Maybe a little civil disobedience to shut down coal plants would be a good thing. God knows, nothing else is working:
The rise in global carbon dioxide emissions last year outpaced international researchers’ most dire projections, according to figures being released today, as human-generated greenhouse gases continued to build up in the atmosphere despite international agreements and national policies aimed at curbing climate change.
In 2007, carbon released from burning fossil fuels and producing cement increased 2.9 percent over that released in 2006, to a total of 8.47 gigatons, or billions of metric tons, according to the Australia-based Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of scientists that tracks emissions. This output is at the very high end of scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and could translate into a global temperature rise of more than 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, according to the panel’s estimates.
“In a sense, it’s a reality check,” said Corinne Le Quéré, a professor at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia and a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey. “This is an extremely large number. The emissions are increasing at a rate that’s faster than what the IPCC has used.” […]
Richard Moss, vice president and managing director for climate change at the World Wildlife Fund, said the new carbon figures and research show that “we’re already locked into more warming than we thought.”
“We should be worried, really worried,” Moss said. “This is happening in the context of trying to reduce emissions.”
The new data also show that forests and oceans, which naturally take up much of the carbon dioxide humans emit, are having less impact. These “natural sinks” have absorbed 54 percent of carbon dioxide emissions since 2000, a drop of 3 percent compared with the period between 1959 and 2000.
An 11 degree increase in the global average temperature would be catastrophic. Think billions of dead people from starvation, disease, drought, lack of potable water, severe weather, out of control wildfires, soil erosion, crop failures, rising sea levels and wars fought over ever more scarce resources. Imagine the ugly, polluted world of Blade Runner and multiply it by a factor of ten. Imagine the largest mass extinction event in the history of the earth. The financial crisis which is dominating the headlines today seems like a looming doomsday, and it will cause severe pain and hardship. But a world where the average global temperature rises 11 degrees Fahrenheit or more, beyond the IPCC’s worst case scenario? That’s a true doomsday, my friends.
