Now that the nearly-800 billion dollar stimulus bill has passed, we can move on to other things. It’s time for President Obama to move on to solving climate change. And according to those he has chosen to work on the problem, we are in good hands.
That’s good, because according to a prominent scientist, (several of them, actually) Obama has four years or less to get a serious, strong move on climate change.
“Prof James McCarthy spoke on the eve of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which he heads. The US president has just four years to save the planet, said Prof McCarthy.
If major policy changes do not happen within Mr Obama’s term of office, they will not happen at all, he warned.
“We have a moment right now of extraordinary opportunity, with a new president, positioned with scientific leadership that has known no equal in recent times,” the AAAS president told BBC News.
“The calibre of scientific advice that is close to this man is truly exceptional.”
McCarthy is the current president of the AAAS. McCarthy also co-chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II, which had responsibilities for assessing impacts of and vulnerabilities to global climate change for the Third IPCC Assessment (2001). Read the BBC story here. James Hansen, a climate scientist with NASA, has said we only have a couple of years to save life on the planet in a way that would allow life to exist as it does now. It’s important to remember that “the planet” will be just fine — it’s the life currently on it that is in danger of not surviving. McCarthy believes that now is our last, best chance to solve the climate crisis. We can’t gradually phase out gas and coal and oil, we have to end the use of it, and then start to take C02 out of the atmosphere (Hansen suggests with charcoal embedded in the soil). What most people don’t realize is the speed with which this has to happen. Every day I read stories about how things are gradually going to change in five years, in ten years, by 2050 or some long-off date. We don’t have that kind of time. This is what people need to understand. We have, according to the best climate scientists in America, only 2-4 years to solve the problem. Not come up with a sort of slow-moving plan, but that’s the time we have to solve it. That means there is no time to waste. Here is a recent chart from NOAA.
As ClimateProgress reports, this is serious business. This indicates a jump in world carbon dioxide levels of 2.3 ppm in 2008, to bring us to the highest levels in 650,000 years (or more). That means modern-day humans have never experienced a world with this much carbon in the atmosphere.
We are looking at not just extinctions of animals, but of people, if something isn’t done very soon.
It’s also obvious to anyone that a rise in C02 levels this sharp and this steady is caused by human beings, not by solar flares or volcanos. There is no more volcanic activity now than 650,000 (or four) years ago, but there has been a steady rise in C02 levels from human activity and demand for fossil-fuel driven cars and heating, during that time period.
“A study in Science from the Global Carbon Project (see “More on soaring carbon concentrations“) noted:
The present concentration is the highest during the last 650,000 years and probably during the last 20 million years.
Worse, the rate of growth of CO2 concentrations this decade is 2.1 ppm a year — 40% higher than the rate from the 1990s. At the same time that CO2 emissions are soaring, CO2 sinks are saturating (see “The ocean is absorbing less carbon dioxide“).”
We can be glad not just for President Obama and his new EPA and energy leaders, but also for senators such as Barbara Boxer. Boxer is among those leading the charge on climate change in the Senate. See the next post for what she is currently doing on climate change.
We have no time to waste. Call your Congressmen and tell them you support fast action on climate change.
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