Last Call

Over at Rolling Stone, Bill McKibben's piece on global climate change is a must-read...and it will scare the hell out of you.  The bottom line is there is no real effort to stop climate change on a global scale, we had decades to act and we as a globe did nothing.

Now we're paying the price.  Welcome to the new normal.

Some context: So far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target. "Any number much above one degree involves a gamble," writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, "and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up." Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, puts it like this: "If we're seeing what we're seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much." NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet's most prominent climatologist, is even blunter: "The target that has been talked about in international negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster." At the Copenhagen summit, a spokesman for small island nations warned that many would not survive a two-degree rise: "Some countries will flat-out disappear." When delegates from developing nations were warned that two degrees would represent a "suicide pact" for drought-stricken Africa, many of them started chanting, "One degree, one Africa."

Now keep in mind we're heading for six degrees.  Celsius.  Long after you and I are dead, our grandchildren will be cursing us as Luddites and fools.  And we are:  we live in a country where any given month it's a tossup as to if there's a majority of people who believe in evolution, let alone global climate change.  Billions have been spent to make us stupid and ignorant, and it's worked.  And with energy giants making tens of billions yearly to feed the world oil, it will never, ever stop.

Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

We're pretty much done, folks.  For Generations X and Y, we'll be spending the rest of our lifetimes trying to clean up the damage caused in the first decade of this millennium.  It's all but over now except for just how bad the butcher's bill will be.

Our kids and grandkids will never forgive us.  And we have no right to ask for their forgiveness.