We're Not Scaremongering, this Is Really Happening

by Eric Martin

I was lucky enough to be invited to a meeting between President Clinton and a group bloggers this past Monday at Clinton's Harlem office (I'm the tall guy on the right with the creepy smile looming over Amanda Terkel, Vanessa and Samhita from Feministing and a health care blogger whose name escapes me).  The meeting centered around the admirable work of the Clinton Foundation, although the conversation was not bound by those constraints.

The two big takeaways for me were, first, that Clinton is optimistic that serious, significant health care reform will get passed (in his words, "I'll be surprised if we don't get health care reform"), and that we should not push for the fillibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate if that means a bad bill, instead going for 51 and a good bill via reconciliation. 

Second, that we need to take the global warming threat more seriously.  On this point, I couldn't agree more: global warming has the potential to render almost all other concerns moot.  Without an inhabitable planet - or if the planet's ecosystem becomes so inhospitable that conflict for scarce resources prevail - every other issue pales in comparison.

And yet, the world fails to treat the truly existential threat as such, instead pouring trillions into the furnace in the name of containing a terrorist threat that is, in the grand scheme of things, far less of a danger.  As I wrote some time back:

The foreign policy/national security elite are rightly concerned with threats from an emerging China, regressing Russia and hostile non-state actors/terrorists - especially fear that the latter could acquire some sort of WMD that would wreak havoc on an American city like New York (my home).

But Ansar al-Carbon Dioxide could end up doing a much more effective job of it, rendering all those concerns, and many others, moot. There is no foreign policy if there is no planet after all, and business interests might suffer a bit if Wall Street is made to resemble an octopus's garden. But concern about the environment lacks the exhilaration of military conflicts, and international power politics, and so it goes largely ignored. I am certainly not without blame on this front, I acknowledge.

Maybe it would help if we called it the War on Global Warming?

The willful blindness on the part of many of our media/political leaders is such that a few weeks ago, MIT released the bombshell results of a study on global warming to a collective shrug: 

The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago - and could be even worse than that.

The study uses the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model, a detailed computer simulation of global economic activity and climate processes that has been developed and refined by the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change since the early 1990s. [...]

Study co-author Ronald Prinn, the co-director of the Joint Program and director of MIT's Center for Global Change Science, says that, regarding global warming, it is important "to base our opinions and policies on the peer-reviewed science," he says. And in the peer-reviewed literature, the MIT model, unlike any other, looks in great detail at the effects of economic activity coupled with the effects of atmospheric, oceanic and biological systems. "In that sense, our work is unique," he says.

The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees. [...]

Prinn says these and a variety of other changes based on new measurements and new analyses changed the odds on what could be expected in this century in the "no policy" scenarios - that is, where there are no policies in place that specifically induce reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Overall, the changes "unfortunately largely summed up all in the same direction," he says. "Overall, they stacked up so they caused more projected global warming."

While the outcomes in the "no policy" projections now look much worse than before, there is less change from previous work in the projected outcomes if strong policies are put in place now to drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions. Without action, "there is significantly more risk than we previously estimated," Prinn says. "This increases the urgency for significant policy action." [...]

"There's no way the world can or should take these risks," Prinn says. And the odds indicated by this modeling may actually understate the problem, because the model does not fully incorporate other positive feedbacks that can occur, for example, if increased temperatures caused a large-scale melting of permafrost in arctic regions and subsequent release of large quantities of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. Including that feedback "is just going to make it worse," Prinn says.

In other words, the prediction of temperature increase over the next century has, in essence, doubled.  That's the kind of thing that should be getting just a bit more press than the marital status of Jon and Kate (with their eight).

While Clinton focused on some innovative, revenue-neutral means to begin rolling back energy consumption, reining in global warming will likely cost some amount of money.  Failing to curb global warming, however, will cost exponentially more in the long run.  Waxman's cap and trade is a good first step. 

The only question is, do we grab our fiddles while Rome drowns, or finally get serious about averting an unthinkable catastrophe?  And will the GOP manage to finally respond in a mature fashion?

(Scott Lemieux - third from the left in the photo -  has a round up of links, some of which have links of their own, to other pieces written about the blogger meet-up)