Under A Green Sky

Uncompromising and somewhat shocking. A candidate for ‘Dawkin’s law’ (“just because you’re right doesn’t mean you’re not a dick”) but still, the overall picture is both compelling and bleak. Time to face facts. There is no ‘stopping’ what has already happened, and no simplistic adaptation. The next 200 years will be pretty tough and we can only hope that we are better people when we get to the other side.

The ice-core work indicated that a global temperature change of 10 degrees Fahrenheit could take place in as little as 10 years.

By 2200 we might expect to see carbon dioxide levels approaching 1,200 parts per million.

The rule of thumb used by climatologists is that each doubling of the carbon dioxide level can be expected to increase global temperatures by about 2 degrees Celsius.

Thus the projected carbon dioxide level even for a century from now would be expected to increase the global temperature between 3 degrees and 4 degrees Celsius.

But what humans are doing in terms of injecting carbon dioxide into the oceans from emissions is unprecedented. The present rise in carbon dioxide levels seems to eclipse any other rate of increase from the past. It is this rapid increase that outstrips the natural buffering systems, resulting in oceanic acidification.

The really hot places are united by a very different human activity than turning up the air conditioner: Because human life is so miserable in humid, unrelenting equatorial heat, everyone uses drugs, drugs to help escape the heat, the misery, to make time go by. We who live in the more comfortable climes seem to think that just because the human tribes who have long inhabited the equatorial zone have evolved through many generations living in constant heat, night and day, that somehow these people no longer feel the heat and humidity, that unlike us, they are not made uncomfortable by the horrible climate. Not so.

The next two centuries will be an interesting time. Our ingenuity as a species could let us get through this. Our darker natures and impulses, however, in the face of sudden climate change, could result in the loss of half of all humans on Earth in a century or less.

We have not yet reached the point of no return, or the tipping point. We as a worldwide society can keep carbon dioxide levels below 450 parts per million. If we do not, we head irrevocably toward an ice-free world, which will lead to a change of the thermohaline conveyer belt currents, will lead to a new greenhouse extinction. The past tells us that this is so.