Growing urgency on climate change
We've ignored the climate change problem for too long, and it may already be too late to do anything about it.
The international targets for atmospheric carbon dioxide are currently pegged at 550 parts per million. According to James Hansen, that level is nowhere near low enough; he is asserting that 350 ppm is the level we need to achieve to preserve our way of life:
One of the world's leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.
In a startling reappraisal of the threat, James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, calls for a sharp reduction in CO2 limits.
[...]
Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of CO2 - the most stringent in the world - should be slashed to 350ppm. He argues the cut is needed if "humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed".
"If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice - that's a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster - a guaranteed disaster," Hansen told the Guardian.
At levels as high as 550ppm, the world would warm by 6 [degrees] C, the paper finds. Previous estimates had suggested warming would be just 3 [degrees] C at that point.
Even a global rise of 2.5 degrees C would be catastrophic:
The Nobel Prize-winning scientist who rang the first alarm bells over the ozone hole issued a warming about climate change on Saturday, saying there could be "almost irreversible consequences" if the Earth warmed 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees F) above what it ought to be.
"Things are changing and there's no doubt that it's as a result of human activities," said Mario Molina, a Mexican who shared a Nobel prize in chemistry in 1995 for groundbreaking work on chlorofluorocarbon gases and their threat to the Earth's ozone layer.
"Long before we run out of oil, we will run out of atmosphere," he said.
The clock is ticking, folks. World health is already being affected:
At least 150,000 more people are dying each year of malaria, diarrhea, malnutrition and floods, all of which can be traced to climate change, according to Shigery Omi, the head of the WHO's Western Pacific office. More than half of those deaths register in Asia, Omi said, according to Reuters.
We don't have any more time to waste being distracted by propaganda campaigns funded by the oil and coal industries. We can't afford to let ignorant flat-Earthers subvert scientific facts. It's time to listen to the scientists, and it's time to re-think our approach to the problem:
Most of the focus in the last few years has centered on imposing caps on greenhouse gas emissions to prod energy users to conserve or switch to nonpolluting technologies.
Leaders of the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change - the scientists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year with former Vice President Al Gore - have emphasized that market-based approach. All three presidential candidates are behind it. And it has framed international talks over a new climate treaty and debate within the United States over climate legislation.
But now, with recent data showing an unexpected rise in global emissions and a decline in energy efficiency, a growing chorus of economists, scientists and students of energy policy are saying that whatever benefits the cap approach yields, it will be too little and come too late.
The economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, stated the case bluntly in a recent article in Scientific American: "Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people."
What is needed, Mr. Sachs and others say, is the development of radically advanced low-carbon technologies, which they say will only come about with greatly increased spending by determined governments on what has so far been an anemic commitment to research and development. A Manhattan-like Project, so to speak.
And time is critical, they say, as China, India and other developing nations march headlong into the modern world of cars and electric consumption on their way to becoming the dominant producer of greenhouse gases for decades to come. Indeed, China is building, on average, one large coal-burning power plant a week.
Tick, tock, tick, tock. We can't afford to dither any longer.