Ready to move into the streets? We’re the volcano now …
Bill McKibben is one of my heroes. If you aren’t familiar with what he calls the Great American Carbon Bomb, you’ll get a good primer here:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/14-3
Quotable:
The climate problem has moved from the abstract to the very real in the last 18 months. Instead of charts and graphs about what will happen someday, we’ve got real-time video: first Russia burning, then Texas and Arizona on fire. First Pakistan suffered a deluge, then Queensland, Australia, went underwater, and this spring and summer, it’s the Midwest that’s flooding at historic levels.
“If you could burn all the oil in those tar sands,” writes McKibben, “you’d run the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide from its current 390 parts per million (enough to cause the climate havoc we’re currently seeing) to nearly 600 parts per million, which would mean if not hell, then at least a world with a similar temperature.”
The year 2010 saw the lowest volume of Arctic ice since scientists started to measure, more rainfall on land than any year in recorded history, and the lowest barometric pressure ever registered in the continental United States. Measured on a planetary scale, 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest year in history. Jeff Masters, probably the world’s most widely read meteorologist, calculated that the year featured the most extreme weather since at least 1816, when a giant volcano blew its top.
Since we’re the volcano now, and likely to keep blowing, here’s his prognosis: “The ever-increasing amounts of heat-trapping gases humans are emitting into the air put tremendous pressure on the climate system to shift to a new, radically different, warmer state, and the extreme weather of 2010-2011 suggests that the transition is already well underway.”
From August 20 to September 3, thousands of people are going to converge on Washington DC to urge President Obama to put the long-term good of the planet above short-term profits for corporations. I’m out of the country for most of this period, but I’m trying to arrange my travel so I can participate at least for a day or two. You can learn how to be involved here: http://www.tarsandsaction.org/
