We’ve seen the movie, so we know the first part – we’re in trouble deep. And one of the good things about 2006 is that this ceased to be a public secret. It’s now out in the open. We not only know that the drought is spreading, the ice melting, the waters beginning to rise, but we also know that we know. And this changes everything.
The science is in, and the “skeptics” aren’t what they used to be. They’re still around, of course, but their ranks have thinned, and their funders are feeling the heat. It’s fair to say that they’ve been reduced to a merely tactical danger. They’re flaks and everyone knows it. Still, this good news comes with bad – their job was to stall, and they did it well. And it’s now late in the game.
You don’t have to take my word for it. 2006 was a year in which the scientists, men and women schooled in the arts of careful and measured conclusion, chose instead to speak frankly. So know that Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies and perhaps our single most respected climate scientist, spoke for many of his fellows when he said that we’re “near a tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built in momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this planet.”
We’re in trouble deep. And it’s time, past time, for at least some of us to go beyond warning to planning, to start talking seriously about a global crash program to stabilize the climate...
Which is exactly what this essay (we hesitate to call it a manifesto) sets out to do...
The recent Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change, led by former World Bank Chief Economist Sir Nicholas Stern for the UK Department of the Treasury, received a lot of attention for its recommendation the greenhouse gases be stabilized below 550 ppm CO2 equivalent. Unfortunately, there was a price - Stern simultaneously dismissed stabilization targets below 450 ppm CO2-equivalent, or any sort of “peak and decline” trajectory that would have a high probability of keeping temperature increase below 2ºC.