There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight... and Every Night From Now On, Looks Like

   
Wonder what your retirement is going to be like?  Wonder what life is going to be like for your kids or grandkids?  Well, that’s natural.  Of course, you have to remember the lesson of the old tale of “The Monkey’s Paw,” namely that you should be careful of what you wish for, because you just might wind up actually getting your wish.

 A lot of our questions about what life on Earth is going to be like for the foreseeable future were answered on the front pages of major newspapers on Saturday, May 11, 2013.  The headline on the front page of the New York Times read “Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears.”  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 The LA Times reported the story on the first page of the “Late Extra” section under the banner “Crucial CO2 gauge hits key level.”  http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-carbon-atmosphere-440-ppm-20130510,0,6498056.story To cut to the chase, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that last Thursday, for the very first (but certainly not the last) time, the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere as measured by the observatory on Mauna Loa has surpassed 400 parts per million in an average daily reading, meaning that there is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been at any time in the last three million years.  Even if you’re not a Biblical scholar, you should know that three million years ago human beings weren’t even around yet.

Last Thursday was the first time that the average level remained above 400 parts per million for an entire day, but it’s predicted that within a very few years there will be no measurement of the gas, in any area of the globe, in any season, that will be below 400 parts per million. The reason that the 400 parts per million threshold is significant is that’s the level that the scientific “consensus” has decreed that CO2 levels must stay below to keep the average global temperature from rising 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the average from pre-industrial times.    That may not sound like much, but apparently the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high was about three million years ago, in the Pliocene Epoch.  It was a lot hotter then, the ice caps were a lot smaller, and scientists estimate that the sea level was perhaps 60 to 80 feet higher than it is now.  Not real good news if you live in Malibu, I’d say.  Or New York City, or Miami, or… well, you get the idea.

 Now of course, the ocean isn’t going to rise 60 or 80 feet overnight.  When you start talking about “epochs,” the time scale gets a lot bigger than what our “weatherpeople” are used to coping with in their forecasts.  But that doesn’t mean that you and yours aren’t going to be seeing some of the effects of the now seemingly inevitable debacle. Melanie Fitzpatrick, a climate scientist, is quoted in the LA Times article as saying, “If we don’t reduce carbon soon, we may no longer talk about searing summer temperatures, 100-year storms and intense droughts as something unusual, because they may be the norm.”

 What’s causing this upheaval?  Well, with apologies to BP, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, and their ilk, the evidence is pretty conclusive that the culprit is fossil fuels.  By studying the air bubbles found in Antarctic ice (which is melting pretty fast now) scientists have determined that for at least the last 800 million years the level of CO2 in the atmosphere cycled between 180 parts per million in cooler times to 280 parts per million in warmer times.  (CO2 levels and temperature are “tightly linked,” in other words.)  Throughout the roughly 8000 years of human civilization, the CO2 level fluttered around near the top end of that range—until the “Industrial Revolution” a couple of hundred years ago which kicked off the massive use of fossil fuels.  Since then, there has been a 41% increase in CO2 levels, with no end in sight.

 Why no end in sight?  Well, there are now over 7 billion people in the world, many of them already happily blasting away into the atmosphere with their air conditioners and motor vehicles, and the rest aspiring to join them.  The New York Times article, by Justin Gillis, put it very well:  “Virtually every automobile ride, every plane trip and, in most places, every flip of a light switch adds carbon dioxide to the air, and relatively little money is being spent to find and deploy alternative technologies.”

 Not to mention the fact that we’re frenetically slashing and burning and chopping away at the earth’s forests, getting rid of the trees that, as they taught us even in California public schools, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen.  Plus chopping down everything in sight so that we can grow corn and soybeans to feed to factory-farmed animals whose short, miserable lives are mostly spent farting methane.

 Why the hell not, you may ask.  If we know there’s a problem-- a crisis, even-- why aren’t we doing more to try to avert disaster? Well, why did it take so many years to start warning people about the dangers of cigarette smoking?  There are a lot of people, with a lot of money, who benefit from the status quo.  And they own politicians.  Lots of them.  As Mr. Gillis puts it, “[c]limate change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are politically influential in Washington, point out that carbon dioxide represents only a tiny fraction of the air…”  Well, it’s true that most of the air is nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%).  But that’s about the extent of the truth in this absurd argument.  Whether its cobra venom or arsenic, to use a couple of Mr. Gillis’s examples, or a few hundred wackadoos in Al Qaeda, a little badness can go a long way toward ruining your day… or your kids’ and grandkids’ future, for that matter.

 It may already be too late to avert disaster, and in fact probably is.  If this were a movie, and some scientist could somehow get representatives of every country on earth together to act in concert on an emergency basis to go all out to control population growth, implement green technologies, and rein in the great consumer lifestyle expectations of the American and Chinese peoples… well then we’d be living on another planet, anyway, and we probably wouldn’t have had to worry about CO2 in the first place.