Because my buddy of 30 years and I have been watching and bequipping "environmental collapse" stories for two years, we have learned that there's a fairly predictable trajectory of the Truly Scary Stories:
a) scientists recognize a trend;
b) scientists begin studying and become concerned;
c) data begin to confirm those concerns, even though they don't want to believe it;
d) a scientific consensus grows, based on available evidence; a few stories in mainstream news begin to appear;
e) a growing panic in the scientific literature becomes apparent, couched in scientific reportage; a rise in mainstream news stories, because a few top scientists are willing to take the risk of public pronouncement of their panic -- they're quotable.
f) Finally, the Big Story makes it into news outlets worldwide, as if it was recently discovered.
g) sometime after that, the politicians become clued in.
The duration of that sequence varies. Climate chaos was the first, and is just now tickling the politicians.
White nose syndrome, or amphibian collapse, are still warming up.
Predator depletion has been slower than endocrine disruptors, and about as fast as the recognition of the problem of continent-sized plastic gyres, or the 400 ocean dead zones.
Not all of these things are related to CO2 by any means (in ref to the diary title). But CO2 may be the key to other changes, because of climate change's uglier, meaner, faster, sociopathic older brother, Ocean Acidification, which will be hitting headlines increasingly in the next six months.
Ocean acidification is likely to be the Next Big Thing, rhythmically. It might come out during Copenhagen, but in terms of the "collapse samba" rhythms, it'll happen in mid-2010.
The media are likely to start to glom onto this theme fairly soon -- there's been a few documentaries about it, some news reportage, and of course a number of ahead-of-the-curve DK diaries about it (see a great recent DK Greenroots diary on the topic). But Big Problems like this one takes some months to become accepted, and then explained to those who will listen.
Why does it matter? Because of the other predictable, dependable, frightening pattern that we've seen: whatever the discovery, the impacts are worse than expected, and starts happening faster than expected.
With ocean absorption of CO2, just stabilizing ("carbon neutral") -- even starting tomorrow -- is probably insufficient.
In terms of halting ocean acidification -- which may make the Arctic ocean inhospitable to life in 10 years, and kill off corals worldwide in 20-30 years -- becoming neutral tomorrow wouldn't be enough.
The vast ocean will continue to absorb the excess CO2 that exists in the vast atmosphere, for decades. Further, that same CO2 is melting glaciers, icecaps, and permafrost worldwide. It's a one-two punch.
I suspect that society will conclude, by mid- to late-2010, that even 350 ppm CO2 is unacceptable -- that we need to get down to 280 for at least a decade, if we are to preserve the ocean and compensate for our earlier overshoot.
We will need to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, for civilization's worldwide survival. Not just for "global warming," but for the survival of the oceans.
Without the oceans, we're screwed. That's pretty clear to everyone.
So what happens if society actually wakes up to this likely reality? How do we slam this economy into a different gear, with reasonable survival rather than "economic growth" as the goal?
A few large-scale carbon sequestration schemes? Millions of small-scale biochar carbon sequestration schemes? Billions of biochar plots in developing countries, paid for by first-world guilt?
Lots of wind, solar, and sweaters? A serious carbon tax? Planned two-year shifts of coal plants to natural gas, and a two-year planned phase-out of those plants, while finalizing the "smart grid" worldwide?
Serious investment in biotech to develop Kim Stanley Robinson's carbon-harvesting lichen? Radical reforestation and perennial-planting on every interstate median? Giant, fatally flawed geoengineering schemes that have unintended consequences?
The worldwide "giant pool of money" described in NPR/ThisAmericanLife's majesterial work on the economic collapse, is about 76 trillion dollars. That's the amount of money out there, trying to find stuff to invest in.
If society really shifted to recognize an imminent danger, then a portion of that giant pool would shift toward recovery -- in response to both long-term and mid-term investors.
How do we encourage that shift, and more importantly, how do we ensure that shift benefits the most people?
How do we get, say, two to ten trillion dollars of investment to shift to radical recovery, of radical sequestration of carbon? And how do we ensure it doesn't get pissed into the coal and oil companies' pockets?
Heck, when you get down to it, if they actually did it, I wouldn't mind if people got rich from it. But I'd rather a lot of people got a reasonable living out if it, than a few get filthy rich from it.
We need to be pre-framing the discussion now, if we can.
How do we get there? What can we do now, to seed the field for a better harvest in mid-2010, when the rest of the world wakes up to the emergency?
Thinking about this now -- about influencing the response to a global, worldwide recognition of looming disaster -- might help get our voices more effectively heard.