Climate Change: A Window of Opportunity
On the surface, our lives run on as usual, with ordinary obligations and ordinary successes - mortgage payments, leaking faucets, overdue library books, deadlines met, milestones marked and moved beyond.
And yet while all this ordinary life has been going on we’ve also been adding to levels of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere. And the climate scientists have been speaking out about the implications:
January 2005: Rajendra Pachauri Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “We must have immediate and very deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions if humanity is to survive.”
September 2006: James Hansen, the NASA climate expert: “We have a very short window of opportunity to address climate change. No more than a decade at the most.”
How can this be? How can we have ten years to address a problem of human survival when the world outside our windows looks more or less as it always has? Are these scientists saying that our Earth could slide from today’s relative normalcy into something so inhospitable in ten short years?
Well no. The problem is, by the time climate change looks and feels like a survival crisis to most of us it will be far too late to do anything about it.
Climate change is like a house fire or an infection or cancer, something that can be addressed in its first stages, but which can feed upon itself and grow stronger than any human intervention if it is allowed to progress too far. For familiar threats - fire, infection, cancer - we all know exactly what this means: prevention is best, early response is promising, and delay may be deadly. The same is true for climate change, which is why the scientists use strong words, like “survival,” and short time frames, like “a decade at the most.”
With climate change we are past the prevention stage, and have been for decades. If climate change were a house fire, we would be at the point in the drama where the smoker has already fallen asleep in bed. His mattress is already smoldering. The only question left is whether he’ll wake up in time to keep the whole house from catching fire.
The largest danger of climate change is that human-induced warming has the potential to set off cascades of changes in the Earth itself, just as a smoldering mattress has the potential to engulf the rest of the house.
o High enough temperatures could cause significant amounts of polar ice to melt, replacing white, heat-reflecting ice, with dark, heat-absorbing water, leading to more heating, and thus more melting and even more heating.
o Human-induced warming could thaw frozen soils releasing more heat-trapping gases and causing still more warming and more thawing.
o Human-induced warming could weaken carbon dioxide-absorbing ecosystems, leaving more heat-trapping CO2 to accumulate in the atmosphere, causing more warming, further weakening those carbon-absorbing ecosystems.
Once any of these cycles takes off it will run under its own power in the same way that a house, once fully afire, will continue to burn even if the mattress that sparked the conflagration has been completely extinguished. Stopping the mattress fire before the curtains and walls catch fire can save the house; stopping it once the house is burning is futile. That’s what defines a window of opportunity - decisive action at the right time saves the day, the same action, delayed, is close to useless.
The sobering news is that seizing this window of opportunity will require extremely large cuts in global warming pollution, cuts of as much as 70%, worldwide.
But, look around, from your own life to your national government. Do you see the kind of response you’d expect of people who are clear that they have only ten-years to accomplish such dramatic change?
The mattress may be smoldering, but most of us, from ordinary citizen to senior Senator, appear to be still slumbering atop it.
What else could explain the way we are driving, flying, and shopping our way through the opening year of a ten-year window to address a problem that threatens human survival?
I don’t believe people are callous enough to do that on purpose, but I have no trouble believing that we haven’t fully awoken to what it means to be one of the grown-ups in charge during the last ten years to address climate change.
My best evidence for this conclusion comes from my own life, much of which I still live as though these were ordinary times.
There are moments when the ten-year window comes into clear focus for me, moments when it stands out against the blur of obligations and worries and pleasures of my ordinary life.
It is in those moments - when I can see the ten-year window while not being too frightened by its seriousness - that I seem to know best what to do. It is in these moments that I find myself standing beside my neighbors with my “Stop Global Warming” signs, buying electricity produced from methane capture, and expanding the garden that feeds my family. It is in those moments that I feel most like the person I would like to be, someone who knows what to do when she is given a window of opportunity.
Elizabeth R. Sawin is the Director of Sustainability Institute’s Our Climate Ourselves program and is a writer, teacher, and systems analyst who lives with her family as part of an intentional community and organic farm in Hartland, Vermont.
Who do you humans think you are? We let you build some houses, make some tools, and next thing we know you are destroying the forest we live in, the ice we live on, the water we drink and the air we breathe.
I’m afraid you have not been the best neighbor we could have hoped for.
5 words. “The Great Global Warming Swindle”
In the words of Rosie, Google it!
In just one hour, the earth receives more direct energy from the sun than from all human activities over an entire year - think about it.
Or maybe look at this map.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Solar_land_area.png
Coercive world government requires world problems, Environmentalism is a perfect vehicle.
Global warming and peak oil might be latched onto by people who seek to coercively control others, when they’re uncomfortable with socialism.
I tend to have more faith in free people, consent and market forces than coerced people, law and government beaurocracy.
consider this….
UK population 60 million
av. distance per person per year 7000 miles
or 20 miles per day
cost of electricity 5 pence / KWh
high performance electric car 0.5 pence per mile
(e.g. tesla etc.)
or 10 miles per KWh
or 2KWh per day
or 10 pence per day
or 730KWh per year
or £36 per year !
Nuclear power station = 5GW
or 43,800,000,000 KWh per year
or transportation energy for 60 million people !
Extra power stations
to reduce oil dependency by 60% - one
(unless my math is wrong)
I fully agree with this article. I think that a large part of the problem is lack of available options to make a difference. It is almost like learned helplesness - “this problem is too big, and there is nothing I can do about it.” Perhaps we need to actually develop some options that can be made available - how about “10 years to a zero emmisions life”? Put plans together on how to develop a home garden, put up solar pannels, ride a bicycle for local travel, and push for availability of electric vehicles. Of course this would not really be a zero emmission life style - but perhaps starting the process would accelerate the process to a zero emmissions life style.
I think the largest stumbling block is the generation that allowed this to happen in the first place is largely still not willing to accept the idea that our behaviour as an industrial society hurts our planet, and are more willing to deceive themselves into believing that there isn’t even any point on principle of doing something to be more responsible. This is the generation that grew up believing that responsibility means getting married, having kids and paying bills, not being healthy and taking care of the world around them.
Although it’s still disputable (ostensibly!) what impact humankind has on the global climate, I would like this very humankind to do everything it can to reduce its impact to the minimum. Then only could we be shure we’re not irresponsible. The price? It’s not about the price you and me would have to pay - it’s about the price corporations are not willing to pay.
Here’s the problem of your average american; if he stops driving his/her big SUV around they have little or no other options for transporting their children or groceries. Cargo carrying bicycles with electric assist are the provence of a very tiny, hard-core group.
Sure your average suburban home could convert to geo-exchange heating, cooling and hot water and put a few solar panels on the roof but there is no fincancial vehicle that allows the owner to do that in a cash flow neutral basis. Don’t even think a rental property owner is going to upgrade anything unless you pay him cash up front to do it.
The French just tested a passenger train that goes over 350 mph. Train service from my town to the nearest large city is worse than it was in 1920. Actually it almost doesn’t exist.
There is NO political will to make these changes. Global warming is real. We will do little about it until it looks like it is likely to kill us in the next six months. By that time it will be too late. When Al Gore quits flying in jets I’ll give up my pick-up; not till then.
It was a nice planet while it lasted.
The Great Global Warming Swindle is purely lies and misinformation.
There is no scientific debate left regarding whether global warming is happening or whether humans can be attributed to it’s cause.
There is a debate on whether humans are the whole cause, and how much of an effect it will have on us and the Earth.
That’s the state of the debate. It is not environmentalists that determine if global warming is happening or who causes it. Scientists, who devote their lives to understanding Earth systems do that. Among them there is a consenses on this issue.
There is a difference between scientists and environmentalists. Though scientists could very well be environmentalists; environmentalists can be any person from a choir director, to a soccer mom to a systems engineer.
The responses I have seen to that movie suggests that it gets these words and their meanings confused (probably intentionally).