CHART OF THE DAY….Via Andrew Revkin, Maxwell Boykoff of Oxford University charts media mentions of global warming over the past five years. The dark line is the European media and the heavy dashed line is the North American media. As you can see, during the past two years media attention to global warming has nearly halved in both places. (The other lines are Oceania, South America, and Asia.)
What makes this especially perverse is that it’s come at the very time when climate scientists are getting increasingly cataclysmic in their warnings about the danger of global warming. It’s no longer a vague theory and it’s no longer a matter of gradual change. Most climate scientists now think that we’re getting very close to a tipping point at which we’ll basically destroy our planet if we don’t make some big changes very quickly. Here’s Bill McKibben, from our current issue, on the most important number on earth, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere:
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….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.
Are you listening, politicos?
