Heat: How To Stop The Planet From Burning

George Monbiot‘s book Heat covers the limits of our climate-changing actions and the actions that need to be taken immediately in order to avert catastrophe.  Here’s the skinny: there is a limit to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere before we set into motion devastating, irreversible consequences. If we reach this limit we will go past the “tipping point,” the global point of no return.

Malte Meinshausen, a climatologist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research quoted in a ScienceNews article, says “If you want to limit the risk of exceeding 2 degrees C global warming to one in four, or 25 percent, then total CO2 emissions over the first half of the 21st century have be kept below 1,000 billion tons.” We’ve already emitted half of that, but that does leave a decent amount left to fill the gap (though we don’t need to fill the gap).

We’ve talked about this limit before: a concentration limit for atmospheric CO2. We want it back to 350ppm from the current level of 389ppm. There are other guesses to this number: some say 400ppm or 450ppm, while others insist we’ve passes it (remember 350ppm). If we continue on our current path without serious emission cuts we’ll hit this upper limit in just a few decades.

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What's to Fear?

I am writing this post in a somewhat balmy, 80-plus degrees in my house (at 10:30pm). In Seattle air conditioning in homes is nearly as unheard of as the robin is in the Inuit’s land. Of course, now that the robin is in the arctic the Inuit have to come up with a word for it. Why has the last ten days been the hottest streak of temperatures in Seattle history? Why is the robin suddenly so far north? Why was last night the first night in recorded history that it stayed above 70 degrees in Seattle?

Simply put the Earth is warming. Rather, the climate is changing. In some places it is cooling, but most of us are experiencing the beginnings of climate destabilization. Why? Because we have insisted on releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, altering the interaction of our planet and the sun’s energy.

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