[Vision2020] Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

[Dave]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719


By Bill McKibben <http://www.rollingstone.com/contributor/bill-mckibben>
July 19, 2012 9:35 AM ET

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't 
convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some 
hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 
high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the 
warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere -- the 327th 
consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded 
the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance 
were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars 
in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded 
for our nation -- in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it 
represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any 
season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had 
rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest 
downpour in the planet's history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world's nations, 
meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 
environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who 
flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was 
"a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British 
journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, 
footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes." Since 
I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global 
warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades 
working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some 
confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly -- losing it 
because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human 
civilization is in.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be 
ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of 
our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, 
an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by 
financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of 
environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through 
to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional 
political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand 
our precarious -- our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless -- position 
with three simple numbers.



Follow the link for the rest of the article

Or listen to an interview here.
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/2/bill_mckibben_of_350org_even_industry


Dave


-- 
Windows, OSX, or Linux is the same choice as:
McDonald's, Burger King, or a (real) Co-Op.

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