McKibben: global climate talks irrelevant
December 15th, 2008 by Jim JustBill McKibben reports from Poznan that we’ve been pretending that the process to do something about global warming is working. The real problem with the process is that’s no longer consistent with the science of global warming.
These interminable talks are designed to build a machine that would halt the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 to 550 parts per million. They’re so loaded with loopholes, and the timetables are so slow, that they probably wouldn’t accomplish even that, but that’s the goal. The theory is that the world we need is a 450 world, based on the science from five and 10 and 15 years ago. But a year ago, our leading scientific authority on climate change, NASA’s James Hansen, said that was wrong. All the data that he and his team assembled suggested that 350 parts per million was the maximum possible if we wished to keep “a planet similar to that on which civilization developed, and to which life on earth is adapted.” They pointed to not just the Arctic melt, but the shocking thaw of sub-tropical glaciers, the shifting of monsoonal rain patterns, and the rapidly developing fear that Greenland and the West Antarctic could raise sea levels much more quickly than we’d previously imagined. They said — in the context of these talks — that the sun does not in fact revolve around the Earth.
As McKibben puts it, we’ve been engaged in saving the treaty, not saving the world. We need to save the world. Meanwhile, the talks drag on, increasingly irrelevant.
The only course of action left is to change the political reality.
Both Hansen, the leading scientific authority on climate change, and Gore, the leading political voice, have endorsed the idea of 350 as the only rational target. They’ve said the world circles the sun. Now we have to proceed on that understanding. It won’t be easy – “political reality” says it’s impossible. But political reality is easier to change than scientific reality. Since we can’t change the laws of physics, we’re going to have to try and change the laws of man.