Do the Math
Like most people, Bill (environmentalist and co-founder of 350.org) was not a natural activist. There really aren’t many people whose greatest desire is to get out and fight the system. His theory of change is that he will write his book, people will read it, and they will change. But that’s not how change happens. What I want is to be a little noisy, feel a little uncomfortable, and make others feel a little uncomfortable. Now is the moment when we really have to take a stand because we’ve reached our limit.
Probably the biggest limitation we face is depleting the atmosphere to put our society’s waste into it, especially carbon dioxide, a ubiquitous by-product of burning fossil fuels. We burn coal, oil or natural gas, we get carbon dioxide and now the atmosphere is full of it.
We know the solution to this problem; we know many of the technologies we need to switch from fossil fuels to something else. What stops us from doing this is the enormous political power of those who have made and are making huge profits from fossil fuels.
One of the things that humanity faces is the need to drastically reduce its carbon footprint within the next 40 years. We are no longer at the point of trying to stop global warming. It’s too late. We are at the point where we are trying to prevent it from becoming a total disaster.
Chief climate scientist Jim Henson had his team at NASA conduct a study to find out whether there was too much carbon in the atmosphere. Their paper, possibly the most important scientific paper of the century so far, says that we now know enough and know too much. Any amount of carbon in the atmosphere above 350 parts per million is incompatible with a planet on which civilizations can develop and life on Earth can adapt.
That’s pretty strong language for scientists. This feeling is heightened when you know that the atmosphere outside today contains 395 parts per million of carbon dioxide. And increase at a rate of about two parts per million per year. Everything frozen on Earth will melt. The large Arctic ice sheet will more than halve; the ocean is about 30 percent more acidic than it was 30 years ago, as seawater chemistry changes as it absorbs carbon from the atmosphere. Because warm air contains more water vapor than cold air, the atmosphere is about 5 percent wetter than it was 40 years ago. This is an astonishingly large change.
