Earth Equity News-April 27, 2008

Our Last Chance to Snap into Action for the Climate. By Mike Tidwell, Orion, May/June, 2008 issue. "What the scientists have been wrong about -- and I mean really, really wrong -- is the speed at which it's all occurring. Our climate system isn't just 'changing.' It's not just 'warming.' It's snapping, violently, into a whole new regime right before our eyes. A fantastic spasm of altered weather patterns is crashing down upon our heads right now. The only question left for America is this: can we snap along with the climate? Can we, as the world's biggest polluter, create a grassroots political uprising that emerges as abruptly as a snap of the fingers?... Amid the sudden need to rethink everything a.s.a.p. comes another piece of good news: the clean-energy solutions to global warming grow more economically feasible and closer at hand with each passing year... Getting off carbon fuels-though vital and mandatory-won't steer us clear of climate chaos. We've delayed action far too long... But the answer to the question Can human beings artificially cool the planet? is almost certainly yes. That answer, I realize, poses a terrible conundrum for conservationists like me who understand it's precisely this sort of anthropocentrism and technological arrogance that got us into the mess we're in. But like it or not, we are where we are. And I, for one, can't look my ten-year-old son in the eye and, using a different sort of ideological arrogance, say, No, don't even try atmospheric engineering. We've learned our lesson. Just let catastrophic global warming run its course... Although there are surely dark times ahead, I can see him living through them, living deep into the twenty-first century, when most of the lingering greenhouse gases will have finally dissipated from our atmosphere, allowing an orderly end to the geo-engineering process." Mike Tidwell is the author of The Ravaging Tide and is the founder and director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.