The bills are coming due. And not just, or even mainly, the bills from a failed Bush presidency, but the bills from 200 years of burning fossil fuel. Twenty years ago when we started worrying about global warming, we thought we’d have a generation to pay those bills off. But we were wrong — the planet was more finely balanced than we’d realized. The melting Arctic is the call from the repo man. As NASA climate scientist James Hansen has said,
If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleo-climate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 [in the atmosphere] will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm.
from “President Obama’s Big Climate Challenge” by Bill McKibben…
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