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Worsening Climate Change

Comment by Larry Ross, February 20, 2007

Bill McKibben's excellent essay shows that the IPCC report that we face a serious global warming crisis is very conservative. The actual situation is worse. "The amount of carbon in the atmosphere is now increasing at a faster rate even than before" and "almost everything frozen on earth is melting" "If we don't take the most aggressive possible measures to curb fossil fuel emissions immediately, then we will see temperature increases of - at the best estimate - roughly 5 degrees Fahrenheit during this century" That would produce a "totally different planet, one much warmer than that known by any of our ancestors." "A far more rapid rise in sea level may be possible because the great ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic appear to have begun moving more quickly toward the sea."

"Anything less than an all out assault on carbon in our economy will be rendered meaningless by the increasing momentum of global warming." We are going to have to work very hard "to have even a chance at limiting the damage" the IPCC report indicates.

Some of the questions not covered are (1) How will Bush's wars in Iraq, the coming much larger Iran war and probable ongoing wars to implement Bush's plans to dominate the middle east for it's oil resources, effect any US efforts to reduce global warming?

Serious efforts to reduce global warming are unlikely under the Bush regime, even though fast action is essential. Bush's war plans will take precedence. New larger wars will tend to sideline global warming issues, allowing the situation to drift on and worsen.  

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The Real News about Global Warming

by Tom Engelhardt

The world is, it seems, melting like an ice cream cone in the sun. Let me leave it at that.

As all Tomdispatch readers know, I write the introductions to posts at this site. This post is undoubtedly the exception that proves the rule. The editors of The New York Review of Books have been kind enough to let me put out Bill McKibben's striking essay on the real news lurking in the latest major report on global warming. (His piece appears in the March 15 issue of the magazine, now on the newsstands.) McKibben whose new book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future , is about to be published (and eagerly awaited by me), has been involved in important recent organizing efforts re: climate change. So I decided to give him the first -- and last -- word today. Tom

Bill McKibben : "This piece is an account of a scientific triumph -- the ongoing effort to understand and warn about climate change in a timely fashion -- and also, of course, of a political debacle -- the complete failure of our government over two decades to address the problem in any fashion whatsoever. But it ends with a paragraph about an effort now five weeks old and, so far, entirely confined to the Web. When we launched stepitup07.org in mid-January, we hoped we might be able to find a couple of hundred groups and individuals around the country who would agree to hold rallies on April 14.

"That would have represented by far the largest demonstration against global warming in U.S. history. By this point, our wildest imaginings have been long since surpassed -- we're nearing 700 actions scheduled for April 14, and the sheer genius people have brought to designing some of them boggles the mind. There will be underwater demonstrations, rallies on top of mountains, and on and on. All of it makes me think of the example and the words of Rebecca Solnit on Tomdispatch.com in recent years: As far as I can tell, she's absolutely right in her confidence that people around the country and around the world can, joyfully and powerfully, rise to the challenges in front of us. People power is a lovely thing to behold!"

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Warning on Warming

by Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books, March 15, 2007

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report in early February, it was greeted with shock: "World Wakes to Climate Catastrophe," reported an Australian paper. But global warming is by now a scientific field with a fairly extensive history, and that history helps set the new findings in context -- a context that makes the new report no less terrifying but much more telling for its unstated political implications.

Although atmospheric scientists had studied the problem for decades, global warming first emerged as a public issue in 1988 when James Hansen, a NASA scientist, told Congress that his research, and the work of a handful of other scientists, indicated that human beings were dangerously heating the planet, particularly through the use of fossil fuels. This bold announcement set off a scientific and political furor: many physicists and chemists played down the possibility of serious harm, and many governments, though feeling pressure to react, did little to restrain the use of fossil fuel. "More research" was the mantra everyone adopted, and funding for it flowed freely from governments and foundations. Under the auspices of the United Nations, scientists and governments set up a curious hybrid, the IPCC, to track and report on the progress of that research.

From roughly 1988 to 1995, the hypothesis that burning coal and gas and oil in large quantities was releasing carbon dioxide and other gases that would trap the sun's radiation on Earth and disastrously heat the planet remained just that: a hypothesis. Scientists used every means at their disposal to reconstruct the history of the earth's climate and to track current changes. For example, they studied the concentration of greenhouse gases in ancient air trapped in glacial cores, sampled the atmosphere with weather balloons, examined the relative thickness of tree rings, and observed the frequency of volcanic eruptions. Most of all, they refined the supercomputer models of the earth's atmosphere in an effort to predict the future of the world's weather.

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