At last month’s G-8 summit, western leaders including Barack Obama pledged to forge a deal that would hold the increase in global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius and the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to 450 parts per million. Two years ago that would have been an unthinkably progressive stance. Because two years ago the American president wanted to do essentially nothing at all about global warming. And because two years ago it seemed like those numbers might be good enough to tackle the problem.
But two years ago, almost to the week, scientists noticed that the Arctic was losing ice at an almost unbelievable pace, outstripping the climate models by decades. Clearly we’d passed a threshold, and global warming had gone from future threat to present crisis. It wasn’t just Arctic ice; at about the same time methane levels in the atmosphere began to spike, apparently as a result of thawing permafrost. Surveys of high altitude glaciers showed they were uniformly melting, and much faster than expected. Oceanographers reported—incredulously—that we’d managed to make the oceans 30% more acid. Remember—that’s been caused by slightly less than one degree of temperature rise. In mountainous parts of Asia, glaciologists began reporting the lightning quick melt of ice sheets that have been in place for thousands of years, and that provide the headwaters for crucial rivers—the Rongbuk glacier around Sagarmatha has, a 2009 report revealed, lost 100 vertical meters of ice since the Mallory expedition in the 1920s. Gangotri, the source of the Ganges, could be gone by 2050. If that happens with one degree, why would anyone want to even think about two?
Indeed, thinking legally for a minute, how could one? If we know that the current level of 390 ppm has melted the Arctic, doesn’t aiming for 450 constitute a kind of crime? The president of the Maldives Islands, Mohammed Nasheed, said recently that such a treaty would represent a suicide pact—it would mean one nation after another blinking out beneath the rising sea. In fact, for developing countries generally it would almost certainly be an impossible blow: they’re the most vulnerable to sudden climate change, both because they’re often located in riskier places, and because almost by definition they lack the resources to provide any kind of resilience. It’s possible to imagine building higher seawalls around New Orleans, but Bangladesh? California may figure out a way to deal with the loss of the snowpack in its mountains, but Nepal? That’s why the LDC bloc has increasingly focused on “survival” as a goal in climate talks. And survival now comes with a number attached.
That number is 350, and it is almost certainly the most important number in the world. A NASA team headed by James Hansen published a series of papers in 2008 showing that 350 parts per million co2 is the most the planet can safely hold, at least if we want a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” Since we’re already at 390 ppm, the message was clear: we don’t need to buy an insurance policy to reduce the threat of future warming. We need a fire extinguisher, and we need it now.
Scientists have heard that message—in March they gathered by the thousands at an emergency conference to declare that the five-year-old findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were dangerously out of date.
But politicians haven’t caught up. Obama, the EU, and the rest of the world’s political class are still using the dated science and its now stale conclusions. It’s easy to understand why: reaching a deal that would meet even that 2 degree target is incredibly hard, given the recalcitrance of everyone from China’s Central Committee to the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works. Aiming even higher could undermine the whole process—asked about tougher targets Obama said recently that they risked making “the best the enemy of the good.” EU leaders want a reachable target too—they want to declare Copenhagen a success, partly because failure might mean we wouldn’t get another shot for years.
But global warming, unfortunately, is different from other problems, in that half measures may not do any good at all. If we don’t address it very dramatically and very soon, then we won’t ever fix it—each season that more ice melts and more carbon accumulates increases the chance that we’ll never get it under control, because those feedback loops are taking the outcome out of our hands. We don’t have a method for refreezing the Arctic, or restoring the Rongbuk to its icy glory.
It’s not fair to make Obama or any other politician shoulder this burden alone. To meet the scientific challenge would require not only a deal to save the remaining rainforest, but also re-gearing the world’s whole economy away from fossil fuel far faster than any leader could currently get away with. The only analogy is the mobilization that won World War II, and right now that’s not politically possible. Right now half-measures like the legislation wending its way through the American Congress are the best we can do. If we want to extend the limits of political possibility, we need to build a real movement. That’s starting to happen. In September a coalition of environmental and aid groups will stage a campaign they’re calling TckTckTck to highlight the urgency of the crisis. A crew of us at 350.org have been working with youth groups, churches, and others for the last two years, and our efforts will culminate with a huge day of global action on October 24 with events in most of the world’s nations. We’re all trying hard to help the scientists reboot this debate, changing the political climate enough so that leaders everywhere will be able to move more boldly. Across Nepal we badly need activists to use that day to make the number 350 visible—they’ll be joining with thousands of other events around the globe. If we work together, the most important number on earth can become one of the most well-known.
It’s a long shot, but not so long as hoping that we can muddle through. It’s important to remember that the real negotiations aren’t between different countries. The real negotiation is between human beings on the one hand, and physics and chemistry on the other. And those are tough talks—physics and chemistry don’t haggle, or meet you halfway. They’ve already put forward their demand: 350 parts per million. We can meet it, or we can fail.
(Bill McKibben is an author, environmentalist and educator. His book, The End of Nature, (1989, Random House) is regarded as the first book about climate change for general audience. McKibben is currently a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. This essay was originally written for and published by The 350 Journal (Aug.09), by 350NEPAL. A PDF version of the entire journal is available at 350NEPAL.org.)
Related story
Forceful merger on the cards for insurers that fail to shore up...
