Earth Equity News

The World at 350: A Last Chance for Civilization. By Bill McKibben, TomDispatch.com, May 11, 2008. "All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth. There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA's Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- 'if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.' Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points -- massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them -- that we'll pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us. So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don't bring it down right away, you're going to have a stroke... In this case, though, it's worse than that because we're not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas -- hard... Here's the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the IPCC last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): 'If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment... A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality."