sway2sway
05-16-2008, 05:40 AM
I'm spreading this message around because I think it's worthy of the spread-
more so than condiments,
and it ain't like a bed spread
or a spread on a bed-
it's a web spread,
that hopefully will go to some heads,
expand maybe and then spread and spread,
could lead to enlightment,
or maybe still dead.
Anyway
I thought this was interesting, it was sent to me with a warning of doom & gloom, but it ain't only that.
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 of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A few weeks ago, NASA's chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- that "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."
There's a lot of examples in there of how this cascade effect is taking over, like we tipped the earth's dominoes. I'll leave that part as the mystery, for you to read yourselves,
I call that the OnePieceSuit&AttatchedFigureFlatteringSkirtMethod.
'whoa, what's going on under there?' the ogler and the reader might say.
Still, as long as it's not impossible, we've got a duty to try to push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality. In fact, it's about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.
After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can't do this one lightbulb at a time.
We do have one thing going for us -- the Web -- which at least allows you to imagine something like a grass-roots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that "350" stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.
Hansen's words were well-chosen: "a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that civilization may not.
Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won't exist, at least not for long, as long as we remain on the wrong side of 350. That's the limit we face.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printeditio … 2815.story
more so than condiments,
and it ain't like a bed spread
or a spread on a bed-
it's a web spread,
that hopefully will go to some heads,
expand maybe and then spread and spread,
could lead to enlightment,
or maybe still dead.
Anyway
I thought this was interesting, it was sent to me with a warning of doom & gloom, but it ain't only that.
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 of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A few weeks ago, NASA's chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- that "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."
There's a lot of examples in there of how this cascade effect is taking over, like we tipped the earth's dominoes. I'll leave that part as the mystery, for you to read yourselves,
I call that the OnePieceSuit&AttatchedFigureFlatteringSkirtMethod.
'whoa, what's going on under there?' the ogler and the reader might say.
Still, as long as it's not impossible, we've got a duty to try to push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality. In fact, it's about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.
After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can't do this one lightbulb at a time.
We do have one thing going for us -- the Web -- which at least allows you to imagine something like a grass-roots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that "350" stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.
Hansen's words were well-chosen: "a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that civilization may not.
Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won't exist, at least not for long, as long as we remain on the wrong side of 350. That's the limit we face.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printeditio … 2815.story