Many of you may have already seen this. Read it again.
Tom
Subj: Re: [CONS-SPST-GLOBALWARM-CHAIRS] Jerry Mahlman - Straight talk about
climate change
Date: 4/26/2006 7:53:46 AM Central Daylight Time
From: [log in to unmask] (Frank Leslie)
Sender: [log in to unmask] (Chp & Grp Global
Warming Energy Chairs)
Reply-to: <A HREF="mailto:[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]</A> (Chp & Grp Global
Warming Energy Chairs)
To: [log in to unmask]
There's a phrase in here that prompted me to think "witless living". What a
pithy term for the way many drift through life.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: Chp & Grp Global Warming Energy Chairs
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of
Darrell Clarke
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 6:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Jerry Mahlman - Straight talk about climate change
One of the best statements I've read on the seriousness we face. Yet a 75%
reduction in fossil fuel use is technically feasible today, without
expecting everyone to go back to living on farms (as if we all could). But
it also says what a huge goal we face to get there. And that should be our
goal!
Darrell
Angeles Chapter
------------------------
http://www.earthsky.org/shows/observingearth_interviews.php?id=49567 via
EnergyBulletin.net (see the original for illustrations)
Interview: Straight talk about climate change.
Jerry Mahlman on dealing with your grandkids' problem.
Posted: April 2006
Renowned climate scientist Jerry Mahlman is perhaps best known for the
"hockey stick, " a term he coined to describe a chart of temperature changes
over the last 1,000 years. Formerly the head of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid
Dynamics Laboratory, he's now a senior researcher at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research.
Mahlman has spent much of his life modeling how Earth's atmosphere responds
to the steady buildup of greenhouse gases. In 2007, he'll be a senior editor
of the assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the
latest science and consequesnces of Earth's warming climate. Mahlman spoke
with Earth & Sky's Jorge Salazar about what a warmer world could really mean
to you and me.
Salazar: People are becoming more aware of global warming. Can't we just
adjust our lifestyles a little and stop it from happening?
Mahlman: There's a colossal misperception that if you bike to work once a
week and recycle your garbage, then global warming will be fixed up. The
problem is that, even if everyone did that, the attempt to stop global
warming would fail by a factor of roughly 100.
For example, I was in Al Gore's office when he was vice-president. And he
asked me the question, "If we could hold the emissions of carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere constant, would global warming go away?"
And I said, "If you were to hold the emissions constant, you would get up to
eight times the carbon dioxide, or CO2, that there was before the Industrial
Revolution. You would still be in a heck of a mess."
Carbon dioxide results from burning fossil fuels, whether it's coal, oil,
natural gas, or even more exotic forms. And so we have this problem that our
population is increasing. Our demand for fossil fuels is increasing. You
just look at the United States, and the SUV-Hummer phenomenon, all happening
witlessly within the context of a problem that was identified very clearly
and quantifiably more than 25 years ago. In 1979, the National Academy of
Sciences essentially laid out why global warming is a problem*.
So this isn't a new thing.
That early knowledge about global warming has been backed up by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In that backing up, there have
been now three assessment reports presented to the world. Another one is
coming up. In fact, I'm the senior review editor for the final draft of that
report to the world that will come in 2007.
So all of this information has been put out there. The National Academy of
Sciences and others have written many, many things about this. And,
essentially, the governments of the world are choosing to do nothing. The
largest offenders are the United States of America and Australia. Both are
highly technical countries that have many gifts and much money and are not
choosing to address the problem in any way whatsoever. That's where we are.
I'll tell you one of the horrifying facts of global warming, and why it is
so inexorable. Suppose that you and I wanted - along with all the rest of
the people in the world - to cut down on CO2 emissions so that they would be
small enough to let us guarantee that the concentrations of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere next year, and the decade after, and the decade after,
would not go up any more.
What would be your guess as to how much we would have to reduce our per
capita consumption of fossil fuels to meet that goal? This is an intuitive
question for you.
Salazar: Well, what you've described sounds pretty serious. It's almost
something like a war on carbon emissions, and I'd imagine war rationing to
be, say, 50 percent of my consumption.
Mahlman: Well, it turns out that every person in the world would have to do
that, only twice as good as that. You'd have to cut it by 75 percent.
That's a horrific number if you think about everything that you do: whether
it's talking on the telephone, or diving our cars, or heating or cooling our
homes. Think of everything that's manufactured, energy used to extract
metals, for example. So the answer is 75 percent, if the entire world were
going to participate.
Salazar: So what does a 75 percent cut in personal emissions look like?
Mahlman: You would have to have a radical change in your lifestyle.
In other words, we're not taking the problem seriously, and if we did, we
would have a huge challenge making a dent into the problem. The system is
hard-wired to produce more and more carbon dioxide, and to a degree other
greenhouse gases, all of which are going into the atmosphere.
We need to be talking about what we're going to do to arrest global
warming - to keep it from happening, to keep it from warming - now. That's
the problem.
In fact, it's worse than I talk about, because suppose that we're able to
produce the miracle - the absolute miracle - of reducing 75% in our
emissions globally. Guess what? Over the next hundred years, the Earth would
warm up another degree Fahrenheit, even though we produced that miraculous
result.
So what we're really doing now is deferring all of the problem to the
generations that follow us. And they will not have much access to fossil
fuels, because we'll have used up most of them. They'll get all of the
garbage, in terms of the increased warming of the planet.
There are enormous intergeneration equity issues that are going on here,
right now. We get all of this dirt-cheap fossil fuel. We burn it all up, we
screw up the planet with greenhouse gases, warm up the planet, warm up the
ocean, and therefore have many manifestations that are negative. And
nobody's really talking about it.
The IPCC reports tell it all, and they consistently get ignored. The reason
they get ignored - and this is not warm and fuzzy to talk about - is that
it's really hard to do something about it in a relatively short period of
time, say over the next three decades. It's really, really hard.
Salazar: So how do we start talking about global warming?
Mahlman: It's very easy to focus on what regular people can do, but on the
other hand, regular people don't have their hands on the buttons that have
to be pushed in order to change the way that we produce goods and services
for all humans on Earth. That's the problem.
You've go to be able to begin to say, "What are the proactive actions that
you take?"
And the point is, that nobody's taking that seriously.
We've been on an energy binge. The binge will continue because of the
momentum. It's huge.
Now part of the problem is that when you start to put together education
programs, there's a barrier. Because the things that we scientists are
saying are so intolerable that there's actually incentives to ignore what
we're saying. I'm presenting the basic facts in a way that are almost never
reported in the media. And yet, you read the IPCC report. And there it is in
its stark form.
*Climate Research Board (1979) Carbon Dioxide and Climate: Scientific
Assessment, Washington, D.C., National Academy of Sciences, 22 pages.
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Subject: Re: [CONS-SPST-GLOBALWARM-CHAIRS] Jerry Mahlman - Straight talk
about climate change
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