Monday, July 30, 2012

Bill McKibben, Again, Raises The Global Warming Alarm

Award-winning environmental writer and college teacher Bill McKibben is again trying to raise awareness about climate change and global warming - - this time with a long, documented essay in Rolling Stone. It's worth reading, down-loading or clipping from a hard copy.

As are stories overlooked before this summer's baking heat predicting average worldwide temperature increases of a ruinous 11 degrees Fahrenheit, while  McKibben warns the +2 degree rise that some experts believe tolerable are catastrophically close at hand.

The climate change deniers who regularly tee off on this blog against the science and implications making up McKibben's positions will have their reflexive field day:

Rolling Stone? That tree-hugger McKibben?

Meh.

And we're not just talking about right-wing blog trolls with time on their hands and anonymous screen names.

The same pro-carbon industry mentality is on full display at the administratively-inert, ideologically- compliant Scott Walker-run Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, which scrubbed its climate change web pages, but made sure to have a helluva Halloween party across its divisions and offices last year.

A couple of weeks ago, during record heat, a stretch of air pollution advisories and ruined crops in the field, this was the DNR's "Air Quality Tip of the Week":

For the week of July 1, 2012:

"Happy Birthday America! No doubt about it, fireworks are a part of the festivities on the 4th of July. Yes they do cause air pollution, but the smoke is localized and disperses quickly causing little harm. Learn more"
And so be it: it's a waste of time arguing with closed-minded people who, as they say, will crush you with their experience.

But here's what should trouble anyone taking the time to read the essay: it scientifically predicts unsustainable Earth temperatures resulting from the aggressive and suicidal burning of carbon resources held by major multi-national and state corporations - - mining and consumption and combustion that seems inevitable because those corporations' profits and their countries' budgets and economies are at odds with life-saving resource conservation.

A central point McKibben is trying to make, and which he hopes will trigger awareness and then mass movements in opposition to the Carbon industry's agenda:
We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it's already economically aboveground – it's figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It's why they've worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada's tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.

If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today's market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren't exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won't necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can't have both.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The weather is not the climate and changes in the weather are not changes in the climate. We only notice climatic changes over long periods of time and then they are often so slight that they are hidden in statistical analysis. The carbon dioxide theory of catastrophic climate change can be seen to be false quite easily by looking at the global temperature data from 1940 to 1980, that is if we can even accept that we have good data. At this period of time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increased steadily and human CO2 emissions increased dramatically, and yet the global temperatures for this period dropped.



The theory cannot be true some of the time, most of the time or just once upon a time; if the observations do not support the theory all of the time, then it is false. Einstein said that a hundred experiments could not prove him right but one experiment could prove him wrong. This one observation proves that man made global warming due to carbon emissions is just plain wrong and we could not ever hope to effect the climate by our CO2 emissions. .



A Google search on “Bill McKibben is crazy” should keep you entertained for some time.

Al Gore and Mckibben are RIGHT!!!!!!!!! said...

Bill McKibben is now the best journalist of our time!!

Heed his words!!

Follow his example!!

Corporate global criminals are destroying the earth and our future!!

There is no greater cause at this time than the protection of the planet for our future and the future of the Greenland ice and the polar bears and our future’s, future.



We all must stop emitting CO2 NOW!!!!

Not one more molecule must be allowed to pollute or earth and destroy our climate!!!

Not one damn molecute!!!

It’s the damn climate that is being destroyed!!!

Destroyed and then destroyed some more!!!

Because of CO2!!

CO2 emitted from people!!



And it takes a lot more than just talking and writing and blogging to stop people from emitting CO2!!

We must take action!!

Immediate action!!!

IMMEDIATELY!!!!

Stop people from emitting CO2!!!

Stop yourself from emitting CO2!!

stop everybody and everything from emitting CO2!!!

It is poison!!

Poisonous poison!!!

People must be told!!!

But they won’t listen, they haven’t listened, they must, instead, be controlled, and forced to stop emitting CO2!!

It is the only way to save the planet and the climate!!


AL GORE IS RIGHT!!

BILL MCKIBBEN IS RIGHT!!