Posted on 05/11/2008 10:48:45 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Civilization's last chance The planet is nearing a tipping point on climate change, and it gets much worse, fast. By Bill McKibben May 11, 2008 Even for Americans -- who are constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start -- even for us, the world looks a little terminal right now.
It's not just the economy: We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn into gas, it helps send the price of a loaf of bread shooting upward and helps ignite food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the "limits to growth" suddenly seem ... how best to put it, right.
All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.
There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A few weeks ago, NASA's chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted....
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
“His next book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment: McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable tv on the Fairfax, Virginia system (at the time among the nation’s largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home.”
That explains what’s wrong with this guy. Watching too much tv has scrambled his brain.
I don't know. But this reminds me of those men walking the streets of New York wearing signs that say, "the End is Near." How long will it take the management of NASA to reign in their crazies?
Bill McKibben’s scientific qualifications = writing for The Harvard Crimson (student newspaper) and for The New Yorker (pretentious pseudo-literary rag for wannabes)
Love the bikini girl! Bring on global warming!
Isn’t “scho;ar in residence” liberal code for unemployed?
What is brown acid?
This is what passes for a “scholar” these days.
Someone who buys into every liberal brainwashing scheme lock, stock and barrel, he cares so much about so much BS that he must be the perfect man, complete with a wife who doesn’t use his last name.
I would like to have a catch with a football with a man like this. Inevatibly, after 100 or so balls go through his hands and strike him in the head it will either awaken his critical thinking faculties or he’ll decide America is just too brutish and macho for him and he’ll move to one of the countries that is “lighter” on the planet like India or one of the others he mentioned.
Eject! Eject!
Say no more....
“Call the men in the white coats.....”
I’ve heard the men in the white coats work for Al Gore.
Mass insanity is tough to defeat unless you’ve got George Patton and his Third Army with you.
...along these lines...
McKibben is spreading alarmist nonsense.
He claims there is a ‘tipping point’, and yet the extreme climate models on which the alarmist scenarios are based have been debunked by the actual temperature record. They are simply wrong, and to extrapolate from them is pure fearmongering.
We have 380 ppm CO2 and increasing, but in the last ten years, the globe has stopped warming. Artic ice is above mean levels of the last 30 years. The amount of warming measured in the last 60 years has been less than 0.6C; this is not an extreme amount, as today’s temperature level is less than it was in recent millenia. It would take ten times that amount of warming, and a lot more CO2 than we’ve ever pumped before, to create temperatures that would significantly raise sea levels, and the amount of CO2 that it would take to to that is over 1000ppm, not 350ppm or even 600ppm. Such amounts will not occur even if we generated CO2 at current rates for another 200 years.
McKibben’s alarmist nonsense is dangerous because we now are seeing the lie that measures like biofuels are ‘cost-free’. They are not. Biofuels have helped ramp up food prices. Shutting down coal plants will do the same to electricity prices. Shutting down coal plants now is unnecessary and destructive. We can start planning nuclear power plants to replace them, but in the meantime, lets not fall for the alarmist nonsense.
“OMG, this moron wrote with a straight face coal-fired power plants are as dangerous as nuclear power plant meltdown”
Technically correct, as NEITHER IS DANGEROUS TO US AT ALL!
Coal plant CO2 is not a big deal for now, and nuclear meltdown risks are extremely small.
This April - we had the COOLEST April in 114 years.
I think the “tipping point” already happened when the idiots weren’t paying attention.
This nonsense needs a reasoned response to call out this lunacy.
please send it to letters@latimes.com —
“This April - we had the COOLEST April in 114 years.”
Depends on ‘we’. is that your town? ... globally it was no such thing. Maybe coolest in 5 years or so.
Utter bunk. The danger we face is another ice age. “
... 15,000 years from now, maybe.
The last 100 years have been a slight warming trend.
Not a real problem.
The next 100 years these alarmist predict 4-6C which could be a problem if it were real. IMHO it is not, they are ovr predicting by a factor of 4-6C. CO2 doubling will warm the earht by about 1-1.5C.
I think the biggest danger to our civilization is stupidity, bunkum and the snake-oilers who sell it. We can survive climate change a lot better than we can survive alarmist-driven stupid policies.
We have 350. Do we hear 280? 280? 280? How about 150? 150? 150? How about zero, in which case, all plants die, and therefore, we ALL die, either by freezing or starving.
The dude said around 2012. If we don’t do it by then, we’re dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooomed!
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