Do The Math Most Don’t Want To Do

HUMANS CAN SEE THE DIFFERENCE 1 DEGREE OF TEMPERATURE CAN MAKE IN WEATHER CONDITIONS

“Adapting means hoping the flood arrives simultaneously with the fire, to put it out.” - Tom Toles There are times when issues come in spades, and this spring has been environmentally bountiful, but not in a good way. The hog farm looming in the watershed of the Buff alo National River in Newton County, the Exxon oil pipeline leak in Mayfl ower, the Arkansas Legislature’s willing degradation of the state’s water quality standards (Act 954), and the new global carbon dioxide milestone are just a few recent happenings continuing to lower our quality of life today and every day. And, these events are here now, not out in some distant future where many folks prefer to push all environmental unpleasantness.

The biggest issue of our time, probably of all time, encompasses jobs, immigration, wars, energy, global economy, food and water supplies, health, diseases, plagues, and actually about anything else you can think of. Every living thing is affected by the health of this planet.

For more than 50 years,carbon dioxide has been monitored at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

First measurements in the late 1950’s found 315 parts of carbon dioxide per million parts of air (ppm). Climate scientists generally agree that for the planet to sustain life, as we have known it, carbon dioxide should be no higher than 350ppm.

On May 9, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was measured at 400 ppm over a 24-hour period, setting a record unmatched in human existence. And, it is rising about 2 ppm each year.

Humans can see, and do not deny, the diff erence that one degree of temperature can make in freezing our gardens or in bringing water to a boil. It would be helpful if we could extend our grasp of this knowledge to the climate’s rising degrees and the consequent effect on the entire globe’s physical and ecological functioning.

“Do the math” is generally the final challenge in clinching arguments that have gone past doing the words. In his dauntless eff orts to unite people into actionon global warming, Bill McKibben, founder of “350.

org” and author of “The End of Nature,” has produced a YouTube video called, “Do the Math,” and it is not hard to understand. Trust me on this. If I can get it, anyone can. He gives us just three numbers to consider, and they might be the most important numbers we ever learn. The last one, 2,795, is probably the scariest and seems to be the least known.

McKibben says, “Financial analysts sat down and fi guredout how much carbon the world’s fossil fuel industry has in reserves and that number turned out to be 2,795 gigatons [one gigaton is a billion tons]. That’s 5 times as much carbon as governments agree we can afford to pour into the environment.” He also points out the continuing pathological destruction of the earth in the quest for yet more fossil fuel saying, “Exxon alone spends $100 million a day exploring for new hydrocarbons.”

Big Coal, Big Oil, andBig Gas are blowing up mountaintops, drilling ocean floors, scraping up tar sands, and fracking the rocks under our feet to extract every last chunk, drop and puff of their fossil fuel specialties.

The climate, however, has already long passed its ability to absorb, dilute, dissolve or deal with the carbon that, yes, we humans really are allowing to be belched into the atmosphere. Fossil fuel industries pollute for free, which is why they fi ght carbon tax proposalsso vehemently.

In a Rolling Stone article (July 19, 2012), McKibben wrote, “So far, we’ve raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius [1 degree Celsius equals 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit], and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking fi ve percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating fl oods.”

It is too late to stop climate change because it is already happening, but it is not too late to begin to work our way back to 350ppm if we will just put on the sanity brakes immediately.

The consequences of continuing to heat our world will not be a lot diff erent than what we observe when we turn up the heat on our stoves, furnaces, or coff ee pots. Things change. We need to as well.

FRAN ALEXANDER IS A FAYETTEVILLE RESIDENT WITH A LONGSTANDING INTEREST IN THE ENVIRONMENT AND AN OPINION ON ALMOST ANYTHING ELSE.

Opinion, Pages 11 on 05/19/2013

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