Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone. Please, go read the entire article:
If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the “largest temperature departure from average of any season on record.” The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet’s history.
Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world’s nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn’t even attend. It was “a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago,” the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls “once thronged by multitudes.” Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I’ve spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.
When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn’t yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.
“..it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.”
The three numbers are the 3,215 high-temperature records, the 327th consecutive month, and the odds 3.7 x 10-99. Are these the three numbers he refers to?
Those numbers mean nothing to me, they are meaningless. This McGibbon guy sounds like a complete fool. And people listen to this guy? Wow.
The first hint of global warming was … the glaciers melting, which has happened over the past 12,000 years or so. The submerged continental shelves used to be the Atlantic beaches. The Chesapeake bay used to be the lower Susquehanna River valley. All of this is from glacial melt water. The warming is obvious. What’s not so obvious is that the warming began 11,350 years before humans began burning fossil fuels and 11,450 years before they began burning fossil fuels in considerable quantities.
I like Naomi Klein’s solution: Adapt.
Link: http://inmedias.blogspot.com/2011/10/global-warming-local-farming-and-naomi.html
She’s one of the few sane liberal minds writing about this issue.
Klem didn’t read the article. Those are not the numbers and McKibben is nobody’s fool. BUT the three numbers in the lead paragraph are junk probability multiples that don’t belong with the rest of the analysis. There is no way that in the warming and cooling cycles that the Earth has experienced that clusters of hundreds of months don’t exist in which the average global temperature exceeded or was less than a global average for the preceding stable century. That is the nature of long term warming and cooling.
Klem, you’ve just totally blown your credibility by commenting ignorantly (and sarcastically) on something you haven’t even read.
Ok I’ve read it now. I had to sit there and read five pages of that fruity greenie scare talk, just for you people.
The three ‘terrifying’ numbers are 2C degrees, 565 gigatons and 2795 gigatons.
They still mean nothing to me, in fact they make me laugh. But you’re right, McGibbon is no fool. That’s why his article is placed under the heading “Politics”, not science or environment.
He’s no fool, he’s a politician masquerading as a climate science environmental guy. You faun over his every word. Perhaps its you people who are the real fools.
cheers
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/greenland-ice-melt-nasa_n_1698129.html
If you burn billions of tons of carbon based fuels which throws off heat (and poison) into a closed atmosphere, even the village idiot can see that eventually the atmosphere will begin to heat up. That’s called reaching the saturation point. It may take 12,000 years to reach the stauration point, but the tipping point will eventually be reached. Prepare to deploy your gas masks and heat shielding suits very soon.