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Climate change activists have chosen a magic number
I almost never write about writing-in my aesthetic, the writing should disappear, the thought linger. But the longer I've spent working on global warming-the greatest challenge humans have ever faced-the more I've come to see it as essentially a literary problem. A technological and scientific challenge, yes; an economic quandary, yes; a political dilemma, surely. But centrally? A crisis in metaphor, in analogy, in understanding. We haven't come up with words big enough to communicate the magnitude of what we're doing. How do you say: the world you know today, the world you were born into, the world that has remained essentially the same for all of human civilization, that has birthed every play and poem and novel and essay, every painting and photograph, every invention and economy, every spiritual system (and every turn of phrase) is about to be . . . something so different? Somehow "global warming" barely hints at it. The same goes for any of the other locutions, including "climate chaos." And if we do come up with adequate words in one culture, they won't necessarily translate into all the other languages whose speakers must collaborate to somehow solve this problem.
I've done my best, and probably better than some. My first book, The End of Nature, has been published in twenty-four languages, and the essential idea embodied in the title probably came through in most of them. It wasn't enough, though, nor were any of the other such phrases (like "boiling point" or "climate chaos") that more skillful authors have used since. So in recent years I've found myself grasping, trying to strip the language down further, make it communicate more. This year I find myself playing with numbers.
When the Northwest Passage opened amid the great Arctic melt last summer, many scientists were stunned. James Hansen, our greatest climatologist, was already at work on a paper that would try, for the first time, to assign a real number to global warming, a target that the world could aim at. No more vague plans to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or keep it from doubling, or slow the rate of growth-he understood that there was already enough evidence from the planet's feedback systems, and from the quickly accumulating data about the paleoclimate, to draw a bright line.
In a PowerPoint presentation he gave at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco last December, he named a number: 350 parts per million carbon dioxide. That, he said, was the absolute upper bound of anything like safety-above it and the planet would be unraveling. Is unraveling, because we're already at 385 parts per million. And so it's a daring number, a politically unwelcome one. It means, in shorthand, that this generation of people-politicians especially-can't pass the problem down to their successors. We're like patients who've been to the doctor and found out that our cholesterol is too high. We're in the danger zone. Time to cut back now, and hope that we do it fast enough so we don't have a stroke in the meantime. So that Greenland doesn't melt in the meantime and raise the ocean twenty-five feet.
For me, the number was a revelation. With a few friends I'd been trying to figure out how to launch a global grassroots climate campaign-a follow-up to the successful Step It Up effort that organized fourteen hundred demonstrations across the U.S. one day last spring and put the demand for an 80 percent cut in America's carbon emissions at the center of the political debate. We need to apply even more pressure, and to do it on a global scale-it is, after all, global warming. But my friends and I were having a terrible time seeing how to frame this next effort. For one thing, the 180 or so countries that will negotiate a new international treaty over the next eighteen months are pretty much beyond the reach of effective lobbying-we can maybe influence the upcoming American election, but the one in Kenya? In Guatemala? In China? And for another, everyone insists on speaking those different languages. A Babel, this world.
But a number works. And this is a good one. Arcane, yes-parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. But at least it means the same thing in every tongue, and it even bridges the gap between English and metric. And so we secured the all-important URL: 350.org. (Easier said than done.) And we settled on our mission: To tattoo that number into every human brain. To make every person on Planet Earth aware of it, in the same way that most of them know the length of a soccer field (even though they call it a football pitch or a voetbal gebied). If we are able to make that happen, then the negotiations now under way, and due to conclude in Copenhagen in December of 2009, will be pulled as if by a kind of rough and opaque magic toward that goal. It will become the definition of success or of failure. It will set the climate for talking about climate.
So the literary challenge-and the challenge for artists and musicians and everyone else-is how to take a mere number and invest it with meaning. How to make people understand that it means some kind of stability. Not immunity-we're well past that juncture, and even Hansen says the number is at best the upper bound of safety, but still. Some kind of future. Some kind of hope. That it means kids able to eat enough food, that it means snowcaps on mountains, that it means coral reefs, that it means, you know, penguins. For now 350 is absolutely inert. It means nothing, comes with no associations. But our goal is to fill it up with overtones and shades and flavors. The weekend before we officially launched the campaign, for instance, 350 people on bicycles rode around the center of Salt Lake City. That earned a story in the paper and educated some people about carbon dioxide-but it also started to tint 350 with images of bicycles and the outdoors and good health and pleasure. We need 350 churches ringing their bells 350 times; we need 350 spray-painted across the face of shrinking glaciers (in organic paint!); we need a stack of 350 watermelons on opening day at your farmers' market; we need songs and videos; we need temporary tattoos for foreheads. We may need 350 people lining up to get arrested in front of a coal train.
It makes sense that we need a number, not a word. All our words come from the old world. They descend from the time before. Their associations have congealed. But the need to communicate has never been greater. We need to draw a line in the sand. Say it out loud: 350. Do everything you can.
Bill McKibben is editor of American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. To learn more about the new campaign and get involved, go to http://www.350.org.
© 2008 Orion Magazine
21 Comments so far
Show AllDoom and Gloom - Thanks for making me laugh. I am sending your post to everyone I know who has a sense of humor.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
June 30, 2008, North Pole, 11.45 A.M.
The North Pole has melted. Santa Claus, the Elves, and the Reindeer drown while swimming toward land. They were spotted and picked up just after dawn by an Icelandic Cruise Ship. The Captain, Borg Nordstrom wept at the discovery.
The United Nations has called a Special Emergency Meeting to discuss the global implications of the death of Santa Claus. Fox News has reported that (that bitch) Mother Earth is 100% responsible for the death of Claus. President Bush has assembled the military high command in the war room to design a failed strategy to deal with the crisis. Bush addressed the group saying, "American kids are tough. They will learn to live without toys." The Joint Chiefs agreed and suggested a kiddie boot camp to be attended by all American children in December of 2008.
Christian church bells began ringing at the news. Now, we can finally get back to the true meaning of Christmas, forced acculturation and genocide exclaimed Bishop Panzer.
Early reports that Chinese toy makers have committed mass suicide appear to be authentic.
WalMart and Malls across America have locked their doors and are boarding up their windows.
In a short press conference Vice President Dick Cheney was overheard saying, "So!"
Sorry, environmental concerns are antithetical to total hegemonic control by our global oligarchy and cuts into their profits and hydraulic despotism, thus, as the Great Pelosi says, "It's off the table." The only things that are on the table, are those that will give more privilege (private law) to the richfilth that America would like to be. I know.
Instead of going at environmental concerns directly, why not go after America's desire to become one of the Oligarchy, "by any means necessary"?
in response to some comments re the human contribution to atmospheric CO2:
the steady preindustrial atmospheric CO2 was 260-280 ppm
this represents the equilibrium state between production and absorption of CO2 by natural processes
the increase of 100 ppm since that time is entirely due to human activity
man is adding 7 billion tons of Carbon ie 20 billion tons of CO2 each year to the atmosphere
although the annual added amount of CO2 is small in comparison to the already existing CO2 (2/380), the power of annual compounding ensures the rapid build up of CO2, even in human time frames, and in a blink considering geological time spans.
to effectively reduce this CO2 level to preindustrial levels,by natural processes, if no further CO2 is added by man, will take thousands of years.
sources: US Env protection agency and wikipedia: carbon dioxide and CO2 cycle
I was having a conversation with my 16 yr old daughter about issues that kids are interested in and she constantly complains how very few of her peers are even aware of current events and don't even think to question their parents' beliefs/opinions. We had a friendly argument over my assertion that global warming/climate change is the most important issue facing us because without a world, there arent' any other issues...anyway, I think we need to cultivate/teach/train kids to think for themselves, to question authority and to become educated and we'll be surprised at what gets accomplished.
Hi Folks, I've studied Bill McKibben's work, along with Derrick Jensen, Howard Zinn, and so many others, and love Siouxrose, Ephraim, and frankly all your comments; and though I think our band makes some of the most exciting original protest music ever (I guess since we're so completely ignored, ha, though loved when we rock live to a tiny handful) I will have to admit that music, even powerful music, can probably not change the world now, these days, at this late date, any more than a slightly well crafted incredibly long run on sentence.
I'm reminded of the line in the movie "Wings Of Desire" where they comment on the know it all isolation and factionalism of the German people at the time (paraphrase) 'everyone in their castle and you had to know the exact password to enter'.
Americans are seemingly beyond reach to any logic that doesn't involve a huge cash layout and musicians are no exception. Aside from the fact that the gatekeepers (right or left) are in charge of the door and viral media for the little people is not all it's cracked up to be.
Americans are firmly lodged in their tangle of false realities, we're stuck in a myrid of somewhat useless expensive hobbies that all roughly translate to " I got mine f... you" and "my opinion is the correct one no matter how little I know". Even if we were all of a single sane mind, the rest of the world wants and demands "growth" and is getting it.
Into that craven cultural maw ventures well funded giant conglomerates to their profit and empowerment but a person with the saner idea yells to the tiny choir until hoarse and tired. Vapid ideas and ideals hold sway while the more morally directed get ignored and laughed at. We're expected to actually go crazy, by design, as conflicting opinions and lies, mingled with vague terror fears, which is the heart of soul of modern corporate media, is a tactic straight out of the army training manuals on brainwashing.
At the risk of actually solving the problems, I will offer you a rumor: if the benchmark is 350 and we're at 385, people need to know at 387 ALL computers, televisons, guitars and Harley Davidsons will cease functioning! Bet we see some action now!
Http://www.myspace.com/thehaymarketorphans
It is too little. And, it is too late. We are going down. I don't know that we will go extinct, but we are going to hit a bottleneck in the next 10s to 100s of years.
I have to agree with Siouxrose here, that music would be a far better rallying medium than the dry number, 350. Much as I admire Bill McKibben's work, this seems like grasping at straws.
The problem with getting people to give a damn about climate chaos, global warming, "climate change" (the sanitized descriptor), is that nothing catastrophic is happening, yet. Even when we get Katrinas and tornados up the wazoo, most people can't or refuse to connect the dots. They "don't know what to do" because their worthless leaders refuse to do anything. And they despair of having any effect whatsoever on these so-called leaders, who most of us know are merely the representatives of greed-driven corporations unwilling to do one goddamn thing to seriously address global warming. Can't make those shareholders nervous.
If music could rouse people to action as it did in the '60s (I was there), we might have reason enough to hope. But it's all just ipods and celebrity obsessing, everyone lost in their solipcistic echo chambers, and any given song is as durable as all the mindless throwaway Gollywood movies. We're supersaturated with entertainment, jaded to the point of numbness by it all, so music probably can't move us to action any more than tatooing "350" to our foreheads or asses will. If "350"-oriented tactics can win the day, I'm all for it. But it sounds a little like expecting anything "progressive" from Obama.
"We have, most of us, utterly forgotten that we are Gaia's creatures."
George Wanker Bush hasn't forgotten it, for he never knew it to begin with. He will tell you he was brought by the stork, carried in a basket that included a chrome plated, ivory handled .44 Magnum revolver and a picture of Elmer Fudd. There was also a copy of "Mein Kampf" which Bush never read. Karl Rove read it to him.
Before the species, repeat, SPECIES homo sapiens, can undertake to coordinate its activity, it will first of all have to recognize that it is a species. And then it will have to do something that has never before been done by homo sapiens.
This is actually a spiritual task. Words fail. We don't know what "spiritual" means. A number does not even suggest the nature of the task involved and it isn't a task in the usual sense. We have, most of us, utterly forgotten that we are Gaia's creatures. We don't know what that means, either.
We're not going to fundamentally alter our way of life based on a campaign by scientists who have arrived at a rational assessment of the need to adjust the gaseous composition of our atmosphere.
We will change our way of life when we know at an instinctive level that we must act. Aboriginal peoples, American Indians, Amazonian tribes still in direct relationship with Gaia have this deep level understanding that is not a product of rational intellect and the study of climatological models.
We are very far from this understanding. But. It will return as a revelation, for some people, for the survivors, when we are confronted by a catastrophic event or series of events that challenge our survival as a species. Then we will draw together in a mutual shared awareness of our creaturehood on the planet.
Nature needs to give us a hard collective slap right across the face and we need to say: Thanks, I needed that!
MiMiCcS
SAY WHAT???? I don't "memorize slogans" and am more-than-a-little offended,but please amplify your comment in university level english.
Do you assert that all the discussion re:global warming is much-ado-about-nothing?If so,could you please cite sources,and if not ,expand.Thanks. Bob
We are 11,000 years into an interglacial. During the last interglacial 116,000-130,000 years ago, temperatures were 5 deg C higher and glaciers in Greenland did not melt away.
Man accounts for 3% of CO2 emissions. So of the 100 ppm increase above the so called optimum-280 ppm, man is responsible for 3 ppm, and of the 30 ppm above the magic number of 350 ppm, man owns 1 ppm.
Like Bush and his "Bring them on" and Obamas -"We need change", the AWG message is geared to those whose who are limited to being able to memorize slogans. So lets hear it again CD Say it out loud: "350. Do everything you can"
How about a celebrity, like Tom Cruise, or Madonna, or Tiger Woods, having to live on $350 dollars a month for 350 days. Now that would grab peoples attention. Hey, I'd buy the t-shirt.
I'm thinking about this:
I have heard it said that if you plop a live frog into a kettle of boiling water, that frog will leap out of the hot water. If, however, you place a frog in a kettle of tepid water and slowly bring the water to a boil, the frog will allow itself to be boiled to death.
This seems, to me, to be what we humans are doing. We are allowing ourselves to be boiled to death, allowing countless choices to be made on our behalf, some of them microscopically inconsequential, many of them easy to overlook in an instant. It seems to me that it's too late to pull the human race out of the crappy mess we have placed ourselves in.
One problem with words and numbers is that they speak to the mind, cold logic & intellect. It takes EMOTIONS and sometimes powerful visual cues, special effects that speak to the aggregate senses to MOVE people. This is where film or an important song "heard round the world" comes in.
It's pretty obvious that music that takes a strong political bias has been more or less censored. The few unknown musicians who seek to bring this type of material forward find closed doors/radio stations, and those who established their career credentials long ago occasionally step out and share...
The 60's were animated by a variety of social justice issues (into the 70's) because music was a MAJOR factor, the lyrics of songs roused a generation and moved its consciousness. I believe that music, a universal language that transcends intellectual response, could be KEY to bringing greater awareness about.
I was discussing this issue with some friends and it seems to us that for the 20-somethings who spend so much time on their ipods, computers, cell phones they truly are more ensconced in a VIRTUAL reality than this tangible one... maybe this explains their lack of connection to the actual changes in weather, all symbolic of the fraying of those ecosystems necessary for sustainability for us all.
Slightly altering an earlier idea of mine: 350 should be painted all over the buoy that should be placed at the North Pole this summer when its ice melts, then photographed and disseminated widely.
Changing the discussion from reducing the "growth of future emissions" to one of reducing the "CO2 actually in the atmosphere" helps to clarify just how deep the environmental problem is actually getting, and how inadequate current proposals actually are.
ya, some have a better understanding of numbers than others. 350 or bust, while expressing something terrifyingly true, will not be a slogan that inspires a movement. but it, sure as hell, better be a part of any transformational movement.
Even though this may be an excellent exercise in masturbatory relief, I'll still give you odds (350 to 1) that the number game fails, before you can jerk off another 349 times.
I think Arvy is right. CO2 is one indicator but there are others. And not just for global warming. Global warming is one of at least two dozen major factors that are contributing to the current problems in the relationship between humans and the world around us on this Earth. Jared Diamond wrote a great summary chapter near the end of his book Collapse about those other factors. And Diamond misses a few, mainly human societal and cultural factors such as military spending which takes away vital resources which are required to address the overall crisis.
We're like patients who've been to the doctor and found out that our cholesterol is too high.
The cholesterol (CO2) numeric is an important indicator, but it hardly comes close to covering the complete symptomology of arterial consequences that are already at the point where the angiogram results (ice cores, etc.) don't look good at all. Has anyone begun to notice any chest pains recently?