The Global Warming Reader: A Century of Writing About Climate Change

314 Pages·2012·5.12 MB·English

by  Bill McKibben

PENGUIN BOOKS
THE GLOBAL WARMING READER
Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment, including
The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience about global warming.
He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and is a frequent
contributor to such publications as The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s
Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone,
and Outside. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and
has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst fellowships, the Lannan Prize,
and honorary degrees from a dozen colleges. A scholar in residence at
Middlebury College, he lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern,
and their daughter.
THE GLOBAL WARMING
READER
A Century of Writing About Climate Change
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
BILL McKIBBEN
Penguin Books
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First published in the United States of America by OR Books 2011
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Pages 423 and 425 are an extension of this copyright page Anthology selection, introduction and introductory comments to each essay
copyright © Bill McKibben, 2011
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-101-57721-9
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Bill McKibben
PART I: SCIENCE
On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground
Svante Arrhenius
The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature
G. S. Callendar
Carbon Dioxide Exchange between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of
Atmospheric CO2 during the Past Decades
Roger Revelle and Hans E. Suess
The Keeling Curve
Dave Keeling
Statement of Dr. James Hansen
James Hansen
Summary for Policymakers: The Science of Climate Change
IPCC Working Group I
The “Anthropocene”
Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer
The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
Naomi Oreskes
Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?
James Hansen et al.
Causes of the Russian Heat Wave and Pakistani Floods
Jeff Masters
PART II: POLITICS
from Earth in the Balance
Al Gore
“The Battle for Control of Reality” from The Heat Is On
Ross Gelbspan
Remarks at the Kyoto Climate Change Conference
Mark Hertsgaard
“Is Your Stomach Too Full?” from Earth Odyssey
Al Gore
The Science of Climate Change: Senate Floor Statement
James M. Inhofe
from State of Fear
Michael Crichton
from An Inconvenient Truth
Al Gore
from The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems
Van Jones
Climate Generation: The Evolution of the Energy Action Coalition’s Strategy
Billy Parish
To Really Save the Planet, Stop Going Green
Mike Tidwell
Climate Rage
Naomi Klein
This Is Fucked Up—It’s Time to Get Mad, and Then Busy
Bill McKibben
The Green Generation
Adrienne Maree Brown
The Population Myth
George Monbiot
Global Warming Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near
James Hansen
Speech at Klimaforum
Mohamed Nasheed
PART III: IMPACT
from The End of Nature
Bill McKibben
John 5:1-9
Sally Bingham
Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action
The Evangelical Climate Initiative
An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security
Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall
“The Briefing” from Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers
Arundhati Roy
Images
David Breashears and E. O. Wheeler
Climate Change and Agriculture
Dr. Vandana Shiva
Images
Gary Braasch
The Darkening Sea: What Carbon Emissions Are Doing to the Ocean
Elizabeth Kolbert
Nepal’s Farmers on the Front Line of Global Climate Change
John Vidal
REFERENCES
INDEX
Introduction
I write these words in May of 2011, the week after a huge outbreak of tornadoes
killed hundreds across the American South; it was the second recent wave of
twisters of unprecedented size and intensity. In Texas, a drought worse than the
Dust Bowl has set huge parts of the state ablaze. Meanwhile, the Army Corps of
Engineers is moving explosives into place to blow up a levee along the
Mississippi River, swollen by the the third “100-year-flood” in the last twenty
years—though as the director of the Federal Emergency Management
Administration noted at the end of 2010, “the term ‘100-year event’ really lost its
meaning this year.” That’s because 2010 was the warmest year recorded, a year
when 19 nations set new all-time high temperature records. The Arctic melted
apace; Russia suffered a heat wave so epic that the Kremlin stopped all grain
exports to the rest of the world; and nations from Australia to Pakistan suffered
flooding so astonishing that by year’s end the world’s biggest insurance
company, Munich Re, issued this statement: “The only plausible explanation for
the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change. The view that weather
extremes are more frequent and intense due to global warming coincides with
the current state of scientific knowledge.”
And that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that on April 6, the U.S. House
of Representatives was presented with the following resolution:
“Congress accepts the scientific findings of the Environmental
Protection Agency that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by
human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and
welfare.”
The final vote on the resolution? 184 in favor, 240 against. When some future
Gibbon limns the decline and fall of our particular civilization, this may be one
of the moments he cites.
In some sense, this anthology is an attempt to deal with the paradox that,
though everyone (scientists, the insurance industry) we depend upon to analyze
risk tells us we are facing the gravest crisis in human history, our political system
here and around the world is doing nothing. The Democratic-controlled Senate
last summer refused even to take a vote on the mild, modest, even tepid climate
change bill that came before it; President Obama has wasted no political capital
pushing for such legislation. There are many obstacles to change, of course: the
inertia that comes with our dependence on fossil fuels; the powerful vested
interests of the most profitable industry the world has ever seen. But there’s also
a fundamental lack of understanding about how high the stakes are, about what
we can do, and most of all about what it means to be watching the only world
humans have ever known change in deep and dramatic ways. We can’t just be
stunned—that seems to lead to denial, to inaction. We need to feel what’s
happening, not just in our overheating bodies but in our minds and spirits too.
Perhaps the first thing to realize about global warming is what a new idea it is.
The first few papers in the Science section of this anthology may belie that
notion, but it is important— while giving great honor to Arrhenius and the few
others who first conceived the idea—to realize that not even other scientists were
paying attention until very recently. It was not until the late 1980s that climate
change broke into the open: if you had to assign a date, it would be the June
afternoon when NASA’s James Hansen testified before a House committee, a
story that ran above the fold in the New York Times the next day and signaled the
start of a pervasive new worry for human beings.
For some while, the scale of that worry was not clear. Those of us who
thought it was likely to be catastrophic (I wrote the first book for a general
audience about this topic, in 1989, and it bore the fairly definitive title The End
of Nature) had to wait a few years for science to conclusively confirm those
fears. The world’s climatologists cobbled together what may turn out to be one
of the most important organizations in the planet’s history: the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which by 1995 had concluded that humans
were warming the planet and that it was likely to be serious.
In the fifteen years since, it’s as if the planet itself has been conducting a
rigorous peer review of that science, just to make sure it was right. We’ve had a
succession of incredibly warm years—already, in fact, the planet has warmed on
average about one degree Celsius. And it turns out that’s enough to cause huge
physical changes, which are occurring faster than (habitually conservative)
scientists would have predicted even a few years ago. For instance:
• The Arctic has lost twenty-five percent of its summer ice cover, and the melt
on Greenland is proceeding with unnerving speed.
• The hydrological cycle is fundamentally disrupted, with both more droughts
and far more extreme rainfall events.
• The oceans have become steadily more acidic as seawater absorbs carbon
dioxide, changing its chemistry.
• Forest fires are raging with newfound intensity, and forests in the boreal
regions are dying from onslaughts of insects once kept in check by cold winter
temperatures.
In other words, virtually every major physical system on the planet is now in a
state of remarkable flux. In the geological blink of a blink of a blink of an eye,
we’ve managed to bring the epoch that scientists call the Holocene to an end.
Since that 10,000-year period of climatic stability marked the rise of human
civilization, its conclusion should worry us. And, indeed, around the world we
can already see the widespread effects of this warmer, wilder weather on human
life:
• Crop yields have become erratic, with serious busts as heat waves wipe out
whole growing regions.
• Mosquito-borne diseases, for example dengue fever, have spread rapidly, and
have now reappeared even in North America.
• Political tensions have begun to flare over water shortages and refugee fears:
India, for instance, has constructed a long wall on its boundary with
Bangladesh, a country exquisitely vulnerable to global warming.
• Small, low-lying islands have been evacuated as rising seas have made
habitation impossible.
In the Science section of this book, I’ve included some of the basic documents
that allow us to understand just what’s going on. Some of them are historic—it’s
important that we remember how we learned of this problem and how our
understanding has evolved. Some are current. But all should be, at some deep
level, unsettling. If they have a basic message, it’s this: we’ve taken the stability
of our planet entirely for granted. That stability has let us largely ignore the
physical world—it’s been the backdrop for our political and economic lives. But
as it happens, that stability was precarious, and it has now been upset. We were
born on one world (a world we could count on to support us) and now we live on
a new world, without any such assurance.
But the science of global warming is, in some sense, the easy part (though the
difficulty of modeling the impacts of carbon, and of measuring its many effects,
should never be underestimated—these researchers are real heroes). What’s been
harder, almost from the start, is the politics. To do anything about global
warming would require doing something about fossil fuel—in particular, it
would require us to stop burning it. Which is only about the hardest task you can
imagine.
For one thing, fossil fuel is what we do. If an alien landed here, he could be