Stephen Rees’s blog

There has been a protracted debate about global climate change for far too long. The vested interests and the people who think that their national economy is more important than the planet we live on – and some frankly deliberately contrarian publicity seekers – have thrown up a huge sandstorm of doubt and uncertianty. Meanwhile the natural processes have continued – as have humans burning ever increasing amounts of fossil fuels.

This longish opinion piece appears in Yale Environment 360, a publication of the Yale School of Forestry
& Environmental Studies. The author, Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. His The End of Nature, published in 1989, is regarded as the first book for a general audience on global warming. He is a founder of 350.org, a campaign to spread the goal of 350 parts per million worldwide. His most recent book is “American Earth“, an anthology of American environmental writing.

He doesn’t pull any punches, but he is clear that processes that has been thought to take many years have already started happening. And of course Stephen Harper is still banging on about “realistic” targets.

Perhaps the most important, in the short run (though it’s like picking which terminal illness you’d most want to contract) is the prospect of rapid melt on the ice sheets of Greenland and the West Antarctic. We used to think these ice sheets were stable on a time-scale of centuries, because how do you even start to melt a mile and a half of ice? I mean, it’s inertia defined. But it turns out that nature may have a method. As temperatures warm, snow at the very top of that ice sheet is turning to water, and that water in turn is finding its way through cracks and fissures to the base of the ice sheets where it can grease the skids for their slide into the ocean.

Meanwhile, rising and warming seas can eat away at the glaciers along the sea’s edge, which serve as corks in the bottle for the inland ice sheets. Add it all up badly enough, and there’s at least the possibility — or so [head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies] Hansen testified recently in federal court under oath — for five meters of sea level rise this century. Which is another way of saying the end of civilization as we know it, since there’s not enough money on earth to defend our coastal cities or the fertile plains near the sea — the places where the world mostly, you know, lives — from that kind of rise.

Many of the people who question climate change also believe a large number of other impossible things. Perhaps the most scary being that the “end of the world” has been prophesied and that bringing it about would be a Good Thing. People who would rather read Revelations than Science are, of course entitled to do so. But what is also very much to the point is that one common theme among neo-conservatives is that what they say does not necessarily have to be true, as long as it gets things moving in the “right” direction. The ends, they say, justify the means. Which puts them in the same camp as Al Quaeda.

We now have plenty of evidence that we have been consistently lied to – and if they lie about Weapons of Mass Destruction and the threat from the former Soviet Union, they will happily lie about climate change too. The science is not in question and no scientist publishing in peer reviewed journals has ever questioned the link between anthropogenic CO2 and climate change. And no-one in the right minds would believe that somehow the economy does not depend upon the environment – and not the other way around.

This issue puts all other issues into a different perspective.

Physics and chemistry don’t bluff and they don’t bargain — they just are. If there’s a way out of this box, therefore, it’s up to us.

Hat tip to Bill Henderson for brining this article to my attention