The Most Important Number on Earth
NEWS: Now that we know how far we are past the carbon tipping point, it's time to freak out—and get to work.
Sooner or later, you have to draw a line. We've spent the last 20 years in the opening scenes of what historians will one day call the Global Warming Era—the preamble to the biggest drama that humans have ever staged, the overture that hints at the themes that will follow for centuries to come. But none of the notes have resolved, none of the story lines yet come into clear view. And that's largely because until recently we didn't know quite where we were. From the moment in 1988 when a nasa scientist named James Hansen told Congress that burning coal and gas and oil was warming the earth, we've struggled to absorb this one truth: The central fact of our economic lives (the ubiquitous fossil fuel that developed the developed world) is wrecking the central fact of our physical lives (the stable climate and sea level on which civilization rests). For a while, and much longer in the US than elsewhere, we battled over whether this was true. But warm year succeeded warm year and that fight began to subside. Instead, the real question became, is this a future peril, the kind of thing you take out a reasonably priced insurance policy to guard against? Or is it the oh-my-lord crisis you drop everything else to deal with? Will Hitler be happy with the Sudetenland, or is the world going to spend every cent it has, not to mention tens of millions of lives, fighting him off? Trouble, or TROUBLE? These last 12 months, we've found out.
It was September 2007 that the tide began to turn. Every summer Arctic sea ice melts, and every fall it refreezes. The amount of open water has been steadily increasing for three decades, a percent or two every year—it's been going at about the pace that the hairline recedes on a middle-aged man. It was worrisome, and scientists said all the summer ice could be gone by 2070 or so, which is an eyeblink in geologic time but an eternity in politician time. In late summer of last year, though, the melt turned into a rout—it was like those stories of people whose hair turns gray overnight. An area the size of Colorado was disappearing every week; the Northwest Passage was staying wide open all September, for the first time in history. Before long the Arctic night mercifully descended and the ice began to refreeze, but scientists were using words like "astounding." They were recalculating—by one nasa scientist's estimate the summer Arctic might now be free of ice by 2012. Which in politician years is "beginning of my second term."
The key phrase, really, was "tipping point." As in "I'd say we are reaching a tipping point or are past it for the ice. This is a strong indication that there is an amplifying mechanism here." That's Pål Prestrud of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research-Oslo. Or this, from Mark Serreze, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado: "When the ice thins to a vulnerable state, the bottom will drop out...I think there is some evidence that we may have reached that tipping point, and the impacts will not be confined to the Arctic region."
"Tipping point" is not, in this context, an idle buzzword. It means that the physical world is taking over the process that humans began. We poured carbon into the atmosphere, trapping excess heat; that excess heat began to melt ice. When that ice was melted, there was less white up north to reflect the sun's rays back out to space, and more blue ocean to absorb them. Events began to feed upon themselves. And in the course of the last year, we've seen the same thing happening in other systems. In April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report showing that 2007 had seen a sudden and dramatic surge in the amount of methane, another heat-trapping gas, in the atmosphere. Apparently, one reason is that when we burned all that fossil fuel and began raising the temperature, we also started melting the permafrost—melting eight times more of it in some places over two decades than had thawed for the previous 1,000 years. And as that frozen soil thaws, it releases methane; enough of it now bubbles out to make "hot spots" in lakes and ponds that don't freeze during the deepest part of the Siberian winter. The more methane, the more heat, the more methane. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The final piece of the puzzle came early this year, and again from James Hansen. Twenty years after his crucial testimony, he published a paper with several coauthors called "Target Atmospheric CO2" (.pdf). It put, finally, a number on the table—indeed it did so in the boldest of terms. "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted," it said, "paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."
Get that? Let me break it down for you. For most of the period we call human civilization, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hovered at about 275 parts per million. Let's call that the Genesis number, or depending on your icons, the Buddha number, the Confucius number, the Shakespeare number. Then, in the late 18th century, we started burning fossil fuel in appreciable quantities, and that number started to rise. The first time we actually measured it, in the late 1950s, it was already about 315. Now it's at 385, and growing by more than 2 parts per million annually.
And it turns out that that's too high. We never had a number before, so we never knew whether we'd crossed a red line. We half guessed and half hoped that the danger zone might be 450 or 550 parts per million—those were still a little ways in the distance. Therefore we could get away with thinking like the young Augustine: "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet." Not anymore. We have been told by science that we're already over the line.
And so we're now in the land of tipping points. We know that we've passed some of them—Arctic sea ice is melting, and so is the permafrost that guards those carbon stores. But the logic of Hansen's paper was clear. Above 350, we are at constant risk of crossing other, even worse, thresholds, the ones that govern the reliability of monsoons, the availability of water from alpine glaciers, the acidification of the ocean, and, perhaps most spectacularly, the very level of the seas. It is at least conceivable that instead of a slow, steady rise in the height of the oceans, we could see rapid melt in Greenland and the West Antarctic, where much of the world's frozen water resides. We can't rule out, warns Hansen, a sea level rise of up to 20 feet this century. Plug that into Google Earth and watch waterfront developments turn into high-priced reefs. We can't rule out, in other words, the collapse of human society as we've known it. "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted..." We should add the phrase to the oath of office for every politico on the third planet.
So what does this mean? If you took 350 to be the most important number on the planet, what would it imply?
In essence, it means that we've got to transform the world's economy far more quickly than we'd hoped. Almost everyone knows that this transformation is coming—that by century's end we won't be relying on fossil fuel, both because the oil will have run out and because the environmental damage will be intense. But the question is how quickly. The kind of change envisioned before last year was still a little leisurely—maybe the developed world cutting its carbon emissions 15 or 20 percent by 2020. That's far more than the Bush administration or its energy-industry cronies would go for, of course—at ExxonMobil's annual meeting last spring, ceo Rex Tillerson said he envisioned a world that still used fossil fuel for two-thirds of its power in 2030. A world where change came slowly enough that everyone could make every last penny off their sunk investments in coal mines and oil platforms. And a world where politicians didn't need to raise the price of carbon steeply, and hence didn't need to arouse voters.
But the 350 world looks different. We're not worried we might have a weight problem. We've been to the doctor and the doctor has said, "Your cholesterol is too high. Scaring me. You're in the danger zone. You need to change your diet and then you need to pray that you get back down where you're supposed to be before the stroke that's coming at you." When that happens, you clean the cheese out of the refrigerator and go cold turkey.
In energy terms, that would look like this:
[ 1 ] No more new coal plants, because although the world still has immense amounts of coal, it's immensely dirty. And the people who tell you about clean coal are blowing smoke—literally.
[ 2 ] A cap on the amount of carbon the country can produce—which, in essence, is a tax. America would say, just as it does now with sulfur from coal plants, "We're only going to release so much carbon every year." CO2 would stop being free; in fact, it would become expensive. In order to simplify the process, the upstream producer who mines, imports, or sells the fossil fuel would get the tab. ExxonMobil would have to pay dearly for a permit to release x amount of carbon, a cost it would pass on to consumers. Then those consumers would use less, and markets would go to work figuring out all the possible ways to cut demand and boost renewables.
[ 3 ] An international agreement, including China and India, to do the same thing around the world.
Now, these are three of the hardest tasks we've even thought about since we took on Hitler. They go to the very heart of the way our economy operates: We get most of our electricity from fossil fuels, any increase in the price of energy affects every single part of the economy, and China and India are pulling people out of poverty largely by burning cheap coal. If you're a person who uses a lot of fossil fuel, i.e. an American, then they're unappealing. If you're a person who would like to use even a little energy, i.e. almost anyone in the developing world, then they're maddening. And yet they are what the physics and chemistry of the situation dictate. So the question becomes, how to make them happen?
The logic imposed by 350 is fairly straightforward. In order to keep Americans from rebelling, we need to take the money we're charging ExxonMobil for those pollution permits and return it to the taxpayers—everyone needs to get a check every month to, in essence, buy us all off. To help make us whole for the price rises that will inevitably come, the price rises that will do the work of wringing fossil fuel out of the economy. ExxonMobil would pay, then we'd pay—but we'd get some of the money back in the mail. We've got to make the switch so fast that it's going to be brutally expensive—think $10 gas—and our democracy will never support it for long without that monthly check.
But we can't give ourselves back all the money. Because some of it is needed to make the rest of the world whole—to build windmills for the Indians so they won't use the same cheap coal that we used for 200 years in order to get rich. That is, we're going to need a Marshall Plan for carbon—with the same mix of idealism and self-interest that motivated the Marshall Plan in Hitler's wake.
We also need serious investment in infrastructure, both technological and human. For instance, concepts like concentrated solar power—those big mirror arrays in the desert—have gained real momentum in the last 18 months. Former Clinton administration energy analyst Joseph Romm recently calculated that such arrays could provide America with all of its electricity from a 92-square-mile grid in the Southwest desert—but only if promoted via loan guarantees for the entrepreneurs who build them and a new generation of transcontinental transmission lines. Meanwhile, demand is skyrocketing for small rooftop solar panels, but increasingly there's a shortage of trained installers, which means our community colleges need money to start training them. No matter what the price of energy, homes aren't going to insulate themselves—this is the great opening for a green-jobs revolution. (See "The Truth About Green Jobs.")
You'll note here I'm talking more about what we should do in the US House (and Senate) in the next year or two than which bulbs you should be changing in your house. diy conservation makes great practical sense, but we won't save the planet that way. One by one, trying to do the right thing, we add up to...not nearly enough. You cannot make the math work that way—there are too many sockets and too many tailpipes and most of all too much inertia for voluntary action to do the trick. It didn't work when President Bush made voluntary reduction by corporations his global warming "policy," and it won't work fast enough with individuals either.
Which is not to say that life at home doesn't need to change. It does—and it will, once we've taken the political step of making the price of carbon reflect the damage it does to the environment. Look at what happened this past year when the price of gas finally rose far enough to get our attention. We began riding trains and buses in record numbers. Total miles driven fell, sharply, for the first time since we started keeping records in 1942. We groused and moaned and we started to change. General Motors decided to sell its Hummer factory.
If we get that check every month to cover some of the damage, it will help attenuate the very real heat-or-eat dilemma that will grip many people this coming winter, but the incentive to change will still be there. Buses and bikes. Smaller homes that are easier to heat. Solar panels, bought on the installment plan with loans paid off from the power generated on your roof. Local food (and lots more local farmers). Vacations in the neighborhood—no more jetting off for the weekend.
You can see every one of these trends in embryo already, driven by the run-up in energy prices that we've seen so far. The quick contraction of the airline industry. The collapse in home values in the distant suburbs, while homes along the commuter rail lines fare better. Again the question is all about pace—what will make them happen fast enough, across a wide enough swath of the planet. Al Gore set the example with his call for a 10-year conversion to noncarbon electricity. It's at the outer edge of doable, and the outer edge is where we need to be. We'll have plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on sale by 2010. The question is, can we have nothing else on sale by 2020? We built more than half of the interstate highway system in a decade. Would rebuilding our rail networks to a European standard be all that much harder? Can we get the price of energy up quickly enough to get markets on the task of finding a low-carbon way of life that works? And by works, I mean reverses the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. Because physics and chemistry won't reward good intentions. Methane is seriously uninterested in compromise. Permafrost, notoriously, refuses to bargain. Even the absolute political power represented by King Canute couldn't hold back the rising seas. Those forces will only pay attention if we can scramble back below 350.
Forcing that pace requires a new kind of politics. It requires forging a consensus that this toughest of all changes must happen. The consensus must be broad, it must come quickly, and it must encompass the whole earth—they don't call it global warming for nothing.
The list of things on which we've achieved a broad and deep global consensus is pretty much limited to...Coke Is It. And that took billions of dollars and several decades, and it involved inducing people to drink sugar water. The odds against a strong global movement about anything tougher than that are low, with language barriers, religious barriers, cultural barriers. And we start from such incredibly different places—Americans use 12 times the energy of sub-Saharan Africans.
And yet we do have this one tool that at least offers the possibility, a tool that wasn't fully there even a few years ago. The Internet—and its attendant technologies, like cell phones and texting—does link up most of the known world at this point. You can get pretty far back of beyond in most of the world, and someone in that village has a mobile.
And we have a number—350. The most important number on earth. If the Internet has a cosmic purpose, this could be it—to take that number and spread it everywhere on the planet, so that everyone, even if they knew little else about climate change, understood that it represented a kind of safety, a bulwark against the monsoon turning erratic, the sea rising over their fields, the mosquito spreading up their mountain.
I'm part of a group of people calling ourselves 350.org. Our goal is simple—to try to get people everywhere to spread that number. We've started finding musicians and artists, athletes and video makers, and most of all activists, the kinds of people who are working to save watersheds or babies, or to educate girls or to block dams, or any of the other thousand lovely things that won't happen if we allow the basic physical stability of the planet to come unglued. We need a lot of noise, and we need it fast, in the scant months—14 now—before the world meets in Copenhagen next December to draw up a new climate treaty. Because one clear implication of 350 is that that treaty is our last real chance to get it right. If we don't, then all we'll be dealing with is the consequences. Once the ocean really starts to rise, dike building is pretty much the only project.
It's not clear if a vocal world citizenry will be enough to beat inertia and vested interest. If 350 emerges as the clear bar for success or failure, then the odds of the international community taking effective action increase, though the odds are still long. Still, these are the lines it is our turn to speak. To be human in 2008 is to rise in defense of the planet we have known and the civilization it has spawned.
Bill McKibben is a contributing writer for Mother Jones.
Illustration: Sam Weber
The damage that this "intellectual idiot" and his Neocon Mafia has left us with will go down in history as a disaster that will dwarf 9-11 by comparison for decades. That will be his dubious legacy!
I don't know which is MORE frightening. The fact that we are already beyond a safe number of carbon or that there are only "2" postings on this page responding to the most important story of our generation!
WHY IS THIS STORY "NOT" ON THE FRONT PAGE OF EVERY NEWSPAPER ON EARTH!
"The fact that we are already beyond a safe number of carbon or that there are only "2" postings on this page responding to the most important story of our generation!"
I have to agree with the above. An article of this scope really does deserve, urgently, to be read widely. Of course, maybe everyone doesn't respond but one hopes this article will be read by many and passed on by many more. Then again, it seems to be a common trait that people pay no attention until the wolf is at the door, even if they knew the wolf was on his way. :::shrug:::
Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba, has estimated that capturing and burying just 10 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted over a year from coal-fire plants at current rates would require moving volumes of compressed carbon dioxide greater than the total annual flow of oil worldwide — a massive undertaking requiring decades and trillions of dollars. "Beware of the scale," he stressed."
"I know of no realistic person who thinks carbon dioxide emissions are going to do anything but grow. Most European countries are not meeting their emissions goals, and of the ones that have, it's because their economies are collapsing. In the United States, this notion that we're going to reduce our emissions by 80 percent is pure fantasy." --Pete Geddes, Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, 2 April 2008
"I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't: we may not be able to stop global warming. We need to begin curbing global greenhouse emissions right now, but more than a decade after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the world has utterly failed to do so. Unless the geopolitics of global warming change soon, the Hail Mary pass of geoengineering might become our best shot." --Bryan Walsh, Time Magazine, 17 March 2008
Newly grown biomass captures carbon, but you have to store it so that it doesn't decay. Or you char it and bury the charcoal (which is quite stable unless it is ignited). Only that isn't fast enough and it requires too much land which is already needed for food crops. (But at least, char and bury the crop residues).
We need to build industrial plants to capture CO2 from the air using e.g., sodium hydroxide droplets, followed by known industrial processes which regenerate the sodium hydroxide and other intermediate materials, ending up with liquid CO2. This is either stored underground (so build the capture plant near the storage site), or the CO2, or if CO2 storage doesn't work, the CO2 is reduced to plain carbon (coal) and put back into the ground where it belongs.
This requires a LOT of energy, which can't come from burning coal (duh). But a lot of the energy is needed in the form of heat. This heat is available directly from solar concentrators, geothermal wells, or nuclear fission. (Use wind for generating electricity). We just need to spend the money on the engineering and start operating actual capture plants.
The hard part is finding a way to set the carbon taxes high enough to pay for it.
Assimov said, "Any organisism that spawns unchecked in a contained environment will eventually drown in its own waste."
I assume you are referring to the famous author, Issac Asimov.
The possibility exists that humanity may indeed become an extinct organism. However, humans possess the ability to adapt and change our behavior to avoid such a demise. Let's hope we are successful!
THE MOST IMPORTANT NUMBER ON EARTH........."350"!
Go to www.350.org to find out why.
But it is about a more pressing problem facing Civilization. Scary reading
You said, 'Slow down your breeding, people--how many billion do we need? We can do it the hard way (birth control, compensated sterilization, conception permits) or the easy way (war).'
You missed the third way. Remember, if we do not limit our numbers voluntarily, our numbers will be limited for us. We are well beyond the sustainable carrying capacity of this planet, when thinking in terms of thousands or millions of years. We may be beyond the carrying capacity when thinking of hundreds or even tens of years.
Already, world food production of all of our three major staple crops, wheat, corn, and rice, are down year over year. Ocean fisheries output has been declining since the 1980s, despite increased fishing technology. A billion people rely on ocean fish for their main source of protein.
We're depleting our top soil and our underground aquifers far faster than they replenish.
Malthus was wrong on two counts. First, he overestimated the carrying capacity of the planet. I do not personally believe it can sustain even one billion people without exhausting our resource base. Second, he underestimated the degree to which we would steal from our children to feed ourselves. When we deplete our renewable resources without concern for the future, as we have been, that is exactly what we are doing.
So, the third way to limit human numbers is simply do nothing. As we run out of resources, there will be widespread drought and famine that make today's numbers for the chronically hungry or starving (around 1.2 billion) look laughably small.
Got vasectomy?
His 1988 "Scenario A"- which most closely tracks actual CO2 emitted- predicted that we'd see almost a degree C warming by now. Instead the last 20 years has seen only a third of that- barely nuisance value. Mostly positive actually, due to CO2 fertilisation and longer growing seasons.
Catastrophe cancelled.
I believe you meant to say the odds against that are high;and I agree that they are.As the most recent posting here shows Americans(and many others)have little respect for science(Steve's comment that Hansen pulled 350 "out of his hat").China only managed to put functional controls on population growth because the government,and to some extent the populace at large,believed the 'rocket scientists' who warned of catastrophe if controls were not enacted.Hansen speaks of the "man in the street"perceiving warming;I fear most Americans are not in the street but in cars and houses-too detached from reality to notice what is in the street.
http://www.carbonfarmersofamerica.com/
PS - ironically and unfortunately the 350.org website is a bloated pig of a multi-media topheavy site that loads slowly and consumes huge amounts of system resources. Hope they fix that to make it more accessible. Too much technology...again...
Bill HAS IT RIGHT & the Christians are, unknowingly, signifying THE SAME THING, but in a corrupted interpreta-tion of their scriptural writings (as all major religions are slightly OFF the Truth of Things) as is proven clearly by historical evidence that "the Powers That Be" in any given period of passing time "distort, lie about or don't even report anything of the Truth of what happened in that period"!
In 2007 an analysis of News Services:
CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC & FOX showed them to be DISTORTED from Truth at 80% to 55%!
The Good, well intentioned, Helping people, today and in all times past, observe, analyse and speak out about conditions and the urgent need for others to "grasp the Understanding of what is Really Happening" as social, economic and environmental circumstan-ces unfold in Wrongful Directions.
Most all religions state that: "A New Heaven & Earth" shall come into being for all who strive for it. THE MEEK (harmless & Beings resolved to only goodness) SHALL INHERIT the EARTH!
The When, How & Why must be sought out and discovered by each individual, at their "developed rate of perception".
"Harmlessness unto Goodness" in All Things for ALL People & Our Common Environment MUST NOW be in "OUR Thoughts,Words&Actions" for Survival!
MOTHER JONES' writings Echo TRUTH !!!
I don't understand why all this debate about the polar ice caps. There are satellite pictures easily available on web sites and it's clear that the ice extension is HIGHER this year than it was in the last 3 years for instance. See for yourself. Compare between two dates. Here is for example the comparison between Dec. 1st, 2007 and Dec. 1st 2008!
[igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu]
Back in September the difference was even more spectacular:
[igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu]
Historical data confirms that far from melting, the ice cap is actually growing
The whole idea that because warming might be observed over some period of time, one needs to impose the whole statist agenda of no individual liberty is scary.
Same tactics as Bush and his weapons of mass destruction.
The government establishment is up to any pseudo intellectual theory to get increase its power. 350 is a good trick. As an amateur of marketing crookery, I have to congratulate you on that one.
The Federal Reserve is not enough. The industrial-military complex is not enough. Here we have the green complex.
The irony of all that is that without free-market capitalism and price freedom, resources are wasted at a higher rate.
In any case, dictatorships, be them red, brown or green, always fail and their only long-term effect is human death and distress.
Disgusting.
This response is so predictable, so duplicitous, so pathetic, so immoral, so dunderheaded.
Too many current leaders appear to be saying that the environmental 'strategy' of delay and denial is as necessary and justifiable today as invading Iraq was in 2003.
Only a tale told by an idiot could match the one we are seeing played out on the world's stage in this first decade of Century XXI.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
We are talking about such a paradigm shift in thinking that it will likely take dramatic crises, entire cities getting washed away, before anybody seriously contemplates such a "new world order" in which cross-border rule of law supersedes sovereign rights.
My bulk of my post is basically moot but I just wanted to post a response to the posters above who state that the artic ice is getting bigger instead of smaller using two years analysis from one university. The posters who say that 'global warming' is a liberal conspiracy or a right wing conspiracy. Or other such nutter postings.
Just think about what would happen when we find out who's wrong.
Global warming whether true or wrong and we act on it. What do we end up with? A global shift towards sustainability. A cleaner planet. Healtheir people.
Lets say we don't act on it and global warming is false. We still have ever increasing pollution. Sicker people. And environmentally devestated planet.
And if global warming is true, at best we have a small percentage of the population surviving in environmentally controlled facilities slowly edging to extinction. Or just a mass extinction including mankind.
Let's see. Which one is the best way to go? Hmmm. Clean, healthy and doing our best to survive? Or dead?
The evidence for global warming is staggering. The denial of global warming is like putting up a museum that depicts humans living with dinosaurs.
If you don't want to work for making a healthy biosphere or at least for the survival of the human race, fine, don't. Just don't use your energy to try to stop the rest of us.
http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/Climate TimeMachine/climateTimeMachine.cfm
Happy researching.
Your Universities told you Darwin was correct. Now we know the facts, but the Universities refuse to admit their they are wrong. The same Low Foreheads are now deceiving young people and more into believing high taxes will force companies into clean air.
Wake-up, demand the rest of the world to live up to the same clean air standards we have here in the good old US.
Yes we must put aside petty differences and work as a total group for the long haul for the long term benefits if we succeed. [That is a very big if.] We are running out of time, if it isn't already too late to stop the tipping point, we can at least mitigate its effects. And with long term diligence return to the tipping point and restore what we had.
There is no magic formula, no golden ticket. All of the technology we need exists and has existed for an extremely long time. It just boggles my mind that people think this stuff is "new".
PS: Why is it so cold this week?
It's cold because it's f'ing winter you idiot; are you familiar with the concept of winter... the earth revolves around the sun, a neat little gravitational trick called orbit, and every six months the northern half of the earth is positioned so it gets much less light and energy from that bright shiny thing in the sky that appears daily called the sun - or are you still with the Catholic church of the 1500's and think the sun and the entire universe (which they called the firmament revolves around the earth), maybe you even think the earth is flat...
To "noel" and the other clueless posters best classified as "head in the sanders"
It is just sad that you are so easily misled by the pathetic attempts of large organizations you seem to be so afraid of - although the ones I'm referring to are called corporations, not governments. In real studies by real scientists, not bought and paid for pseudo-scientist-spokespersons on hire for the petro-companies who spout garbage "science", there is no debate that CO2 levels have risen to levels never before seen since the emergence of humans on the planet. Or are you of the belief that the world is only 6000 years old, was created in six days, etc., etc. I have a suggestion for you - move to Bangladesh, right on the beach if possible, and when the water starts to rise don't move, it's only an illusion. If it isn't, hopefully you brought an over-sized Bible that you can use as a makeshift raft.
I can only hope evolution comes back into vogue and these fools can be "out-competed" before they cause more harm to the world.
WAKE UP PEOPLE!!!