Why your Tercel won't go.....no air?

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http://www.civicus.org/new/media/climatecodered_1.pdf

3.9 Conclusion

“We have to figure out how to live without fossil fuels someday… Why not sooner?”
— James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science, 13 December 2007
(Inman, 2007)

“Code red” is used in some hospitals to signify the status of a general surgical patient who needs
advanced life support. Our planet too needs life support, for part of its diverse life has already been
drained away by global warming. This understanding is widespread.

We have already gone too far. NASA’s James Hansen told the December 2007 meeting of the
American Geophysical Union that the current CO2 level of 383pmm was already dangerous, “the
evidence indicates we’ve aimed too high” and that we should set a target of CO2 that is low enough
to avoid the point of no return. He said that the CO2 tipping point for many parts of the climate is
around 300 to 350 ppm CO2, and that we must not only cut current carbon emissions but also remove
some carbon that has collected in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution (Inman, 2007;
McKibben, 2007).

In having helped articulate and document the increasing
gravity of climate impacts, Hansen, perhaps the world’s
most reputable climate scientist, is now saying it is time to
start taking carbon out of the atmosphere because it is now too
late and no longer relevant to speculate on how much more
may be safe. The game has changed and Hansen’s
articulation of the 300–350 ppm target will be recognised as
Climate ‘code red’.

So now the message is that we must cool the planet. Like the patient with very high cholesterol, the
effective response is not despair but a determined programme of action to bring the level down to a
safe one as quickly as possible. Because other life-threatening complications — large positive
feedbacks — are already making an appearance, the key is not only the target but getting there in
double-quick time. Speed-of-change is now the difference between success and failure, and like the
emergency services getting to a fire or serious accident, a slow response is not acceptable.
If we don’t stop emitting greenhouse gases rapidly, it will be too late.

So if we are serious, how much of the world’s economic capacity should be devoted to providing a
rapid transition to a zero-emissions economy and a safe-climate future? Economic modellers will
bicker over tenths of a per cent, and calculate that we might avoid dangerous climate change and yet
only shave some tiny amount off GDP in 40 years time. Or get to “carbon-neutral” by cutting
emissions 60% by 2050 and buying credits from the rest of the world for the balance.

We can only say we must devote as much of the world’s economic capacity as is necessary, and as quickly as
possible, because the alternative of not doing enough will likely produce a world where far fewer
species and a lot less people will survive. It makes no sense to give high priority to producing yet
more “cream on the cake” (more luxuries for the well-off) when the very viability of the planet as a
life-support system is at stake.

Environment scientist James Lovelock, co-author of the Gaia thesis, says temperature increases of up
to 8°C are already locked into the system and will result in large parts of the surface becoming
uninhabitable, wiping out 90% of the world’s present human population (Lovelock, 2006).

Two years ago Lovelock’s view was widely dismissed as fanciful. But the non-linearity of some
climate events we are now witnessing and the pressure building in the system that will rapidly bring
catastrophic positive feedbacks into play — large ice sheet loss, carbon-cycle reverse, larger
permafrost methane releases — make such an outlook not unreasonable unless we treat the situation
now as an absolute emergency.

We are close to blowing the system, as many leading figures are now
saying with increasing urgency.

UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said in Bali in December 2007 that
reducing emissions by between 25-40% by 2020 would cap the average global temperature rise to 2ºC,
but this could still result in “catastrophic environmental damage” (AAP, 2007);

the UN Secretary-General calls it “an emergency” (ABC, 2007a);

James Hansen says that “we are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption” (Hansen, 2005c);

and Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the US government’s snow and ice data centre says “the Arctic is
screaming” (Borenstein, 2007).

It’s “now or never” for truly radical action and heroic leadership. How much of our productive
wealth we must devote to this life-saving action should not be calculated in tenths of a per cent, but in
how many per cent and, if necessary, in how many tens of per cent. During the last global
mobilisation, the 1939-45 war, more than 30%, and in some cases more than half, of the economy was
devoted to military expenditure, as Table 4 shows.

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