Year 3, Month 5, Day 21: Tangled Up In Blue

James Hansen is (justifiably) shrill:

GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

I revere Hansen, but I am not so certain about the phrase “game over.” Sent May 10:

Scientists are not known for their extreme language, so when a respected (and unjustly maligned) authority like James Hansen uses words like “apocalyptic” it should be a huge flashing warning light for the rest of us. But “game over for the climate” carries a host of misleading implications.

Earth’s climate is not a sport, and the human species isn’t going to get another chance in next year’s playoffs. Neither is it a video game; we’re not going to yawn, stretch, get another handful of chips, and begin again. When we hear Dr. Hansen’s phrase, we need to imagine a planet-wide version of the football riots in Egypt that killed nine people and injured thousands earlier this year.

Recovering from the inevitable consequences of our profligate consumption of fossil fuels will take hundreds of years; halting the potential disasters likely by mid-century will demand civilizational transformations.

This is not a game.

Warren Senders