January 1st, 2019 by Steve Hanley | Clean Technica
Bill McKibben has been writing about climate change for 30 years. Along the way, he has been arrested multiple times, spat on, had his life threatened, and been spied on by minions working for fossil fuel companies. Oh, he also founded 350.org, whose stated mission is to keep the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere below 350 parts per million. The world blew by that benchmark some time ago and is racing toward the 450 ppm level.
He has written almost 30 books on the subject, including The End Of Nature in 1989 and Oil & Honey
in 2013. If you want to be fully informed on the topic of climate
change, the writings of Bill McKibben are the definitive source.In a piece for Rolling Stone dated December 1, 2017, McKibben penned these words, “The technology exists to combat climate change — what will it take to get our leaders to act?” As 2018 draws to a close, it is appropriate to examine his thesis and see what, if anything changed this year. McKibben started his Rolling Stone piece with these words:
“If we don’t win very quickly on
climate change, then we will never win. That’s the core truth about
global warming. It’s what makes it different from every other problem
our political systems have faced.
“I wrote the first book for a general
audience about climate change in 1989 – back when one had to search for
examples to help people understand what the ‘greenhouse effect’ would
feel like. We knew it was coming, but not how fast or how hard. And
because no one wanted to overestimate – because scientists by their
nature are conservative – each of the changes we’ve observed has taken
us somewhat by surprise. The surreal keeps becoming the commonplace.”
Watching The Arctic Melt
“[W]ith global warming, the fundamental equation is precisely what’s shifting. And the remarkable changes we’ve seen so far — the thawed Arctic that makes the Earth look profoundly different from outer space; the planet’s seawater turning 30 percent more acidic — are just the beginning. ‘We’re inching ever closer to committing to the melting of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which will guarantee 20 feet of sea-level rise,’ says Penn State’s Michael Mann, one of the planet’s foremost climatologists. ‘We don’t know where the ice-sheet collapse tipping point is, but we are dangerously close.'”As if to underscore Mann’s and McKibben’s warnings, on December 5, NASA posted a video on YouTube showing how the Arctic ice sheet has melted from September, 1984 through September, 2016. It’s pretty scary stuff. [To view the video, click here.]
