Closer Than You Think

We are evaporating our coal mines into the air, adding so much carbon dioxide into the air as to change the transparency of the atmosphere. With each passing year, air must be trapping more and more dark (infrared) rays more and more earthlight. Eventually this change might very well heat the planet to heights outside all human experience.

— Svante Arrhenius, 1896

Loud pounding on the apartment door awakened me. Before I could get dressed to answer, the pounding returned. This time it was louder and more aggressive. Throwing my pants on, I raced to discover a firefighter standing in a smoke-filled hallway warning that our building was on fire. He sternly demanded that I leave the building immediately. I did not ask if he was a Republican or Democrat; I did not question his professional judgment or explore for any hidden agenda; I did not seek a contrarian's opinion about the potential of the neighbor's kitchen fire to spread to my unit; nor did I take a wait-and-see attitude about the fire: I followed his advice and got out as fast as I could.

I share this because I see a sharp contrast between how we respond to news of a dangerous structural fire and how we respond to the even greater dangers of global warming. We have been warned about the grave dangers of global warming for a long time. Yet, somehow, the language of scientists has become dangerously obscure, foreign, and unreadable to the average American.

Many talented scientists have done all that they can to get our attention. Great science voices such as James Hansen, Bob Corell, Rosina Bierbaum, Camille Parmesan, Henry Pollack, Tim Flannery, Virginia Burkett, Thomas Lovejoy, Heidi Cullen, Stephen Schneider, Susan Solomon, Katey Walters, George Woodwell, John P. Holdren (the new science advisor to President Obama) and many others referenced in this book have spoken repeatedly, (even very frankly, for scientists) but their urgent messages are not easily reduced to thirty-second soundbites and therefore have not penetrated the nearly impervious American television screen that harbors millions of viewers.

Starting in 1970 with the Study of Critical Environmental Problems conference in Williamstown, Massachusetts, climate scientists have issued multiple warnings with increasing intensity, all saying that we must curb emissions of heat-trapping gases that cause global warming. In 1986 and again in 1987, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works invited a number of leading climate scientists from around the world, including top US scientists, to testify at hearings aimed at gaining a better understanding of the state of atmospheric science related to human emissions. In one of those groundbreaking hearings, Wallace S. Broecker, then a geochemist at Columbia University, warned:

The inhabitants of planet Earth are quietly conducting a gigantic environmental experiment. So vast and so sweeping will be the impact of this experiment that were it brought before any responsible council for approval, it would be firmly rejected as having potentially dangerous consequences. Yet, the experiment goes on with no significant interference from any jurisdiction or nation. The experiment in question is the release of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Broecker's warning of grave and immediate danger got my attention. His blunt assessment should have prompted elected leaders to act, and act fast. However, it did not. Here we have an esteemed member of the National Academy of Sciences, a geochemist who has authored eight textbooks in the field and published more than four hundred journal articles, issuing an urgent warning to all inhabitants of planet earth and almost nothing happens.

It's one thing to ignore one author, but the Intergovern-mental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), involving thousands of scientists, has issued four separate reports during the past fifteen years, with the latest report concluding with a "very high confidence that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming." Humankind is causing the bulk of global warming with emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and other greenhouse gases. By all reasonable accounts, the core climate science is in, with more than enough published studies pointing to ominous threats in the United States and the world around.

A High-risk Experiment: Massive and Growing CO2 Emissions

Broecker's assessment at the hearings was right. It is now painfully clear that we are conducting a high-risk, high-consequence planetary experiment outside the range of human experience and competence. Through fossil fuel emissions and through alterations of nature's carbon storage systems, we have elevated atmospheric CO2 levels by more than 37 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

We have all felt radiant heat from an asphalt parking lot baking in the sun. It is that kind of heat that is being blocked from escaping the atmosphere by CO2 and other global warming pollution. Because CO2 and other pollutants absorb outgoing long-wave radiation, small amounts of CO2, nitrogen oxides, or even trace amounts of methane can have a large effect on the planet's heat balance. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have grown from about 281 parts per million (ppm) in the preindustrial age to 387 ppm today, adding a heavy blanket onto the climate system.

Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO) scientist Charles Keeling first started tracking this buildup by taking actual measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in 1958. In 1970, Charles L. Hosler, then dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Penn State University, provided my first exposure to the threat. Back then, when humans were adding about 0.7 ppm of CO2 into the air each year, Hosler warned, "We are putting astronomical quantities of materials into the atmosphere and there is no question it's affecting the weather. I am afraid the changes are already greater than most people suspect and there may be a threshold beyond which small changes in the weather could bring about a major shift in the world's climate."

CO2 emissions are not stabilizing or going down as anticipated, but are running far higher than the worst-case scenario anticipated at this stage in "Climate Change 2007," the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report. Perhaps the underestimation was caused by a failure to foresee the growth in Asian emissions, which are increasing 5 to 10 percent per year. (Based on the number of coal plants under construction, this will continue for at least another decade.) The underestimation was also caused by the US failure to cut its pollution or even participate in the Kyoto agreement. Black carbon from China's many new and unregulated coal-fired power plants is also amplifying the melt. Soot from China is falling on Arctic and Himalayan ice and snowpack, creating "dirty snow" that increases energy absorption. # The records since 1970 show atmospheric CO2 readings have been climbing year by year. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the total burden of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased as a direct result of coal, oil, and natural gas usage, deforestation, unsustainable agricultural practices, and other misdirected human activities on the landscape. Collectively, humans are now adding about 2.1 to 2.4 ppm of CO2 pollution into the sky each year. In other words, human activities are...