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<a
href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719">http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719</a><br>
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<div class="author"><span class="floatLt">By</span> <a
href="http://www.rollingstone.com/contributor/bill-mckibben">Bill
McKibben</a></div>
<div class="date">July 19, 2012 9:35 AM ET</div>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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Follow the link for the rest of the article<br>
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Or listen to an interview here.<br>
<a
href="http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/2/bill_mckibben_of_350org_even_industry">http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/2/bill_mckibben_of_350org_even_industry</a><br>
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Dave<br>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Windows, OSX, or Linux is the same choice as:
McDonald's, Burger King, or a (real) Co-Op.
</pre>
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