I've got bad news and I've got good news. The bad news is that we have managed over the past 250 years or so to begin to dangerously overheat our planet, primarily by the burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. What's worse is that we have accelerated this process as industrial civilization has grown exponentially and proliferated across the globe from Europe to North America to South America and to East Asia and India. There are other critical influences on climate change, such as forest loss and the production of methane and other gases from agriculture, that we will discuss over the course of the next year as this blog progresses through the many important subjects and themes that pertain.
In a report from the U.K.'s Hadley Centre for Climate Change, we are told that 2007 is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998. The Fourth Assessment Report of the UN-mandated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says unequivocally, again, that what we are experiencing is real, it's dangerous, and it's manmade. One particularly disturbing conclusion from the IPCC is that "Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the timescales associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized."
But you probably already know all this. You've probably seen "An Inconvenient Truth" aka the "Al Gore movie." If you haven't seen it, you pretty certainly know that it just won the Oscar for best documentary. You've also probably seen the now-ubiquitous media coverage of the subject of climate change. You've perhaps read some of the excellent books that have come out in the past several years.
But then that's the good news. People, everywhere, in government, the environmental movement, in the media, in the science community, and in the general public now know what time it is. The parlous state of our planet's health is being addressed, albeit in fits and starts, but the recognition of the terrible problem we've created is deepening and solutions are being actively sought.
We will here look at an array of things, among them the politics of climate change. In another excellent contribution from Bill McKibben in the "NY Review of Books," he notes: "After twenty years of inactivity‚ a remarkably successful bipartisan effort to accomplish nothing‚ the first few weeks of the new Congress have witnessed a flurry of activity." There is going to be a lot of news from Washington.
There have been many important insights and developments from environmentalists and energy experts, business analysts, architects and engineers. Hopefully, we are in what Thomas Kuhn would call a "paradigm shift" and there are going to be more and more positive developments in renewable energy and energy conservation, land use, and transportation. We will be looking at high tech and low tech, lifestyle changes, and one important theme will be activism. What can you learn? What can you do? Who can you reach out to influence? "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living," said Mother Jones.
Another theme will be that efforts to reverse the global warming trend will at the same time produce other felicitous effects. Renewable energy, for instance, equals clean energy , for the most part. (We'll get into nuclear power, but not here and now.)
So, welcome to the Foreign Policy Association's ongoing discussion of climate change. Let's roll up our sleeves and do some good work together.
