A Scary CO2 Increase

Ice cores reveal the Earth’s natural climate rhythm over the last 800,000 years. When carbon dioxide changed there was always an accompanying climate change. The fastest increase seen in the ice cores was of the order of 30 ppm by volume over a period of roughly 1,000 years.

We've seen a 30 ppm increase in just the last 17 years. Doing the math, that is almost 59 times faster than any period in the last 800,000 years. We really are in uncharted territory.

Psycopath in the Room
If your experiences and self-education have lead you to understand that the only real hope for a healthy and vibrant planet is to reduce per capita consumption, transition to a non-carbon and low-tech society, reduce the human population, and phase-out international commerce, then you are not alone!

In working to define and propose a policy platform for a grassroots global warming campaign, I have come to conclude that—given our limited time to begin reducing CO2 emissions drastically, as much as I want to push for the kinds of changes mentioned above—our culture is far from ready to accept powerdown solutions, so they will have to be set aside, nationally and internationally, for the time being.

This means local organizing for these wise long-term solutions must continue and accelerate, but right now, to use an analogy I find quite fitting, there is a psychopath in the room with a gun, and we have to knock the gun out of his hands. The psychopath is industrial civilization and the gun, at this moment, is CO2 emissions. For if we don’t get those going in reverse within the next 6 years, all the other great ideas and work will be moot within a hundred years. Okay, I should qualify that statement. If you don’t mind living on a planet that is 1/3 desert, 8-12 degrees F hotter than now, with only about 5% of the current diversity of life still hanging on, then I suppose you could organize all you like for bioregional societies, and be quite successful, as there will be no other choice. And that is the point. Right now, there is a small window of opportunity that will never again return, to preserve most of the current life on this planet for at least a few centuries more. Future people will have to sort it out beyond that, but if we don’t act to reduce CO2 now, all other future scenarios become bitterly bleak.