Must-read: ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math’

By Joe Romm on 24 July 2012

Climate Progress

“Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe — and that make clear who the real enemy is”

CO2 emissions by fossil fuels [1 ppm CO2 ~ 2.12 GtC, where ppm is parts per million of CO2 in air and GtC isgigatons of carbon] via Hansen. Significantly exceeding 450 ppm risks several severe and irreversible warming impacts. [Estimated reserves and potentially recoverable resources are from U.S. EIA (2011) and German Advisory Council on Global Change (2011). We are headed toward 800 to 1,000+ ppm, which represents the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it -- as the recent scientific literature makes chillingly clear.]

Climate hawk Bill McKibben has a terrific new piece in Rolling Stone, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”

It is getting monster social media numbers of the kind usually reserved for pieces on HuffPost about Kim Kardashian in a bikini: 66k FaceBook likes and an astounding 6300 retweets. That means millions of people have likely been exposed to at least the headline and probably some of the opening text:

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.