Bring carbon emissions to zero by mid-century, or else…
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Posted on March 11, 2008
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further…
…if global emissions continue on a ‘business as usual’ path for the rest of the century, the Earth will warm by 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. If emissions do not drop to zero until 2300…the temperature rise at that point would be more than 15 degrees Fahrenheit…
“…common sense is that we would not let the planet be destroyed.”
Would that we humans had some common sense.
These rather dramatic snippets are from a front page Washington Post article yesterday, Monday the 10th, Carbon Output Must Near Zero To Avert Danger, New Studies Say.
Now why isn’t this story on all the front pages everywhere? Why isn’t it the lead story on Wolf Blitzer’s ‘The Situation Room,’ or Keith Olbermann’s ‘Countdown?’ I mean, how does the importance of this story compare to, oh, say, the governer of New York having sex with high-priced prostitutes?
Which story will have the greater impact on your children and your children’s children?
One of the scientists involved in the new studies is Kenneth Caldeira, senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Most climate studies tend to look at the level of carbon in the atmosphere as the measure of danger and set limits beyond which we ought not to go to prevent climate destabilization, or to at least slow it down.
Caldeira says that a far better measure is the temperature threshold, beyond which “severe climate disruptions’ begin to manifest.
To make our problems worse, the carbon emissions we put into the atmosphere will persist for thousands of years. Andreas Schmittner, science professor at Oregon State University, was struck by these findings:
“This is tremendous,” she said. “I was struck by the fact that the warming continues much longer even after emissions have declined… Our actions right now will have consequences for many, many generations. Not just for a hundred years, but thousands of years.”
Do you see how the moral context of our lives has changed? Stunning, isn’t it? We must make our moral and ethical decisions based not only on what is best for me and my family, or for the next decade or two, or even for the common good of this generation. We must make those decisions in the context of what is best for the common good for the next thousand years.
We have to care not just for our families, our communities, and our country; we have to care for a whole planet.
What these folks studied is a bit different from what the Nobel Peace Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change studied. This time, instead of predicting warming based on the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, these folks looked at what would need to be done to stop the warming process itself.
In an article on the Carnegie Institution website, Stabilizing Climate Requires Zero Carbon Emissions, Caldeira says:
“Most scientific and policy discussions about avoiding climate change have centered on what emissions would be needed to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” says Caldeira. “But stabilizing greenhouse gases does not equate to a stable climate. We studied what emissions would be needed to stabilize climate in the foreseeable future.”
What is needed is zero carbon emissions — by mid-century — as in, within the next 40 years.
Heard anyone, political candidates, for instance, with a plan to do that?
Now here’s the thing: we can. We actually have the capacity to do this. We have the technology to make the switch, not without some painful adjustments in our lives, some scaling down of expectations, some perhaps wrenching changes — but it can be done.
What we don’t have is common sense. What we don’t have is the long view. What we don’t seem to have is the ability to think and work along such a long time line — to make actual life decisions, economic, political, social, personal, based on what is for the common good over centuries —
…which is the time scale for saving life on a planet floating out here in space, as far as we know 
the only planet of rich hues of blues and greens, of vast oceans of life, of life teeming from every inch of water and soil, conscious life that loves and thinks and believes and makes art and raises children and has this unquantifiable thing called hope, this strange development in the universe that is our search for meaning…
…as if all of this is about something greater than ourselves, as if the cosmos and the galaxy and the solar system and evolution on this blue planet created us for purpose and meaning.
These brains of ours — they must expand, they must become huge. These spirits of ours — they must become large enough to see our place in all this, to see not only the millions of years behind us, but the centuries and millennia ahead of us.
We are now in the situation where we must care for a planet. That’s reason to get out of bed in the morning, isn’t it? That’s common ground among this divided, rebellious, resistant human community if ever there was any, isn’t it?
Can we do this? Can we?
Technorati Tags: zero carbon emissions, severe climate disruptions, climate destabilization, kenneth Caldeira, andreas schmittner, carnegie institution for science
Graphics/Photo credits:
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Visible Earth, NASA: These images from NASA track air pollution wafting from Asia across the Pacific Ocean to the West Coast of the United States.
The Blue Marble - NASA Visible Earth
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