Suvival notes :

These desperate times call for desperate measures, we must keep the carbon in the atmosphere below 450 ppm according to Dr. Hansen, to avoid the "run away" feedbacks that may make our planet so hot that our descendents will suffer for hundreds of years, and our civilization will be the cause of the worst extinction event since the astroid hit 230 million years ago!

In his latest scientific post : Implications of "peak oil" for atmospheric CO2 and climate by P.A. Kharecha, J.E. Hansen (NASA GISS and Columbia Univ. Earth Institute)our dilema is explained at some length.

The action that we must take is really quite simple : We must work with China and the emerging Asian economies to build Coal fired power plants that sequester the CO2 produced or die.

Simple, yet a profound challenge as until now it has been everyone for themselves and the "market" will sort it out. Since the "market" is an artificial construct, it needs to be changed to fit our current situation, and this can be done if we value both the current environment and our future generations.

THe problem is that there is no real technology that is up to the challenge since we dabble in this vital technology but haven't committed to commercialization of sequestration.

The action needed is to engage with the Chinese as if our lives depend on it ( they do) and immediately begin to produce electric cars for their market, immediately begin to build nuclear power plants on an industrial scale in China to meet their need while we develop the technology for sequestration on a global scale. China won't do this without economic help from the rest of the world, and we must also do this whereever economic growth would attract a new coal fired plant.

The United States should immediately devote a significant resource stream to developing the sequestration techonology and retrofit our many coal plants as a first step, a technology development program, and a leadership act.

Without dealing with the issue of Coal, we risk raising the CO2 beyond the 450 ppm level, and that's a point where the feedback loop will rapidly get out of control.

Hansen and Kharecha don't discuss what happens when the feedback loop goes non-linear but the scenarios we've all seen on the media for global warming understate the reality. Once the co2 gets to a certain ( we don't know precisely where this is) level, then other sources of carbon release kick in like the release of trapped methane hydrates, forest die back, Amazon desert feedback, and the rest. The increase in temprature would be huge, and while the earth may have feedback mechanisms that will compensate, we won't live long enough to find out. The feedback that may balance warming above the 450 ppm level might take the form of an ice age, something that's limited us before. Indeed during the last ice age there may have been only 10,000 humans in Europe and New York may have been covered in a glacier. Either way, it's ugly for civilization and avoidable.

The big message is that if we act now, we can avoid the big desert, the oven. Only if we act together as intellegent beings will we be spared. We don't have to look to the sky for an astroid threatening us, as our threat is already on the horizon and it's only avoidable if we act now.

Just last night I read a post to arXiv.org by J.E. Hansen urging scientists to speak out on sea level rise before it is too late. http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0703/0703220.pdf It's about Scientific reticence, but it's really a call for a Paul Revere to bring us to our senses while there is still time to act to prevent the greatest calamity in history.

Our science gives us the chance to look ahead and see that without acting now, the world will loose forever many of the beautiful ecosystems that god gave us in trust, and we may loose our civilization as well. I'm not exaggerating at all, maybe understating the seriousness of the problem.

Hansen himself has been censored by the Bush Administration and speaks in a guarded manner, the voice that has already been attacked but won't be silenced because he can clearly see that this train is heading for a wreck and we can still avert the crash if we act!

Hansen looks at the non-linear way that ice sheets change in response to warming, factors in what we know about the changes to our climate, and comes to the conclusion that we can make a difference if we act now, a difference that will be important to our descendents and to the billions of life forms that may continue to live for millions of years if we act now.

It's really a moral question, is our short term greed reason enough to condem our descendents to a world where climate change brutally destroys ecosystems, societies and countless families ? Can we use the intelligence to find a way to live on earth without destroying the very environment that we depend on? Are we smarter than the yeast that makes our beer?

The thing about non-linear climate change and environmental response to that change is that by the time it's obvious to most, it will be too late to do more than cringe and cry. We'll be so busy then adjusting and coping that the chance to build the sort of systems that could enable our civilization to continue will be gone. Desperate times will force competition for scarce resources like food, water, and peace.

When we look ahead and see the wreck, stepping on the brakes is not only the right thing to do, it's relatively painless. Except that the challenge is that we've created this new organism called the corporation and it's rootless. Corporations have no real stake in the future, no built in mechanism to consider their fate and to act in the best interests of humans and other life forms.

The emergence of corporations must be only a stage in their evolution, since for our civilization to be worthy of continuance we must evolve corporations to incorporate a forward vision, to have some value placed on how they relate to the future history of the planet. We can do it, but we haven't and it's the biggest challenge to our civilization in our history.

We humans must resolve to live in harmony with our fellow beings, to live with the understanding that all life is sacred. We have no right to kill future generations of beings here with us for some abstract corporate gain.

Even with conventional economics when we discount the future costs of coping with the disasters that we know are coming, it's worth acting now. The folks who just want to "get theirs" before things change have suppressed the knowledge of what could be done, what is coming for reasons that I condemn but don't understand. No doubt there is much that I don't understand that is known by the ones who distract us with the latest "crises", but the outlines are clear and our opportunity is real : Act now and both we and our descendents will benefit for ever!

Thanks to Dr. Hansen for not keeping quiet, to Al Gore for bringing "an Inconvenient Truth" to the millions and to the Hopi for reminding us that we sit in a kiva that has been home forever, a kiva that need not become an oven.

om