Climate: Will We Lose the Endgame? Bill McKibben

[G_j]

Last edited Thu Jun 26, 2014, 04:17 PM - Edit history (1)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jul/10/climate-will-we-lose-endgame/

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We may be entering the high-stakes endgame on climate change. The pieces—technological and perhaps political—are finally in place for rapid, powerful action to shift us off of fossil fuel. Unfortunately, the players may well decide instead to simply move pawns back and forth for another couple of decades, which would be fatal. Even more unfortunately, the natural world is daily making it more clear that the clock ticks down faster than we feared. The whole game is very nearly in check.
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a perfect, transparent cylinder, about a metre long, cut through with large crystal boundaries that were clearly visible as if through a window. It had never before been seen by human eyes. It was the oldest part of the oldest continuous ice core on Earth. I put my face close to it, careful not to touch, holding my breath.

The team, by the time it finally pulled up its drills, had taken the world’s climate record back about 800,000 years—through many ice ages and interglacial periods. And what it found was simple and unvarying:

Even when our climate was in some other phase, some different way of balancing the many subtle influences that make up the wind and weather and warmth we experience, temperature and greenhouse gases still marched in lockstep. Higher temperature always went with higher CO2. Lower temperature went with lower CO2.
Moreover, in all that long deep history, we’ve never had anywhere near as much CO2 in the atmosphere as we have today. According to Walker, “through the entire [ice core] record, the highest value of CO2 was about 290 parts for every million parts of air. Now we are at nearly 400 and rising.” That is to say, Antarctica, by virtue of being pristine, provides us the best glimpse we’re going to get of the bizarre geological moment we now inhabit.

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In order to put pressure on all the negotiators, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has invited world leaders to New York in September for a climate summit. That gathering will likely feature the usual fine words about future generations, but in view of the twenty-five-year record of diplomatic futility, many of us who have tried to push for action will use the occasion, and the New York backdrop with its fresh memories of Sandy’s inundation, for what may turn out to be the largest street rallies in the history of the climate movement.

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[Louisiana1976]

1. Excellent post. K&R

[mikehiggins]

2. civilisation will lose. earth abides

It seems unlikely our Western form of civilization (sic) will survive, nor will the planet continue to endure the 6 billion + population level. Western dominance will continue as long as our ammunition lasts but eventually a vastly reduced world population will survive at levels not even considered subsistence by us today.

Maybe next time humanity will get it right.