April 10, 2014 – I wrote this article a little while ago,
and Transition Voice hasn’t used it.
I think it’s useful, so I thought I’d publish it here.
Know
Your Limits
There is a growing consensus that 2
degrees Celsius of global warming will be too much (http://www.livescience.com/41690-2-degrees-of-warming-too-much.html
). As the winter of 2013-2014
gradually winds down, we see the evidence of what less than 1 degree of warming
can do all around us. The costs
have yet to be tallied, but there is universal acknowledgement that budgets
were virtually meaningless this winter.
In order to keep the United States functioning at a level anywhere near
normal, states and corporations had to break the bank. The alternative was inconceivable.
Yet merrily we roll along, calmly
averring that there is still time before the climate will begin to wreak major
havoc. The notion that 2 degrees
of warming are somehow “ok” has become foundational to both national and international
planning. After all, the thinking
goes, that amount of warming is what scientists have told us will be
acceptable, right?
Dr.
Who?
That’s certainly what I thought,
anyway. It is with more than a
small degree of chagrin that I must tell you that 2 degrees of warming was
first presented to the waiting world as “safe” by none other than an
economist. Yes, that says
economist, not ecologist. One W.D.
Nordhaus, to be exact. Yale
Professor Nordhaus wrote in 1977 that “if there were global temperatures more
than 2 or 3C above the current average temperature, this would take the climate
outside of the range of observations which
have been made over the last several hundred thousand years.” In fact, that large an increase in
temperature would be well outside of the natural limits known to have governed
the climate during the past 10,000 years, during which period of time
agriculture and civilization developed.
Furthermore, Dr. Nordhaus stated as
recently as 2009 that 700 ppm (!!) of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in the
atmosphere would not cause irreversible harm to our planet (http://thebiggestlieevertold.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/part-1-expose-the
). He goes on to insist that
trying to keep warming below 2.6 C would precipitate economic catastrophe. Goodness, we wouldn’t want that …
A
Wee Bit of Climate Chaos
For the record, 1C was first cited
as the acceptable limit for climate-change induced warming in 1990 by the
United Nations Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases. The Advisory Group was an amalgamation of three
international climate change heavyweights: the World Meteorological Organization
(WMO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International
Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU).
In their report (http://www.scribd.com/doc/121702780/Responding-to-Climate-Change-Tools-For-Policy-Development-Part-I-of-II),
the Advisory Group wrote that “beyond 1 C there might be rapid, unpredictable
and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.”
I don’t know about you, but these
non-linear responses are beginning to wear me out.
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