Dave Chandler's Earthside.com

On Thin Ice

Important news about the effects of global warming -- more evidence that Arctic ice is thinning and that ocean temperatures are rising.

This in spite of recent nonexistent sunspot activity ... which appears to have ended.

Nasa Satellites Reveal Extent of Arctic Sea Ice Loss | Guardian

The Earth is going thin on top. A new study has revealed that the Arctic Ocean's permanent blanket of ice around the North Pole has thinned by more than 40% since 2004. Scientists said the rapid loss was "remarkable" and said it could force experts to reassess how quickly the Arctic ice in the summer may disappear completely. They have called for more research to pin down the causes of the change, which they say is probably down to increased melting and shifts in the way the ice moves around.

The study, based on satellite measurements, is among the first to estimate the thickness of the Arctic ice, rather than just its surface area.

Ron Kwok, senior research scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said: "Even in years when the overall extent of sea ice remains stable or grows slightly, the thickness and volume of the ice cover is continuing to decline, making the ice more vulnerable to continued shrinkage."

The study looked at measurements taken of the Arctic region by the ICESat satellite, launched in 2003.

Overall, the experts found that the ice, typically up to about 3m thick, thinned by 67cm over the last four winters.

Converting to ice volume, the scientists worked out the amount of so-called multiyear ice, which persists through Arctic summers, had decreased in the winter by up to 6,300 cubic kilometres since 2005 – a decline of more than 40%. The research is published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.

Kwok said: "Ice volume allows us to calculate annual ice production and gives us an inventory of the fresh water and total ice mass stored in Arctic sea ice. Our data will help scientists better understand how fast the volume of Arctic ice is decreasing and how soon we might see a nearly ice-free Arctic in summer."

The Arctic ice cap fluctuates with the seasons, growing in the freezing winter and shrinking over the summer. An important finding of the study is that the majority of Arctic ice no longer survives the summer. In 2003, this multiyear ice made up 62% of the region's total ice volume. By 2008, this was down to 32%. The remaining 68% was "first-year" seasonal ice, which was open water during the summer, so is thinner and more likely to melt away.

Earlier this year, scientists warned that sea ice volume reached a record low in 2008 due to an unusually high proportion of the thinner first year ice.

New Report: Rising Ocean Temperatures Near UN’s Worst Case Predictions | Ocean Power Magazine

The European Policy Centre in Brussels released a report late yesterday warning that the ocean is warming about 50 percent faster than two years ago. Their report compiled research presented at the Science Congress in Copenhagen in March. They estimate that recent observations are near the worst-case predictions of the 2007 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and that the new estimates help to better explain the trend in sea level that has been observed in recent decades as most of the sea-level rise observed until recently has been the result of thermal expansion of seawater.

According to the authors of the report titled “Climate change: Global risks, Challenges & Decisons“, ocean temperatures are a better indicator of global warming than air temperature as the ocean stores more heat and responds more slowly to change. Findings indicate that the top 700 metres of have warmed by about 0.1 degrees over the past half century. The disconcerting aspect of that number is that well over half of the increase in ocean temperature has occurred in the last 10 years which corresponds to approximately 15 to 20 times more heat going into the ocean than has gone into the atmosphere.

This report is another important piece of evidence that should be considered in the talks leading up to the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December.

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Sunspot Activity Ramping Up Out of Deep Slumber | Scientific American

It wasn't quite fireworks, but the sun's activity, coming out of a long, deep lull, picked up a bit over the July Fourth weekend. A group of sunspots, which mark intense magnetic activity, appeared in the past few days—a patch larger and more populous than any yet this year, according to data from the Space Weather Prediction Center.

As we reported in April, this year got off to a slow start in terms of sunspots, which typically wax and wane in an 11-year cycle. The minimum of that cycle brought an exceptionally quiet 2008, one of the least active sunspot years of the century

Bad Human Habits

Graphically illustrated -- here is why the human species is in big trouble on this planet.

From the New Scientist web site (October 2008), are two sets of charts of graphs that demonstrate what we have been doing since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

While the fanatic believers in endless growth will argue that the spike in human consumption is a sign of our superiority and 'progress', it is more evident by now to most thinking people that our consuming binge will have a very dramatic cost. Common sense, the experiences of our daily lives, tell us that as things run out, as things wear out, and that as items become scarcer and more expensive we get stressed and anxious. Economic, social and political upheaval will certainly result from our collective anxiety.

Sadly, though the reality of our situation can be seen in these graphs, we are still doing very little in immediate, consequential and substantive terms to reverse our journey to the edge of the cliff. Most people and their 'leaders' do not want to talk about overpopulation, or peak oil, or militarism ... they prefer to look hopefully to the technology 'god' to somehow extricate us from our problems just in the nick of time.

Seeking a softer landing for our descent means accepting more mundane, not very exciting, often controversial paths: buses instead of sleek, high speed trains; ending immigration into the United States; even more recycling; breaking up the mega-transnational corporations; demanding less variety of goods; staying home ... you get the idea. When technological fixes are taken off the table because we have run out of time, the necessary changes in our lifestyles will be more noticeable and seemingly more anachronistic, old fashioned.

We have a lot of bad habits to break, and time is running out.

Special Report: The Facts About Overconsumption | New Scientist

References and attributions for the charts found at the link.

Another Looming Crisis

You should be aware of this possible crisis.

It is our opinion that the planet's eco-system is stressed far beyond its human carrying capacity by probably four or five billion people. This makes our reliance on any particular resource so vital that if even one or two experience a shortage, the lives of millions may hang in the balance.

And yet population control is a taboo subject.

A 'Time Bomb' for World Wheat Crop | Los Angeles Times

The spores arrived from Kenya on dried, infected leaves ensconced in layers of envelopes.

Working inside a bio-secure greenhouse outfitted with motion detectors and surveillance cameras, government scientists at the Cereal Disease Laboratory in St. Paul, Minn., suspended the fungal spores in a light mineral oil and sprayed them onto thousands of healthy wheat plants. After two weeks, the stalks were covered with deadly reddish blisters characteristic of the scourge known as Ug99.

Nearly all the plants were goners.

Crop scientists fear the Ug99 fungus could wipe out more than 80% of worldwide wheat crops as it spreads from eastern Africa. It has already jumped the Red Sea and traveled as far as Iran. Experts say it is poised to enter the breadbasket of northern India and Pakistan, and the wind will inevitably carry it to Russia, China and even North America -- if it doesn't hitch a ride with people first.

"It's a time bomb," said Jim Peterson, a professor of wheat breeding and genetics at Oregon State University in Corvallis. "It moves in the air, it can move in clothing on an airplane. We know it's going to be here. It's a matter of how long it's going to take."

Though most Americans have never heard of it, Ug99 -- a type of fungus called stem rust because it produces reddish-brown flakes on plant stalks -- is the No. 1 threat to the world's most widely grown crop.

The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico estimates that 19% of the world's wheat, which provides food for 1 billion people in Asia and Africa, is in imminent danger. American plant breeders say $10 billion worth of wheat would be destroyed if the fungus suddenly made its way to U.S. fields.

Fear that the fungus will cause widespread damage has caused short-term price spikes on world wheat markets. Famine has been averted thus far, but experts say it's only a matter of time.

"A significant humanitarian crisis is inevitable," said Rick Ward, the coordinator of the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

The solution is to develop new wheat varieties that are immune to Ug99. That's much easier said than done.

After several years of feverish work, scientists have identified a mere half-dozen genes that are immediately useful for protecting wheat from Ug99. Incorporating them into crops using conventional breeding techniques is a nine- to 12-year process that has only just begun. And that process will have to be repeated for each of the thousands of wheat varieties that is specially adapted to a particular region and climate.

"All the seed needs to change in the next few years," said Ronnie Coffman, a plant breeder who heads the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project. "It's really an enormous undertaking." ... MORE

Have We Passed the 'Tipping Point?'

Earthside Comments: Let us put it plainly: the planet Earth cannot afford anymore Americans.

But not only is an ever expanding population of residents of the United States due to immigration unsustainable, the birthrate and our excessive style of resource consumption is killing the planet.

We'll be blunt again: after and only after we have altered the typical American life-style and brought our ecological footprint inline with the rest of the world should any "immigration reform" be considered that would allow anymore people to enter the United States.

As 'ecological footprint' statistics presented below indicate, it is people living here that are most responsible for the global climate change that is threatening the eco-system of the Earth. It would, therefore, be the height of irresponsible to add to the numbers of Americans.

Indeed, as the first few reports here demonstrate, we should be very concerned that growing human population is encroaching such on the rest of the environment that the sustainability capacity of the planet may have already passed the tipping point. When species necessary for human survival, like bats and bees, are under new survival threats themselves, then key indicators about the health of the environment may have been presented.

Dealing with human overpopulation and the negative impacts of immigration into the United States are nearly taboo subjects in the political, social and religious discourse of Americans. But ignoring these extraordinarily difficult and uncomfortable realities won't make them go away. And, indeed, we don't have a good handle on solutions either -- but being willing to recognize and debate the problem is an important first step if we are ever going to find remedies.

The remainder of this post contains information and links to hopefully further illustrate the danger of our predicament. We then encourage you to be bold and at least give voice to the unpopular choices that need to be taken to save the planet from the swarm of humanity.

It's Nature's Law: When People Arrive, Animals Vanish | Associated Press/Miami Herald

It seems to be a law of nature that when people come, animals go. It happened in the past, and it's happening again now.

About 11,000 years ago, more than 130 species, including most large mammals such as the woolly mammoth, saber-tooth cat and a 5-ton ground sloth, suddenly vanished from North America.

Scientists are still debating the reasons, but two leading suspects are excessive hunting by humans who had newly arrived from the Old World and devastating human-borne diseases.

"People come and animals begin to disappear," said Ross MacPhee, the curator of the mammal collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

A third commonly cited cause of the massive extinction is climate change at the end of the Ice Age and its effect on plant and animal habitats.

The combination of climate change and human impact was especially destructive, according to Anthony Barnosky, a paleontologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"Today we stand at a similar crossroads," Barnosky reported in an analysis of the extinctions during what scientists call the Late Pleistocene age, about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago. "A similar but scaled-up natural experiment is under way today - the exponential growth of human populations at exactly the same time the Earth is warming at unprecedented rates," he wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ...

... Looking to the future, Dennis Hansen, a biologist at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., predicted that human activities are "set to cause further extinctions among large vertebrates."

In an article last month in the journal Science, Hansen pointed to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, where the vast majority of animals have gone extinct, leaving the forests "largely populated by ghosts today." ...

White-Nose Syndrome Killing Bats Is Spreading Fast | ABC News

A mysterious fungus is killing off thousands of bats around the country. Scientists are calling it white-nose syndrome, because of the distinctive white smudges on the noses and wings of infected bats. White-nose itself doesn't kill bats, but it disturbs their sleep so that they end their hibernation early. During the winter there are no insects to eat, so the bats literally starve to death.

Bats may be one of Mother Nature's least cuddly creatures, but they are ecologically important, keeping mosquitos and insects that attack crops in check.

Researchers say the syndrome has killed upward of half a million bats from New England to Virginia.

"If current trends continue, we will be losing millions of bats in the next couple years," said Al Hicks, a wildlife biologist with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

In some of the worst-hit areas, the mortality rate is 90 percent. Scientists are even using the word "extinction."

Honey Bee Colony Losses In U.S. Almost 30 Percent From All Causes From September 2008 To April 2009 | Science Daily

Honey bee colony losses nationwide were approximately 29 percent from all causes from September 2008 to April 2009, according to a survey conducted by the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. ...

... About 26 percent of apiaries surveyed reported that some of their colonies died of colony collapse disorder (CCD), down from 36 percent of apiaries in 2007-2008. CCD is characterized by the sudden, complete absence of honey bees in a colony. The cause of CCD is still unknown. ...

... among beekeepers that reported any colonies collapsing without the presence of dead bees, each lost an average of 32 percent of their colonies in 2008-2009, while apiaries that did not lose any bees with symptoms of CCD each lost an average of 26 percent of their colonies.

To strengthen the beekeeping industry, ARS recently began a five-year areawide research program to improve honey bee health, survivorship and pollination. Honey bee pollination is critical to agriculture, adding more than $15 billion to the value of American crops each year.

By 2050 Warming to Doom Million Species, Study Says | John Roach/National Geographic News - July 12, 2004

By 2050, rising temperatures exacerbated by human-induced belches of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases could send more than a million of Earth's land-dwelling plants and animals down the road to extinction, according to a recent study.

"Climate change now represents at least as great a threat to the number of species surviving on Earth as habitat-destruction and modification," said Chris Thomas, a conservation biologist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.

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Immigration to Play Lead Role In Future U.S. Growth | Jeffrey Passel and D'Vera Cohn/Pew Research Center - February 11, 2008

U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050

If current trends continue, the population of the United States will rise to 438 million in 2050, from 296 million in 2005, and 82% of the increase will be due to immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their U.S.-born descendants, according to new projections developed by the Pew Research Center.

Of the 117 million people added to the population during this period due to the effect of new immigration, 67 million will be the immigrants themselves and 50 million will be their U.S.-born children or grandchildren.

Among the other key population projections:

• Nearly one in five Americans (19%) will be an immigrant in 2050, compared with one in eight (12%) in 2005. By 2025, the immigrant, or foreign-born, share of the population will surpass the peak during the last great wave of immigration a century ago.
• The major role of immigration in national growth builds on the pattern of recent decades, during which immigrants and their U.S.-born children and grandchildren accounted for most population increase. Immigration's importance increased as the average number of births to U.S.-born women dropped sharply before leveling off.
• The Latino population, already the nation's largest minority group, will triple in size and will account for most of the nation's population growth from 2005 through 2050. Hispanics will make up 29% of the U.S. population in 2050, compared with 14% in 2005.
• Births in the United States will play a growing role in Hispanic and Asian population growth; as a result, a smaller proportion of both groups will be foreign-born in 2050 than is the case now.
• The non-Hispanic white population will increase more slowly than other racial and ethnic groups; whites will become a minority (47%) by 2050.
• The nation's elderly population will more than double in size from 2005 through 2050, as the baby boom generation enters the traditional retirement years. The number of working-age Americans and children will grow more slowly than the elderly population, and will shrink as a share of the total population.

U.N. Raises “Low” Population Projection for 2050 | World Watch Institute

The United Nations has raised its optimistic "low" estimate of world population growth due to an increase in childbirths in some industrialized nations.

In a biennial report released last week, the U.N. Population Division increased slightly a projection it uses to forecast the size of the human population. The "low-variant" scenario of population growth now foresees 117 million more people on the planet in 2050 than it did two years ago.

While the "median-variant" scenario, often seen as "most likely," remains almost the same as before - predicting a world with 9.2 billion people by mid-century, up from nearly 6.8 billion today - the earlier low projection did not anticipate jumps in fertility in Europe and the United States [PDF].

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Ecological Footprint according to Wikipedia:

The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems. It compares human demand with planet Earth's ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed to regenerate the resources a human population consumes and to absorb and render harmless the corresponding waste. Using this assessment, it is possible to estimate how much of the Earth (or how many planet Earths) it would take to support humanity if everybody lived a given lifestyle. For 2005, humanity's total ecological footprint was estimated at 1.3 planet Earths - in other words, humanity uses ecological services 1.3 times as fast as Earth can renew them.

Global Footprint Network Data Tables 2008
Total Ecological Footprint
(global hectares per capita):

United States - 9.4
Mexico - 3.4
Guatemala - 1.5
Haiti - 0.5
Honduras - 1.8
Nicaragua - 2.0
Dominican Republic - 1.5
Panama - 3.2
Costa Rica - 2.3
El Salvador - 1.6

Carbon Footprint Of Best Conserving Americans Is Still Double Global Average | Science Daily - April 29, 2008

An MIT class has estimated the carbon emissions of Americans in a wide variety of lifestyles -- from the homeless to multimillionaires, from Buddhist monks to soccer moms -- and compared them to those of other nations. The somewhat disquieting bottom line is that in the United States, even the people with the lowest usage of energy are still producing, on average, more than double the global per-capita average. Whether you live in a cardboard box or a luxurious mansion, whether you subsist on homegrown vegetables or wolf down imported steaks, whether you're a jet-setter or a sedentary retiree, anyone who lives in the U.S. contributes more than twice as much greenhouse gas to the atmosphere as the global average, an MIT class has estimated. The class studied the carbon emissions of Americans in a wide variety of lifestyles--from the homeless to multimillionaires, from Buddhist monks to soccer moms--and compared them to those of other nations. The somewhat disquieting bottom line is that in the United States, even people with the lowest energy usage account for, on average, more than double the global per-capita carbon emission. And those emissions rise steeply from that minimum as people's income increases.

"Regardless of income, there is a certain floor below which the individual carbon footprint of a person in the U.S. will not drop," says Timothy Gutowski, professor of mechanical engineering, who taught the class that calculated the rates of carbon emissions. The results will be presented this May at the IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment in San Francisco.

While it may seem surprising that even people whose lifestyles don't appear extravagant--the homeless, monks, children--are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions, one major factor is the array of government services that are available to everyone in the United States. These basic services--including police, roads, libraries, the court system and the military--were allocated equally to everyone in the country in this study. Other services that are more specific, such as education or Medicare, were allocated only to those who actually make use of them. ...

... But the "floor" below which nobody in the U.S. can reach, no matter a person's energy choices, turned out to be 8.5 tons, the class found. That was the emissions calculated for a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters.

UK Overpopulation Leader

Earthside Comments:

"I've never seen a problem that wouldn't be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more."

The quotation is by Sir David Attenborough from the report below. It is the same message we have been preaching at Earthside for quite sometime. Peak oil, massive debt, suburban sprawl, global climate change, food contamination ... almost every major problem and difficulty confronting the people of the United States and the world has its genesis in the pressures brought to bear by the demands of too many people.

Through persuasion and choice, we must confront this phenomenon or we will face an increasing bleak future. Overpopulation is still nearly a taboo subject in social and political discourse because of the religious and cultural overtones -- yet its centrality to our problems becomes very obvious upon serious examination.

It is encouraging to see, therefore, that at least in Britain, a major environmental activist has stepped up to promote discussion and debate on the overpopulation issue.

First, here are some links to U.S. population organizations.

Negative Population Growth

Population Connection

World Overpopulation Awareness

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Attenborough Warns on Population | BBC

The broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has become a patron of a group seeking to cut the growth in human population.

On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was "frightening".

Sir David has been increasingly vocal about the need to reduce the number of people on Earth to protect wildlife.

The Trust, which accuses governments and green groups of observing a taboo on the topic, say they are delighted to have Sir David as a patron.

Fraught area

Sir David, one of the BBC's longest-standing presenters, has been making documentaries on the natural world and conservation for more than half a century.

In a statement issued by the Optimum Population Trust he is quoted as saying: "I've never seen a problem that wouldn't be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more."

The Trust, which was founded in 1991, campaigns for the UK population to decrease voluntarily by not less than 0.25% a year.

It has launched a "Stop at Two" online pledge to encourage couples to limit their family's size.

Other patrons include Jonathan Porritt, chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, and Dame Jane Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall institute.

BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin said population was a fraught area of debate, with libertarians and some religious groups vehemently opposing measures by governments to influence individual fertility.

In turn, the Trust accuses policy makers and environmentalists of conspiring in a "silent lie" that human numbers can grow forever with no ill-effects.

In January 2009, Sir David revealed that he had received hate mail from viewers for not crediting God in his nature programmes.

His most recent documentary focused on how Charles Darwin came up with the theory of evolution and why it remained important.

The Ultimate Probem: Overpopulation

Earthside Comments: It is the ultimate, underlying cause of almost all of the problems and difficulties we face ... as a species, as a culture, as a society, as a civilization. It is also the most taboo of political issues -- human overpopulation.

Because a 'solution' is difficult to confront: how do we have less people on the planet in time to save ourselves from the effects of "too many people"? Both conservatives and liberals are squeamish about offending religious sensibilities, about appearing to challenge 'progress' or 'growth', about not being sufficiently compassionate towards the third world, the oppressed, the poor, etc.

Nevertheless it is the simple realization that 6.7 billion humans all need to eat, need to drink, want decent shelter, want transportation, want to keep warm or cool -- that we have to face and the fact that the Earth is not capable of supporting this kind of population. We are surely fouling our own nest ... that is what global climate change is telling us (and why the religious right is so exercised about this issue -- because 'God', not humans, runs the climate according to them).

Earthside maintains that as uncomfortable as it is, we have to confront this issue. It is why as progressives -- indeed because we are environmentalist progressives -- that we are against anymore illegal and legal immigration into this country (indeed, we need to reverse the process by about a hundred million). The last thing this planet needs right now are more people aspiring to attain the carbon footprint level of the typical suburban American. Besides changing our lifestyles to be less demanding and consuming, the biggest environmental issue in the U.S. is that there are too many of us and we add to our numbers at our own peril.

We are gratified that Chris Hedges in the article below has taken up this subject.

We Are Breeding Ourselves to Extinction | Chris Hedges/TruthDig.com/CommonDreams.org

All measures to thwart the degradation and destruction of our ecosystem will be useless if we do not cut population growth. By 2050, if we continue to reproduce at the current rate, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people, according to a recent U.N. forecast. This is a 50 percent increase. And yet government-commissioned reviews, such as the Stern report in Britain, do not mention the word population. Books and documentaries that deal with the climate crisis, including Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," fail to discuss the danger of population growth. This omission is odd, given that a doubling in population, even if we cut back on the use of fossil fuels, shut down all our coal-burning power plants and build seas of wind turbines, will plunge us into an age of extinction and desolation unseen since the end of the Mesozoic era, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared.

We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet's life-forms-an estimated 8,760 species die off per year-because, simply put, there are too many people. Most of these extinctions are the direct result of the expanding need for energy, housing, food and other resources. The Yangtze River dolphin, Atlantic gray whale, West African black rhino, Merriam's elk, California grizzly bear, silver trout, blue pike and dusky seaside sparrow are all victims of human overpopulation. Population growth, as E.O. Wilson says, is "the monster on the land." Species are vanishing at a rate of a hundred to a thousand times faster than they did before the arrival of humans. If the current rate of extinction continues, Homo sapiens will be one of the few life-forms left on the planet, its members scrambling violently among themselves for water, food, fossil fuels and perhaps air until they too disappear. Humanity, Wilson says, is leaving the Cenozoic, the age of mammals, and entering the Eremozoic-the era of solitude. As long as the Earth is viewed as the personal property of the human race, a belief embraced by everyone from born-again Christians to Marxists to free-market economists, we are destined to soon inhabit a biological wasteland.

The populations in industrialized nations maintain their lifestyles because they have the military and economic power to consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources. The United States alone gobbles up about 25 percent of the oil produced in the world each year. These nations view their stable or even zero growth birthrates as sufficient. It has been left to developing countries to cope with the emergent population crisis. India, Egypt, South Africa, Iran, Indonesia, Cuba and China, whose one-child policy has prevented the addition of 400 million people, have all tried to institute population control measures. But on most of the planet, population growth is exploding. The U.N. estimates that 200 million women worldwide do not have access to contraception. The population of the Persian Gulf states, along with the Israeli-occupied territories, will double in two decades, a rise that will ominously coincide with precipitous peak oil declines.

The overpopulated regions of the globe will ravage their local environments, cutting down rainforests and the few remaining wilderness areas, in a desperate bid to grow food. And the depletion and destruction of resources will eventually create an overpopulation problem in industrialized nations as well. The resources that industrialized nations consider their birthright will become harder and more expensive to obtain. Rising water levels on coastlines, which may submerge coastal nations such as Bangladesh, will disrupt agriculture and displace millions, who will attempt to flee to areas on the planet where life is still possible. The rising temperatures and droughts have already begun to destroy crop lands in Africa, Australia, Texas and California. The effects of this devastation will first be felt in places like Bangladesh, but will soon spread within our borders. Footprint data suggests that, based on current lifestyles, the sustainable population of the United Kingdom-the number of people the country could feed, fuel and support from its own biological capacity-is about 18 million. This means that in an age of extreme scarcity, some 43 million people in Great Britain would not be able to survive. Overpopulation will become a serious threat to the viability of many industrialized states the instant the cheap consumption of the world's resources can no longer be maintained. This moment may be closer than we think.

A world where 8 billion to 10 billion people are competing for diminishing resources will not be peaceful. The industrialized nations will, as we have done in Iraq, turn to their militaries to ensure a steady supply of fossil fuels, minerals and other nonrenewable resources in the vain effort to sustain a lifestyle that will, in the end, be unsustainable. The collapse of industrial farming, which is made possible only with cheap oil, will lead to an increase in famine, disease and starvation. And the reaction of those on the bottom will be the low-tech tactic of terrorism and war. Perhaps the chaos and bloodshed will be so massive that overpopulation will be solved through violence, but this is hardly a comfort.

James Lovelock, an independent British scientist who has spent most of his career locked out of the mainstream, warned several decades ago that disrupting the delicate balance of the Earth, which he refers to as a living body, would be a form of collective suicide. The atmosphere on Earth-21 percent oxygen and 79 percent nitrogen-is not common among planets, he notes. These gases are generated, and maintained at an equable level for life's processes, by living organisms themselves. Oxygen and nitrogen would disappear if the biosphere was destroyed. The result would be a greenhouse atmosphere similar to that of Venus, a planet that is consequently hundreds of degrees hotter than Earth. Lovelock argues that the atmosphere, oceans, rocks and soil are living entities. They constitute, he says, a self-regulating system. Lovelock, in support of this thesis, looked at the cycle in which algae in the oceans produce volatile sulfur compounds. These compounds act as seeds to form oceanic clouds. Without these dimethyl sulfide "seeds" the cooling oceanic clouds would be lost. This self-regulating system is remarkable because it maintains favorable conditions for human life. Its destruction would not mean the death of the planet. It would not mean the death of life-forms. But it would mean the death of Homo sapiens.

Lovelock advocates nuclear power and thermal solar power; the latter, he says, can be produced by huge mirrors mounted in deserts such as those in Arizona and the Sahara. He proposes reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide with large plastic cylinders thrust vertically into the ocean. These, he says, could bring nutrient-rich lower waters to the surface, producing an algal bloom that would increase the cloud cover. But he warns that these steps will be ineffective if we do not first control population growth. He believes the Earth is overpopulated by a factor of about seven. As the planet overheats-and he believes we can do nothing to halt this process-overpopulation will make all efforts to save the ecosystem futile.

Lovelock, in "The Revenge of Gaia," said that if we do not radically and immediately cut greenhouse gas emissions, the human race might not die out but it would be reduced to "a few breeding pairs." "The Vanishing Face of Gaia," his latest book, which has for its subtitle "The Final Warning," paints an even grimmer picture. Lovelock says a continued population boom will make the reduction of fossil fuel use impossible. If we do not reduce our emissions by 60 percent, something that can be achieved only by walking away from fossil fuels, the human race is doomed, he argues. Time is running out. This reduction will never take place, he says, unless we can dramatically reduce our birthrate.

All efforts to stanch the effects of climate change are not going to work if we do not practice vigorous population control. Overpopulation, in times of hardship, will create as much havoc in industrialized nations as in the impoverished slums around the globe where people struggle on less than two dollars a day. Population growth is often overlooked, or at best considered a secondary issue, by many environmentalists, but it is as fundamental to our survival as reducing the emissions that are melting the polar ice caps.

© 2009 TruthDig.com

Climate Scientists Warn That World is Heading for War of the Resources | Times of London

Hurricane Gustav

Wow!

Take a look at the latest computer models for Hurricane Gustav. New Orleans looks to be a target again.

Let's hope not.

Link: Deadly Gustav Churns Toward Cuba, Gulf of Mexico | AFP

Saving Ourselves?

Earthside Comments: The 'big' energy news this past week was that there might be 90 billion barrels of oil deep beneath the Arctic Ocean.

The "use it all up now" and "drill, drill, drill" crowd were, of course, very enthusiastic. They didn't skip a beat in their political efforts to use high gasoline prices to discredit environmentalists.

So, here are two articles in contra-position to the notion of most Americans that driving gas gugglers is a basic human right. We are a long way from saving ourselves.

Link: We’re a Nation of Lemmings | Dave Lindorff/CommonDreams.org

Listening to the endless stream of cars passing my house every day, and knowing, from watching them from my mailbox, that they are almost all carrying just one person, either commuting to work or running some kind of errand, I know we are headed for disaster.

Two days ago, there was a report by Agence France Presse about the ongoing destruction of the world’s remaining wetlands (60 percent have already been destroyed by man over the past century), and how they contain within them an amount of stored carbon equal to all the carbon currently in the atmosphere. Global warming and property development are drying out those remaining wetlands, causing the release of that carbon, which will more than negate even the most radical efforts at reducing carbon emissions from power plants, factories and automobiles.

There are also credible, well-researched reports that even a few more degrees of temperature rise in the arctic regions of Siberia and northern North America will melt the permafrost and release as much 400 gigatons of methane gas trapped in frozen clathrates for millennia — the release of which would cause global temperatures to soar to levels not seen in 250 million years (methane is 20 times as potent a global warming gas as CO2). Vast regions of Siberia are already bubbling with releasing methane as the permafrost line moves north.

Now I grant that our corporate media, ever focused laser-like on important stories like Britney Spears’ return to the stage and on the latest gaffe of one or the other presidential candidate, have not been very interested in alerting the masses to these disasters now in progress that could end humanity’s run on the planet (along with exterminating most of the rest of the life on the planet too). But that said, at this point everyone has surely heard enough, and witnessed enough in person of the dramatic changes taking place in the earth’s climate, to know that something scary is going on.

And yet, people are not just going about their business as usual — they are actually, for the most part, complaining not about the lack of highly energy-efficient transportation, the lack of alternative and less energy-wasting public transit, and the lack of government funding for a crash program into researching carbon-free energy solutions, but rather about the high price for carbon fuels. People are clamoring for solutions to make gasoline cheaper!

Years ago, back in the 1970s during an Arab-led oil embargo, when gas prices soared, there were mass campaigns to organize car pools. No such campaigns are being organized today, and if any are they don’t get any media attention. Instead we read that geologists are saying that massive quantities of untapped oil reserves exist in the far north.

Now the last thing we should be wanting to do is take that nicely sequestered carbon out of the ground and burn it into CO2! But that’s what many Americans want done. Screw the climate! We want our cheap gas!

There are so many things we could be doing right now to reduce carbon emissions — as individuals and as a nation. Turning off air-conditioners would be one. Why should entire houses be cooled by central air? Cool one room and use it for the hottest part of the day if need be. Live downstairs during the hottest months and close off the upstairs when it gets too hot. Ditto in the winter. There’s no need to occupy and heat an entire house when it gets really cold. Most Americans’ homes are way too large anyhow, but if you need that much room, use it when it doesn’t require all that extra energy to heat and cool. (When I lived in Cambridge, England as a kid, we used to sleep in unheated bedrooms under cozy comforters, and then in the morning, I’d go down and light a fire in the living room where we’d be during the day. It would be cold as hell until the fire started, but not for long.) Share rides. Plan errands so that many things get taken care of on one outing, instead of in multiple run-outs. Use bicycles. I have yet to see, on my own bike rides in down or when driving anywhere, someone who is actually riding a bike on some errand-carrying a load in a basket or in a backpack. The only bikers I see are people dressed like Tour de France racers out for some exercise. What’s the matter with using bikes for a purpose, instead of the family car?

I’m not trying to criticize, or to say I’m more ecologically virtuous. I’m looking at this as an unprecedented disaster that is dooming my kids, or their future children, to a life of strife, misery and maybe even catastrophe. If I don’t take serious action — and I don’t just mean individual life changes, but political action — to try and save their world, I am guilty of a serious crime. And so are we all.

What the hell happened to any sense of shared responsibility, not just for society, but for our own offspring?

Most decent parents are ready to sacrifice in their lifestyles in order to send their kids to college, or to help them out financially when they are starting out as young adults. But for some strange reason nobody seems ready to sacrifice at all when it comes to rescuing their collective future. This makes no sense.

And yet, this is what our mass culture has done to us. As a nation, as a people, we cannot think beyond our own noses. We cannot even think about the need to act in our own and our children’s interest.

Seventeen years ago, I had occasion while living in Shanghai, China, to visit a rural area in Anhui Province that the year before had been devastated by a flood so huge that the entire region had been not just flooded, but put deep underwater. As I neared a county seat town that was my intended destination, the bus I was on passed a dike-building project. Thousands of peasants were laboring by hand, with shovels and wheelbarrows, to erect a 50-foot wall of earth to keep the river in its banks in the event of another such flood. I got off the bus and, with my travel companion, started walking towards the project. When we were spotted, thousands of those workers dropped their shovels and ran towards us. It was a terrifying moment to have so many people heading towards and surrounding us, but they were very friendly — just curious because none of them had ever met a westerner. We began talking with them, and learned that they were all peasants who had left their fields to build this colossal new Great Wall of dirt. They brought us to the worksite and showed us how they would bring their wheelbarrows to the base of the dike, and then attach a cable, which was connected to a winch operated by those ubiquitous one-cylinder, two-stroke kerosene tractors used across rural China. The winch would whip the barrow up the steep hillside, with a peasant running up behind keeping it upright. At the last minute, the peasant would flip the barrow, dumping the dirt and releasing the hook. Then he’d be off down the hill to collect more dirt.

What struck me, besides their ingenuity, was how all these thousands of people had left their own fields to labor for the collective good that year.

I tried at the time to contemplate my fellow Americans doing the same thing, and couldn’t for the life of me imagine it.

Now we’re in that moment. We know the flood is coming, but no one is willing to join the brigade to take preventive action.

No. Buying a Prius is not taking action. Neither is upgrading the insulation on your house or buying carbon offsets when you fly. We need, as a nation, to commit to seriously ending our addiction to fossil fuels, to rapacious development and the concomitant destruction of forests and wetlands. We need to end our nation’s imperialist policies and to instead devote the trillion dollars a year spent on war to saving the planet from ourselves.

A good start would be seeing that people “get it.” That would mean communities starting to organize around improving mass transit, arranging for carpooling, and demanding climate-saving action from our political leaders.

I’m not optimistic.

Link: Arctic Gas and Oil Bonanza, But No Energy Fix | Andrew C. Revkin/New York Times Blog

The U.S. Geological Survey has released the first Arctic-wide estimate of undiscovered natural gas and oil deposits and come up with huge numbers for both, at least on first glance. The region north of the Arctic Circle, the agency said, probably has a third of the world’s remaining uncharted gas and 20 percent of the remaining oil.

But as Jad Mouawad notes in The Times, if that amount of oil were extractable, it would still add up to less than three years’ worth of gasoline, heating oil and other petroleum needs at today’s consumption rate of 86 million barrels a day — and the demand for oil is rising. The gas is a much bigger deal, with Arctic-wide estimates equaling the known reserves for Russia, the world’s largest largest gas source.

The Arctic energy report, then, perhaps supports the assertions of those saying that the world will not be able to drill its way out of the oil crunch in the long run, and that, with or without considering global warming, we must eventually shift to electrified transportation and renewable farmed fuels for sectors like aviation that can’t plug in.

As for petroleum, while increased scarcity and demand will spur people to drive less, in smaller cars, it will also guarantee the expansion of drilling farther toward the ends of the Earth and deeper in ocean basins. Drilling there is ridiculously hard, and costly, so it will be the last place to be sucked dry. Just review how hard it was simply to extract one 1,200-foot-long core of sea bed near the North Pole in 2004.

That economic reality is why even James Hansen of NASA, perhaps the most impassioned scientist pressing for cuts in fossil fuel burning, bases his best-case calculations for greenhouse emissions around the presumption that a lot of the world’s extractable oil will eventually be burned. He seeks a rising carbon tax to slow the pace of oil use. Dr. Hansen said my initial wording didn’t reflect his views well. His comment is below. In a followup note Dr. Hansen put his views on Arctic oil this way: “We should not be going to the ends of the Earth for the last drop — that is the behavior of a crazed addict — we should move on to the post-fossil-fuel-era.”

This all means that our Big Melt series from 2005 and my New York Times book, “The North Pole Was Here”, still hold up as portraits of a polar region forever changed from an untouchable, frozen frontier to just another human-dominated part of Earth — for better and worse.

Too Many People

Earthside Comments: The taboo subject of human overpopulation is addressed below by British commentator Johann Hari.

After the article is an excerpt of Dr. Albert Bartlett's lecture on human population and sustainability. To get an understanding of the full meaning of the simple mathematical truth of what Dr. Bartlett is telling us, watch the entire lecture.

Every minute that goes by now without us seriously addressing and taking action on human population, global climate change and 'peak oil' ... is a moment lost and a step taken towards catastrophe.

Link: Are There Just Too Many People in the World? | Johann Hari/Independent/CommonDreams.org

This is a column I don’t want to write. Its subject is ugly; it makes me instinctively recoil. I have chastised people who bring it up at environmentalist meetings. The people who talk about it obsessively have often been callous about human life, and consistently proved wrong throughout history. And yet… there is a grain of insight in what they say.

The subject is overpopulation. Is our planet over-stuffed with human beings? Are we breeding to excess? These questions are increasingly poking into public debate, and from odd directions. Phillip Mountbatten — husband of the British monarch Elizabeth Windsor — said in a documentary screened this week: “The food prices are going up, and everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food, but it’s really [that there are] too many people. It’s a little embarrassing for everybody, nobody knows how to handle it.” He is not alone. A strange range of people have voiced the same sentiments over the past few months, from the Dalai Lama to Hu Jintao, from Conservative mayor Boris Johnson to Democratic Governor Bill Richardson.

They start by listing the sums, which are indeed startling. Every year, world population grows by 75 million people — equivalent to another Britain and Ireland whooshing fully-populated from the oceans. At the turn of the 18th century, there were 600 million people on earth. At the turn of this century, there were 6.6 billion. By the time I am in my sixties, there will be more than nine billion — at which point there will be more people alive simultaneously than in the first 17 centuries after Christ combined.

The overpopulation lobby say this will inevitably leave more and more people chasing after a diminishing amount of resources on an ecologically-ravaged planet. At their most pessimistic, they say human beings will, in the long sweep of planetary history, look like a big-brained version of a locust cloud. They eat everything in sight and multiply fifty-fold — until they have consumed everything, when they turn in desperation on each other, munch off their siblings’ heads, and then fall out of the sky dead.

They say with a frown that this global swarming is driving global warming. How can you be prepared to cut back on your car emissions and your plane emissions but not on your baby emissions? Can you really celebrate the pitter-patter of tiny carbon-footprints?

Yet this subject seems to leech out all the dark toxins of environmentalism — a movement I believe is the most urgent and important in the world. There has always been an element of green thinking that viewed humans as a parasitic infestation, wrecking the Eden of planet earth. The philosopher John Gray calls our species “homo rapiens”. The founder of Earth First!, Dave Foreman, called us “Humanpox” and wrote: “The Aids epidemic, rather than being a scourge, is a welcome development in the inevitable reduction of human population… If [it] didn’t exist, radical environmentalists would have to invent [it].”

If environmentalism sounds — or is — misanthropic, we will lose the argument. Most human beings will never think the world would be better off without us. Nobody thinks they are the surplus human being who should not have been born. These strident arguments hand a huge gift to the anti-greens, who always said we were anti-human beneath the surface.

It also looks like displacement. The places where population is growing fastest — sub-Saharan Africa, rural China and Bangladesh — have virtually no carbon emissions, and pitiful food consumption rates. The gap is so huge that to be responsible for as many gas emissions as one British person, a Cambodian woman would need to have 262 children. Can we really sit in our nice homes, with a fridge-full of food we will mostly chuck away and an SUV in the drive, and complain that she is the problem?

Once this gut-reaction has kicked in, I then think of the horrible history of overpopulation predictions. Most famously, the 18th century demographer Thomas Malthus said mass starvation was inevitable because population increases geometrically while food production grows arithmetically. He didn’t anticipate the coming of the Industrial Revolution. His successors in the 1960s, like Paul Ehrich and the Club of Rome, similarly didn’t see the Green Revolution that was galloping around the corner of history.

So it is tempting to say now that the overpopulation argument will smack into some new technological development. It’s not quite true to say there is a diminishing amount of resources, because the genius of human beings is to find new ways to use what is there. Two centuries ago, nobody could have conceived that the sun’s rays or the waves in the ocean were a resource to be used - but solar and tidal power make it so.

And yet, and yet … why do my own arguments leave me echoing with doubt? A dark voice in my head says: you would accept that, to pluck an absurd number, 100 billion people would be too many. You don’t think human genius is infinitely expansive; there is a limit to what it can solve. So isn’t the question just where you draw the line? If 100 billion is too much, why not nine billion?

Hmm. You should always take on the best arguments of your opponents, not the worst. There are good people — a world away from the British royals or the human-hating fringes — who are sincerely concerned about population levels: people like Professors Chris Rapley and John Guillebaud. They argue that although the swelling billions are not now emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases, they will see that we are doing it and will (totally understandably) want to join in the carbon bonfire.

But if this is a problem, is there a solution that isn’t abhorrent? Some people seem to reach instinctively for authoritarian answers. The government of China has bragged that its “greatest contribution” to the fight against global warming has been its policy of punishing, imprisoning or sterilising women who have more than one child. Some environmentalists — a small minority — eye this idea jealously.

There is a far better way — and it is something we should be pursuing anyway. It is called feminism. Where women have control over their own bodies — through contraception, abortion and general independence — they choose not to be perpetually pregnant. The UN Fund For Population Activities has calculated that 350 million women in the poorest countries didn’t want their last child, but didn’t have the means to prevent it. We should be helping them by building a global anti-Vatican, distributing the pill and the words of Mary Wollstonecraft.

So after studying the evidence, I am left in a position I didn’t expect. Yes, the argument about overpopulation is distasteful, often discussed inappropriately, and far from being a panacea-solution — but it can’t be dismissed entirely. It will be easier for 6 billion people to cope on a heaving, boiling planet than for nine or 10 billion — and we will only get there by freeing women to make their own reproductive choices. To achieve this green goal, it’s necessary to mix some oestrogen into the environmentalist palette.

©Independent

Growth Will Be Our End: Dr. Albert Bartlett

And Then There's Global Climate Change

Earthside Comments: Directly related to the previous post are the environmental consequences of human overpopulation and human over consumption of natural resources. Too many people using too much stuff is leaving the Earth's ecosystem stressed and strained.

As we all learned in fifth grade science, for every action there is a reaction. We have burned up over half of the sunlight stored as carbon in oil, coal and gas over millions and millions of years. We've used all that energy in just about 150 years -- of course, there are going to be consequences -- it is just common sense.

Now, as the items below relate, we are in a real bind, our time is running out to do anything that will have substantive mitigating impacts.

What dramatic actions by world governments are you witnessing to save us from our own behavior?

Well?

Link: World CO2 Levels at Record High, Scientists Warn | The Guardian

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to new figures that renew fears that climate change could begin to slide out of control.

Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii say that CO2 levels in the atmosphere now stand at 387 parts per million (ppm), up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years.

The figures, published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on its website, also confirm that carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than expected. The annual mean growth rate for 2007 was 2.14ppm – the fourth year in the past six to see an annual rise greater than 2ppm. From 1970 to 2000, the concentration rose by about 1.5ppm each year, but since 2000 the annual rise has leapt to an average 2.1ppm.

Scientists say the shift could indicate that the Earth is losing its natural ability to soak up billions of tons of carbon each year. Climate models assume that about half our future emissions will be re-absorbed by forests and oceans, but the new figures confirm this may be too optimistic. If more of our carbon pollution stays in the atmosphere, it means emissions will have to be cut by more than currently projected to prevent dangerous levels of global warming.

Martin Parry, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's working group on impacts, said: "Despite all the talk, the situation is getting worse. Levels of greenhouse gases continue to rise in the atmosphere and the rate of that rise is accelerating. We are already seeing the impacts of climate change and the scale of those impacts will also accelerate, until we decide to do something about it."

Link: It Isn't Morning in America Anymore -- It's Dusk on Planet Earth | Environment | Bill McKibben/Tomdispatch.com/AlterNet.org

Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start -- even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.

It's not just the economy. We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so inextricably tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the "limits to growth" suddenly seem how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.

There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA's Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points -- massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them -- that we'll pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don't bring it down right away, you're going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you're lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It's like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front.

In this case, though, it's worse than that because we're not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas -- hard. Instead of slowing down, we're pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year -- two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.

And suddenly, the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent greenhouse gas, accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar as well. Apparently, we've managed to warm the far north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost and massive quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.

And don't forget: China is building more power plants; India is pioneering the $2,500 car, and Americans are converting to TVs the size of windshields which suck juice ever faster.

Here's the thing. Hansen didn't just say that, if we didn't act, there was trouble coming; or, if we didn't yet know what was best for us, we'd certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His phrase was: "if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of Canada this year. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms Canada's efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, already in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the U.S. from Alberta's tar sands.)

We're the ones who kicked the warming off; now, the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun's heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them -- to reverse course. Here's the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Accord. When December 2009 rolls around, heads of state are supposed to converge on Copenhagen to sign a treaty -- a treaty that would go into effect at the last plausible moment to heed the most basic and crucial of limits on atmospheric CO2.

If we did everything right, says Hansen, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out we might even be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.

More likely, though, we're the Coyote -- because "doing everything right" means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they're supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way we made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones, so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.

That's possible -- we launched a Marshall Plan once, and we could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But in a month when the President has, once more, urged us to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that seems unlikely. In a month when the alluring phrase "gas tax holiday" has danced into our vocabulary, it's hard to see (though it was encouraging to see that Clinton's gambit didn't sway many voters). And if it's hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as we do.

Still, as long as it's not impossible, we've got a duty to try. In fact, it's about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.

A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can't do this one light bulb at a time. And if this 350.org campaign is a Hail Mary pass, well, sometimes those passes get caught.

We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that "350" stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

Hansen's words were well-chosen: "a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that civilization may not.

Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won't exist, at least not for long, this side of 350. That's the limit we face.

Copyright 2008 Bill McKibben