From the APR/MAY 2006 issue of Seed:
Whether this or future Earth Days help solve any particular environmental problems won't matter a bit, unless we tackle the biggie—climate change. Bill McKibben, who sounded the alarm two decades ago with his landmark book The End of Nature, reviews the damage and points the way forward. The x-factor in preventing catastrophe, he says, will be whether the American public—with its financial and cultural power to move mountains—sort of gets it, or really gets it.
Let us take as our text for this sermon the words of James Hansen, NASA climatologist and as close to a prophet as the last few decades have raised up: If the Earth continues to heat at its current rate, he said earlier this year, it would "imply changes that constitute practically a different planet...We can't let it go on another 10 years like this. We've got to do something."
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In the last year, the onrushing tide of ecological—and resulting economic—damage has become very clear. What was until recently mostly theoretical now has a name and a face. Let's call her Katrina—wild, vengeful and ruinous. Let's call her Wilma, recording the lowest barometric pressure ever seen in the Atlantic. Let's call her Zeta, still spinning in the Atlantic on New Year's Day, the last in the endless string of tropical storms that broke every record, and with them, at long last, the complacency about environmental threats that has dominated our politics for at least a decade.
There are, obviously, all kinds of ecological perils out there. We've overfished our seas, we've overcut our forests. Fresh water is beginning to run short, and species are disappearing at a rapid rate. You can come up with a long and troubling list, including the disturbing fact that most of the world's people are so poor they can barely summon the energy to care about the larger world. But it's becoming very clear that the overriding, overpowering summation of them all is climate change—lose this battle and it won't matter if we win all the others, because it's simply so much bigger, and connected to everything else. The best guess of scientists is that we will, on our present course, make the planet about 5° C warmer by century's end. That's warmer than it's been in a long time—since well before our ancestors climbed down from the trees.
And climate change is also the perfect metaphor for the larger task we face, since conquering it will mean changing almost everything about the daily life of most people in the developed world. Actually, "conquering" isn't even on the menu any more; the best hope is to keep things merely miserable, not downright catastrophic. And that will be a tall order—the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, rising ever since the Industrial Revolution kicked off two centuries ago, has been spiking the last few years. Scientists say that's because the human-induced warming has begun to cause the planet's basic systems to change: white, reflective ice melts at the poles, replaced by blue, absorptive water, for instance, which is accelerating the warming. Or thawing permafrost frees vast stores of trapped methane, now bubbling up through the Siberian tundra. Earlier this year the great British scientist James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory of Earth self-regulation, announced he thought the planet had passed a tipping point, and that it might be too late to stave off the worst. "Billions will die," he predicted.