U.S., it’s at least as much a problem for the Commerce and Treasury departments as it is for the Environmental Protection Agency. And because every country on Earth will have to coordinate, it’s far and away the biggest foreign policy issue we face.

6. Solving it will be painful. How painful addressing climate change will be depends. On one hand, you’re talking about transforming the backbone of the world’s industrial and consumer system. That’s certainly expensive.

On the other hand, if you manage to convert to solar or wind power, you’d save a lot of money on fuel.

And then there’s the growing realization that green energy could help pull us out of our current economic crisis — bigger than IT and biotech combined.

And what’s the cost of doing nothing? One renowned economist concluded that the costs of climate change could eventually reach the combined costs of both world wars and the Great Depression. For one thing, the increased costs of natural disasters begin to compound.

In essence, we’ve already done too much damage and waited too long to have any easy options left.

7. We can reverse climate change. The warming is happening faster than we expected, and the results are more widespread and more disturbing. None of that is going to stop, even if we do everything right from here on out. The only question now is whether we can hold off catastrophe.

It won’t be easy, because the scientific consensus calls for roughly 5 degrees more warming this century unless we do just about everything right. And if our behavior up until now is any indication, we won’t.

Bill McKibben is the author of 10 books, including “The End of Nature” and “Deep Economy,” and is a long-time advocate for taking action to halt global warming. A former staff writer for The New Yorker, he writes regularly for Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. Brought to you by the Lexington Global Warming Action Coalition.