What if everybody on the planet suddenly became a foot soldier in Al Gore's army and did every freaking thing we could think of and it still wasn't enough to stop us being flattened by global warming?
I decided to write my first diary about the immense scale of the global warming problem, because this seems to be an aspect that is not talked about much, perhaps because it makes it all seem so hopeless, or because we just don't get it yet. More below.
Gristmill (the environmental blog) linked to
this article in Harvard Magazine, and it is the first I have read that really shows scientists wrestling with the enormous scale of this monster. How about this:
(greenhouse warming due to CO2), now caused primarily by emissions from fossil fuels, has set in motion an increase in temperature with effects that won't be fully felt for thousands of years. That is because the ocean acts as an enormous brake on climate change, absorbing half the man-made CO2 and much of the heat. The top 10 to 15 feet of water alone, a small fraction of the total volume, store as much energy as the entire atmosphere. (Hurricanes, whose increased frequency and intensity have been linked to higher sea-surface temperatures, feed off this energy.) Even if we could stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at current levels, the earth would continue to warm.
Yow! More below.
Further down in the article we come to the efforts of Harvard Prof Daniel Schrag's efforts to get his students to understand what we're up against:
Schrag has found that a quantitative approach to the problem guides the way to a solution, because such a tactic strips away the illusion that nuclear power, or any other alternative energy source alone, can solve the problem. First, a difficult but achievable target level of atmospheric CO2 is chosen: he uses 550 ppm--45 percent above the current level. Stabilizing CO2 at lower levels is probably not realistic. But even to hold the atmospheric concentration to 550 ppm, he says, "emissions over the century have to be 70 percent less than what we predict business as usual is going to be. The scale of what we are talking about is huge." Undergraduates in his environmental science and public policy seminar, "Technological Approaches to Mitigation of Climate Change" (ESPP 90m), co-taught with Agassiz professor of biological oceanography James J. McCarthy, each choose an energy source in which they will become expert during the semester: nuclear power, coal, oil, natural gas, or a renewable such as wind, hydropower, solar energy, or biomass. Eventually, each student must devise a plan, using all these energy sources, to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of CO2 below 550 ppm by the year 2100 (an allowance is made for improved energy efficiency).
Then the class and the professors critique the student models. Because each participant is by now well versed in one form of energy, they can point out flaws in each other's work. On this first attempt, none of the students is able to reach the CO2 target without making at least one highly optimistic assumption--a sobering outcome. "It is a difficult problem," Schrag reassures them. "Staying under 550 ppm is not easy."
Of course, who says that staying under 550 ppm will be sufficient, even if we can achieve it?
The fact that there may be a solution to the carbon problem--Schrag estimates the cost to be about 1 percent of GDP, or an amount equal to annual government spending on the Iraq war--nevertheless comes hand in hand with a disquieting realization. Imagine if people everywhere start to grasp the magnitude of the problem and demand that governments respond, so that we actually succeed in stabilizing atmospheric CO2 at 550 ppm. How can that represent success? At the current level, just 380 ppm, glaciers and sea ice are already slowly melting, changing the earth's reflectivity and causing it to absorb more heat. The earth will continue to grow warmer, and sea levels will continue to rise,...
Oops.
Well, you get the picture. By all means read the whole story. There is a convincing argument that nuclear power, with all its horrible problems, and the certainty of future Chernobyls, will be part of the "solution." Every possible "wedge," including wind, solar, nuclear, and conservation, will have to be deployed. These are not options, all of them and more are necessities. In addition, while oil and gas level off, coal will become the fuel of choice, and some way must be found to use it cleanly, perhaps through sequestration schemes. Daniel Schrag wants to inject the carbon into the deep ocean, where it will be trapped for zillions of years, we hope.
This is the part where I am supposed to pose the perky question; "What can you do?" Well, I ain't gonna, because you all know the answer. What can you do? Diddly squat. Don't misunderstand me. We're not powerless. But recycling our diet soda cans and buying a Prius won't do it. This is not a leaky faucet we're trying to fix here, it's the global equivalent of the Johnstown flood. Only government and business can solve problems this size. (Yes, government does have a legitimate function.) Even if government and corporations went all out to stave this beast off, the best we could do is slow the rate of change down to a pace that we and perhaps some significant fraction of the ecosphere can accommodate.
Now this is not a partisan issue. We all want to live in a world that is changing at a reasonable pace. Some Republicans have shown an interest in the topic. But only a Democratic majority is likely to do something meaningful. Which is one reason why I'm here at DailyKos, trying to be a good Democrat. I used to be a member of the Green Party. I woke up and smelled the coffee in 2000, when Nader was trying to tell me that there was no difference between the man who wrote "Earth in the Balance" and this other guy from Oiltown, USA.
The irony is that because of the radical nature of our problems, we must be willing to hang together with more "centrist" politicians who may not reflect our desires completely, but without whom we cannot achieve the consensus needed for the massive changes we must make.