Cole writes: "It seems to me, that Earth Day has to be above all about stopping the CO2 avalanche and keeping warming to 3.6 degrees F."
Windmills. (photo: Flickr)
22 April 15
was a junior in high school on April 22, 1970, on the first Earth Day, called for by Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wi) (d. 1981). The road leading to our school had been littered with trash, and a group of us went out with black plastic bags and cleaned it up.
Environmentalism meant something different in 1970 than it does now. We were worried about industrial pollution. And trash. The air in Los Angeles, where we lived for a while in the late 1960s, was extremely polluted, so that you couldn’t really go for a jog. I was in Beijing last month, and it now is like L.A. was then.
That the real problem was the carbon dioxide and methane that humanity was releasing into the atmosphere may have been realized by an elite group of climate scientists, it wasn’t widely understood. In the days before computer modeling it wouldn’t have been easy to say conclusively that we were dangerously warming the globe.
Now, it seems to me, that Earth Day has to be above all about stopping the CO2 avalanche and keeping warming to 3.6 degrees F. (2 degrees C.). Or if we can’t do that, we have to try to stop it at 5 degrees F. If we go to a 4 degrees C. increase (7.2 degrees F.), that could be a step too far. The climate could go chaotic, with superstorms, massive sea level rise, drought and desertification in some regions, crop disease, and a die-off of sea life. We could even make it hotter than that if we keep emitting CO2 and other greenhouse gases. And there is the real danger that a warming ocean will release frozen methane clathrates from the seafloor, in a one-two punch that could heat things up really dramatically. This kind of thing has happened before in the geologic record.
Mind you, even a best case scenario of a 3.6 degrees F. rise could still lead to 20 to 40 feet of sea level rise over the next few hundred years, along with more extreme weather, and enormous movement of people (Bangladesh and Egypt, which together have 270 million people, will likely have to find some other place to live– that is like all Americans becoming homeless refugees in, say, Central America.
So how can we keep to “only” a 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit increase? The suggestions below seem to me practical for most people in industrialized societies, and I personally think we can only make headway if we remain practical. We can’t get people to shiver all winter or give up flying entirely, and that wouldn’t even address the problem most vigorously. In fact, just the first two of my suggestions below would address a significant proportion of the problem.