I wrote a guest column for the B-Green Collaborative that appeared on 10/19/2009: http://www.bgrncol.com/why-we-should-be-very-worried/
I'm curious what people think. If anyone has feedback, you can leave comments there, or here.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Can You Imagine?
Think about someone you love very much, maybe a child, spouse, or very close friend. Imagine what you would feel like if that person was in danger, say of drowning or being hit by a car. If you saw such a situation, you would try to save that person, right? Now imagine you tried to save them, but you were too late. How would you feel? And if your loved one’s death was preceded by immense suffering, wouldn’t that be even worse?
It’s not fun to even imagine those feelings, so why did I ask you to do it? Global warming is real, but it doesn’t seem real to us, even though we can see ample evidence even in these early stages. If it gets out of control, I think that people in the future will suffer enormously from hunger and many other afflictions and that many, possibly most of them will die because of it. It seems to be very difficult for most people to understand this even intellectually, and almost impossible to confront it emotionally. But because we are not confronting it, we are allowing it to happen. And that is why I want everyone to not just think about it, but also to feel it. Maybe then we will get serious about stopping it.
Of course there are all kinds of arguments going on about this subject, and there is still quite a bit of uncertainty with the models and predictions. I was pretty sure the models were too optimistic, because they didn’t take feedback into account, and they couldn’t reproduce the quickness or severity of changes in the past.
So let’s forget about the models and predictions for now, and just consider this. Scientists have been able to measure both the temperature and the CO2 levels of the past, and they correlate extremely well. In other words, when the CO2 level goes up, the temperature goes up, and when the temperature goes up, the CO2 level goes up. It doesn’t matter which comes first, and the more one goes up, the more the other goes up. That has been pretty firmly established. The values have been measured in more than one way, and they show the same thing. Until this year, ice core data was the best way to take these measurements from the distant past, and we had the numbers going back around 800,000 years. But at no time in that period were CO2 levels as high as they are now. Scientists have known this for years, and I don’t know why this didn’t worry more people.
In any case, this year scientists have discovered a way to take measurements going back much further. These new measurements match the ice core measurements during the same time period, so that means they are just as reliable. The new measurements show that the last time the CO2 level in the atmosphere was this high for an extended period of time was about 15 million years ago. At that time, global temperature was 5 to 10 degrees F higher than now, and sea level was 75 to 120 feet higher. See this article from ScienceDaily on the paper whose lead author is Aradhna Tripati.
It takes some time for temperature to catch up with CO2 levels, but unless the world behaves differently now than it has over the last few million years, the temperature should get approximately that high again if CO2 levels remain where they are. Sea level rises even slower, but eventually it should rise that much. This is much, much worse than the models that the IPCC based its estimates on, and governments are supposedly basing their policies on the IPCC estimates. But what would you trust more, estimates from models that don’t take feedback into account, or what actually happened in the past? I trust our ability to measure the past much more than our ability to predict the future.
Do you know how high about sea level you live? If you happen to live more than 120 feet above sea level, you wouldn’t have to worry about rising sea levels, but most people don’t live at elevations that high. All those people will have to migrate to other locations. All those cities, all those ports, even entire countries will be under water. So many lives will be destroyed. It may take a few hundred years, but still, do we want to cause that?
The temperature rise will happen much faster, and the consequences of it going that high are difficult to comprehend. I think the worst of the early consequence will be famine on a scale that has never happened before. Deserts will expand dramatically, and drought conditions will occur where most food is grown today. Probably the only productive food growing areas will be in places like northern Canada and Siberia, but they could never feed the entire world. The soil is poor, for one thing, and severe weather events would probably regularly destroy crops. There will be virtually no fish left because they depend on corals or plankton, which will disappear, and we are overfishing them to extinction anyway. I don’t see any way to avoid mega-famines until the human population is reduced to a size the new climate can support. I also don’t see how the systems we rely on (economic, governmental, and so on) could survive so many disastrous changes, and I would be surprised if civilization survives the stress.
I don’t know when all this will happen, but I’m pretty sure the food shortages will begin to happen in your children’s lifetime (your lifetime if you aren’t too old), and I think famines will be common in your grandchildren’s lifetime, if not sooner. That is why I asked you to imagine what you would feel like if a loved one had to suffer and die. Does the fact that this will happen in the future make it any less real or any less sad? And if you don’t care about the suffering and deaths of so many people, maybe you will care about the mass extinctions that will occur, or that it will take hundreds of thousands of years for biodiversity to recover.
You might think the fact that the consequences will mainly happen in the future means we have time, but you would be wrong. We are not yet feeling the full effects of the emissions released in our grandparents’ time. The situation is not completely hopeless yet, but I am convinced that the only way we can avoid a horrible future for our children and those who will be born later is for every government and every citizen to treat this as seriously as if they are in the middle of a world war. We can’t put this off any longer, because each year we wait the task gets much more difficult, and soon it will be beyond our capability to stop. I fear this point will occur very soon, but unfortunately we won’t know until years later. So I can’t prove it. But do we want to take that chance?
Our leaders will not do what is needed on their own. That is obvious now. Even the most enlightened are still relying on the older science, the faulty models and predictions. They are also hampered by special interests, and perhaps by a lack of understanding. I have only heard of one country so far that has pledged to do what even those optimistic models suggest is necessary. Only one! And remember, even that is not nearly enough if you are relying on the reality of the past instead of predictions of the future.
The United States Congress seems to be trying to fool people into believing they are doing enough, but they are not even close. If you doubt me, read on.
Box 13.7 on page 776 of the 2007 WG3 report from the IPCC indicates that industrialized (Annex I) nations need to reduce emissions 80–95% below 1990 levels by 2050 to keep GHG emissions to 450 ppm. If developing countries were not also reducing their emissions, and so far they have not pledged to do so, then industrialized nations would have to reduce their emissions even more. But the current bills aim to reduce emissions 80% below 2005 levels by 2050. This would be at the low end of the range even if they were using a 1990 baseline, but they are using a 2005 baseline, meaning they aren’t planning to reduce emissions even close to the minimum amount that the over-optimistic models say is needed!
And to make things worse, those models say industrialized nations also need to reduce emissions 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020. If they don’t, then the 80-95% reductions would not be enough. So how much is Congress currently aiming to reduce emissions by 2020? They say 17% (House version) to 20% (Senate version) below 2005 levels. According to William Becker, Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Change Project, the House bill would only reduce emissions 3.6% below 1990 levels by 2020 (so that must be equivalent to 17% below 2005 levels). The Senate bill doesn’t reduce emissions much more (4.2% below 1990 levels, if my math is correct). So their near-term reductions are woefully short of what is needed, even if the models were not way too optimistic. And that makes the 2050 targets even further off the mark.
If you can imagine your descendents living (or dying) in this future world, you must wish you could do something about it. So what can we do? Individual people or grassroots groups can’t make the necessary changes on our own, definitely not quickly enough. Only government has the resources and power. Therefore the only answer is to force our governments to do their duty to protect us and our descendants. We need to behave as if the lives of our loved ones were in danger, because they will be in danger. I wish I knew of a magic bullet, but I don’t. All I can say is email, write, call, and visit every government representative you can, and tell them they must do 10 times what they are currently considering, and they must do it 10 times sooner. Tell them they need to act as if the country was under a more dire threat than in WWII, because it is. Tell them you don’t mind paying more for gas and oil for a while in order to prevent your children and grandchildren from starving. And join as many actions as you can, such as the 10/24 actions being organized by http://www.350.org/. Write letters to the editor. Call the talk shows and ask them why they keep ignoring the most serious and urgent issue of our time. Talk to your friends and relatives, educate them. Don’t be afraid, don’t delay. Act like your kid’s life depended on it. And if you have any other ideas, write a comment below so others can see it. We can do this, but only if we take the threat as seriously as it deserves and do it now.
(To see what other blogs are saying about this subject, Visit http://www.blogactionday.org/, and click “Who’s Participating?”)
It’s not fun to even imagine those feelings, so why did I ask you to do it? Global warming is real, but it doesn’t seem real to us, even though we can see ample evidence even in these early stages. If it gets out of control, I think that people in the future will suffer enormously from hunger and many other afflictions and that many, possibly most of them will die because of it. It seems to be very difficult for most people to understand this even intellectually, and almost impossible to confront it emotionally. But because we are not confronting it, we are allowing it to happen. And that is why I want everyone to not just think about it, but also to feel it. Maybe then we will get serious about stopping it.
Of course there are all kinds of arguments going on about this subject, and there is still quite a bit of uncertainty with the models and predictions. I was pretty sure the models were too optimistic, because they didn’t take feedback into account, and they couldn’t reproduce the quickness or severity of changes in the past.
So let’s forget about the models and predictions for now, and just consider this. Scientists have been able to measure both the temperature and the CO2 levels of the past, and they correlate extremely well. In other words, when the CO2 level goes up, the temperature goes up, and when the temperature goes up, the CO2 level goes up. It doesn’t matter which comes first, and the more one goes up, the more the other goes up. That has been pretty firmly established. The values have been measured in more than one way, and they show the same thing. Until this year, ice core data was the best way to take these measurements from the distant past, and we had the numbers going back around 800,000 years. But at no time in that period were CO2 levels as high as they are now. Scientists have known this for years, and I don’t know why this didn’t worry more people.
In any case, this year scientists have discovered a way to take measurements going back much further. These new measurements match the ice core measurements during the same time period, so that means they are just as reliable. The new measurements show that the last time the CO2 level in the atmosphere was this high for an extended period of time was about 15 million years ago. At that time, global temperature was 5 to 10 degrees F higher than now, and sea level was 75 to 120 feet higher. See this article from ScienceDaily on the paper whose lead author is Aradhna Tripati.
It takes some time for temperature to catch up with CO2 levels, but unless the world behaves differently now than it has over the last few million years, the temperature should get approximately that high again if CO2 levels remain where they are. Sea level rises even slower, but eventually it should rise that much. This is much, much worse than the models that the IPCC based its estimates on, and governments are supposedly basing their policies on the IPCC estimates. But what would you trust more, estimates from models that don’t take feedback into account, or what actually happened in the past? I trust our ability to measure the past much more than our ability to predict the future.
Do you know how high about sea level you live? If you happen to live more than 120 feet above sea level, you wouldn’t have to worry about rising sea levels, but most people don’t live at elevations that high. All those people will have to migrate to other locations. All those cities, all those ports, even entire countries will be under water. So many lives will be destroyed. It may take a few hundred years, but still, do we want to cause that?
The temperature rise will happen much faster, and the consequences of it going that high are difficult to comprehend. I think the worst of the early consequence will be famine on a scale that has never happened before. Deserts will expand dramatically, and drought conditions will occur where most food is grown today. Probably the only productive food growing areas will be in places like northern Canada and Siberia, but they could never feed the entire world. The soil is poor, for one thing, and severe weather events would probably regularly destroy crops. There will be virtually no fish left because they depend on corals or plankton, which will disappear, and we are overfishing them to extinction anyway. I don’t see any way to avoid mega-famines until the human population is reduced to a size the new climate can support. I also don’t see how the systems we rely on (economic, governmental, and so on) could survive so many disastrous changes, and I would be surprised if civilization survives the stress.
I don’t know when all this will happen, but I’m pretty sure the food shortages will begin to happen in your children’s lifetime (your lifetime if you aren’t too old), and I think famines will be common in your grandchildren’s lifetime, if not sooner. That is why I asked you to imagine what you would feel like if a loved one had to suffer and die. Does the fact that this will happen in the future make it any less real or any less sad? And if you don’t care about the suffering and deaths of so many people, maybe you will care about the mass extinctions that will occur, or that it will take hundreds of thousands of years for biodiversity to recover.
You might think the fact that the consequences will mainly happen in the future means we have time, but you would be wrong. We are not yet feeling the full effects of the emissions released in our grandparents’ time. The situation is not completely hopeless yet, but I am convinced that the only way we can avoid a horrible future for our children and those who will be born later is for every government and every citizen to treat this as seriously as if they are in the middle of a world war. We can’t put this off any longer, because each year we wait the task gets much more difficult, and soon it will be beyond our capability to stop. I fear this point will occur very soon, but unfortunately we won’t know until years later. So I can’t prove it. But do we want to take that chance?
Our leaders will not do what is needed on their own. That is obvious now. Even the most enlightened are still relying on the older science, the faulty models and predictions. They are also hampered by special interests, and perhaps by a lack of understanding. I have only heard of one country so far that has pledged to do what even those optimistic models suggest is necessary. Only one! And remember, even that is not nearly enough if you are relying on the reality of the past instead of predictions of the future.
The United States Congress seems to be trying to fool people into believing they are doing enough, but they are not even close. If you doubt me, read on.
Box 13.7 on page 776 of the 2007 WG3 report from the IPCC indicates that industrialized (Annex I) nations need to reduce emissions 80–95% below 1990 levels by 2050 to keep GHG emissions to 450 ppm. If developing countries were not also reducing their emissions, and so far they have not pledged to do so, then industrialized nations would have to reduce their emissions even more. But the current bills aim to reduce emissions 80% below 2005 levels by 2050. This would be at the low end of the range even if they were using a 1990 baseline, but they are using a 2005 baseline, meaning they aren’t planning to reduce emissions even close to the minimum amount that the over-optimistic models say is needed!
And to make things worse, those models say industrialized nations also need to reduce emissions 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020. If they don’t, then the 80-95% reductions would not be enough. So how much is Congress currently aiming to reduce emissions by 2020? They say 17% (House version) to 20% (Senate version) below 2005 levels. According to William Becker, Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Change Project, the House bill would only reduce emissions 3.6% below 1990 levels by 2020 (so that must be equivalent to 17% below 2005 levels). The Senate bill doesn’t reduce emissions much more (4.2% below 1990 levels, if my math is correct). So their near-term reductions are woefully short of what is needed, even if the models were not way too optimistic. And that makes the 2050 targets even further off the mark.
If you can imagine your descendents living (or dying) in this future world, you must wish you could do something about it. So what can we do? Individual people or grassroots groups can’t make the necessary changes on our own, definitely not quickly enough. Only government has the resources and power. Therefore the only answer is to force our governments to do their duty to protect us and our descendants. We need to behave as if the lives of our loved ones were in danger, because they will be in danger. I wish I knew of a magic bullet, but I don’t. All I can say is email, write, call, and visit every government representative you can, and tell them they must do 10 times what they are currently considering, and they must do it 10 times sooner. Tell them they need to act as if the country was under a more dire threat than in WWII, because it is. Tell them you don’t mind paying more for gas and oil for a while in order to prevent your children and grandchildren from starving. And join as many actions as you can, such as the 10/24 actions being organized by http://www.350.org/. Write letters to the editor. Call the talk shows and ask them why they keep ignoring the most serious and urgent issue of our time. Talk to your friends and relatives, educate them. Don’t be afraid, don’t delay. Act like your kid’s life depended on it. And if you have any other ideas, write a comment below so others can see it. We can do this, but only if we take the threat as seriously as it deserves and do it now.
(To see what other blogs are saying about this subject, Visit http://www.blogactionday.org/, and click “Who’s Participating?”)
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