If We Want to Survive the Climate Crisis We Must Change

By Bill McKibben, YES! Magazine. Posted March 15, 2008.

At any given moment we face as a society an enormous number of problems: there's the mortgage crisis, the health care crisis, the endless war in Iraq, and on and on. Maybe we'll solve some of them, and doubtless new ones will spring up to take their places. But there's only one thing we're doing that will be easily visible from the moon. That something is global warming. Quite literally it's the biggest problem humans have ever faced, and while there are ways to at least start to deal with it, all of them rest on acknowledging just how large the challenge really is.

What exactly do I mean by large? Last fall the scientists who study sea ice in the Arctic reported that it was melting even faster than they'd predicted. We blew by the old record for ice loss in mid-August, and by the time the long polar night finally descended, the fabled Northwest Passage was open for navigation for the first time in recorded history. That is to say, from outer space the Earth already looks very different: less white, more blue.

What do I mean by large? On the glaciers of Greenland, 10 percent more ice melted last summer than any year for which we have records. This is bad news because, unlike sea ice, Greenland's vast frozen mass sits above rock, and when it melts, the oceans rise -- potentially a lot. James Hansen, America's foremost climatologist, testified in court last year that we might see sea level increase as much as six meters -- nearly 20 feet -- in the course of this century. With that, the view from space looks very different indeed (not to mention the view from the office buildings of any coastal city on earth).

What do I mean by large? Already higher heat is causing drought in arid areas the world over. In Australia things have gotten so bad that agricultural output is falling fast in the continent's biggest river basin, and the nation's prime minister is urging his people to pray for rain. Aussie native Rupert Murdoch is so rattled he's announced plans to make his NewsCorp empire (think Fox News) carbon neutral. Australian voters ousted their old government last fall, largely because of concerns over climate.

What do I mean by large? If we'd tried we couldn't have figured out a more thorough way to make life miserable for the world's poor, who now must deal with the loss of the one thing they could always take for granted -- the planet's basic physical stability. We've never figured out as efficient a method for obliterating other species. We've never figured out another way to so fully degrade the future for everyone who comes after us. Or rather, we have figured out one other change that rises to this scale. That change is called all-out thermo-nuclear war, and so far, at least, we've decided not to have one.

But we haven't called off global warming. Just the opposite: in the 20 years that we've known about this problem, we've steadily burned more coal and gas and oil, and hence steadily poured more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Instead of a few huge explosions, we've got billions of little ones every minute, as pistons fire inside engines and boilers burn coal. Having put off real change, we've made our job steadily harder. But there are signs that we're finally ready to get to work. Congress is for the first time seriously considering legislation that would actually limit U.S. emissions. The bills won't be signed by President Bush, and they don't do everything that needs doing -- but they're a start.

And the international community meeting in Bali in December overcame U.S. resistance and began the steps toward an international treaty that will be ready in 2009. The talks are going slowly, largely because of American intransigence, but George Bush won't be president forever, so there's at least a chance we'll re-engage with the rest of the world. If we do, there are steps we can take. Because the problem is so big, and coming at us so fast, those steps will need to be large. And even so, they won't be enough to stop global warming -- at best they will slow it down and give us some margin. But here's the deal:

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Bill McKibben wrote this article as part of Stop Global Warming Cold, the Spring 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, Wandering Home, and Deep Economy, and a founder of StepItUp, which has recently joined forces with 1sky.

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