McKibben says we missed chance to avoid climate change

MILLBROOK — “Over the past 20 years both political parties have had the chance to address global warming and they’ve produced exactly nothing,” said Bill McKibben, world-renowned author and environmentalist, at a talk before a packed house at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook last Thursday afternoon.The mood in Washington is no different now, he noted: Recently House Republicans voted almost unanimously to cut funding from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and to prevent it from classifying greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act — very likely a vote future historians will mark. “That a top legislative body has decided to embrace ideology over a consensus of scientific conclusions,” he said, “is depressing.”The day of McKibben’s visit came with heavy downpours in the Hudson Valley and news that the worse tornado outbreak in 75 years had just killed nearly 350 people in the South. As William Schlesinger, head of the Cary Institute, said by way of introduction, “The nation’s weather couldn’t be a more appropriate platform for our speaker.”McKibben wrote the first book about global warming aimed at lay people, “The End of Nature.” It has been compared to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in importance. Published in 1989, it laid out an argument he’s been espousing, refining and augmenting in a dozen books and many lectures since, the latest being “Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.” (“Eaarth” is not a typo: McKibben’s coinage signifies his expectation that the earth in the near future will be radically different from the earth we’ve known.)Our planet’s climate has been stable for 10,000 years, he said, a period called the Holocene. It’s why we humans have been able to feed ourselves with relative ease, develop civilizations, invent technologies and pursue science and art. About 200 years ago, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we began to burn fossil fuels, first coal and then oil, which released increasingly vast amounts of carbon into our atmosphere largely in the form of carbon dioxide. This molecule lets the sun’s radiation reach earth’s surface but traps some of the heat before it escapes into space. The result is human-caused global warming and, as we are beginning to see ominous evidence of, global climate change.Until very recently, McKibben said, climatologists (scientists who study earth’s climate) were reluctant to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, saying that they should be viewed relative to other events over time. But their reluctance is disappearing in view of “dramatically shifted weather regimes” in such places as the Gulf of Mexico, the extra moisture in the air due to higher temperatures — up 4.5 percent over the last 40 years — and the tremendous increase in extreme weather events across the globe.So far man’s activities have added 0.8 degree Centigrade to earth’s temperature, he said. This doesn’t seem like much, but “it’s enough to melt the ice caps” as well as glaciers and ancient mountain snow in places as various as Mount Kilimanjaro, the Andes and the Himalayas. McKibben said there is another degree Celsius “in the pipeline” — that is, inevitable because the CO2 needed is already present but its full effects have yet to be felt. If we don’t start sharply reducing the amount of fossil fuels we burn in short order, he said, if we just continue blithely on our way “as our political class seems to want us to do,” then global temperature will rise an added four to five degrees Celsius by 2100 — a conclusion reached by a “robust consensus of scientists.” The harm that will cause to sea life, plant life, agriculture, weather and communities in precarious places could well be horrific.McKibben’s talk was not all doom and gloom. The organization 350.com, which he and six of his students at Middlebury College started in the fall of 2008, has brought the message about climate change to nearly 200 countries through peaceful grassroots activism. This fall, on Saturday, Sept. 24, the third annual global 350.com demonstration will occur and will be, once again, the largest global rally in history. It will help show “that environmentalists are not all well-off white people with no other worries,” as he put it, but come from all ages, races, ethnicities, religions and socio-economic backgrounds.The number 350 stands for the maximum amount of CO2 in our atmosphere if we are to maintain a recognizably stable climate, measured in parts per million (ppm). This figure was determined after years of research by James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Scientific Institute, whom McKibben termed “the world’s greatest climatologist.” The current level is 392 ppm and rising at two parts per year. The challenge, McKibben thinks, is not “ignorance” of the fact of climate change, but the money and power arrayed against transforming our fossil-fuel-consuming culture — foremost being the fossil-fuel companies themselves. Doing the heavy lifting for them in Washington are various think tanks, quasi-scientists and lobbyists — foremost among them being the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. This is not the local chambers, made up of business people in towns and cities across the country who do good works in their communities, but the national organization, which McKibben says has become the organ for a few powerful interests. Disclosure laws don’t require that the U.S. Chamber say where its money comes from, but McKibben notes that 55 percent of its donations are provided by 16 sources. Given that much of the U.S. Chamber’s work has been to attack climate-change scientists and promote ideas such as “clean coal,” there is no mystery about who its agenda benefits.Despite all the grim news he delivered to Dutchess County on a wet, windy afternoon, Bill McKibben received a standing ovation at the close of his remarks. Tom Parrett is a writer who lives in Millerton and Greenwich Village.