Grist: The coming climate panic?

[marmar]

The coming climate panic?

23 Dec 2009 9:46 AM
by Auden Schendler, Mark Trexler


One morning in the not too distant future, you might wake up and walk to your mailbox. The newspaper is in there and it’s covered with shocking headlines: Coal Plants Shut Down! Airline Travel Down 50 Percent! New Federal Carbon Restrictions in Place! Governor Kicked Out of Office for Climate Indolence!

Shaking your head, you think: What just happened?

With a non-binding agreement coming out of Copenhagen at the same time that atmospheric CO2 creeps above 390 parts per million, it’s possible that a new feeling might soon gain prevalence in the hearts of people who understand climate science. That feeling is panic. Specifically, climate panic.

In the same way that paleoclimate records show evidence of abrupt climate changes, we think it’s increasingly possible that policy responses to climate change will themselves be abrupt. After years of policy inaction, a public climate backlash is already smoldering. When it blows, it could force radical policy in a short timeframe. It’s the same kind of cultural tipping point, often triggered by dramatic events, that has led to revolutions or wars in the past.

The backlash is brewing in the form of increasingly strident comments from respected and influential people. Economist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has called government indolence on the issue “treason.” NRDC attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has called it “a crime against nature.” Environmental journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert has described “a technologically advanced society choosing to destroy itself,” while James Hansen and Rajendra Pachauri, perhaps the world’s leading climate scientists, have said inaction in the next several years will doom the planet.

Meanwhile, that very planet is visibly changing—epic droughts, fires and dust storms in Australia; floods in Asia, alarmingly fast melting of land ice in Greenland and Antarctica; the prospect of an ice-free summer on the Arctic Sea; raging, unprecedented fires throughout the world; and mosquito-borne illnesses like Dengue spreading to regions previously untouched. Measurements show that the oceans are rising and becoming more acidic, while the Earth’s average temperature was higher in the past decade than at any time in the past century. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-23-the-coming-climate-panic/

[Goldstein1984]

1. I don't think it's the likes of the policy makers who are going to

do the suffering.

I'm ashamed of the role the U.S. is playing in this. We claim to be the most scientifically advanced nation on Earth, except when the products of science conflict with the profit motive.

[wuvuj]

5. Don't forget the conflict with religious and political stupidity.

...

[Thickasabrick]

2. Blame it on the Chinese - and us for being so in debt to the Chinese

we couldn't press them on anything.

[bhikkhu]

3. I'll believe that when consumption drops

or: before people even start to panic about the state of the planet, they'll think about what they can do to reduce their CO2 emissions, and then consumption in general will drop. I'm pretty sure it hasn't happened anywhere, except that recession has forced some involuntary reduction.

[pscot]

4. Cliimate panic won't happen

until it dawns on the unwahed masses that they're up shitcreek without a paddle. Rising sea levels and food shortages should do it.

[wuvuj]

6. Prediction....

...when things get to this point....the fascists will push the fear button...convincing the unwashed that environmentalists are the root cause of all their problems. The US...being currently overpowered by it's military and DOJ will flip into a full fledged police state....3/4s there already.

[Meeker Morgan]

7. Food shortages will be blamed on the government ...

... and the government (either party) will blame the farmers.

[TxRider]

8. ROFL