From Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation’s climate correspondent:
They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an “Oh, sh*t” moment–an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself. Listening to the speeches, groundbreaking in their way, that President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao delivered September 22 at the UN Summit on Climate Change, I was reminded of my most recent “Oh, sh*t” moment.
It came in July, courtesy of the chief climate adviser to the German government. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known by its German acronym, WBGU, is a physicist whose specialty, fittingly, is chaos theory. Speaking to an invitation-only conference at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute, Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed Chancellor Angela Merkel about it. The study has now been published. If its conclusions are correct–and Schellnhuber ranks among the world’s half-dozen most eminent climate scientists–it has monumental implications for the pivotal meeting in December in Copenhagen, where world leaders will try to agree on reversing global warming.
Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues go a giant step beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose scientific reports are constrained because the world’s governments must approve their contents. The IPCC says that rich industrial countries must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 (from 1990 levels) if the world is to have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. By contrast, the WBGU study says the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020–i.e., quit carbon entirely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035, and the world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050. The study adds that big polluters can delay their day of reckoning by “buying” emissions rights from developing countries, a step the study estimates would extend some countries’ deadlines by a decade or so.
I think the whole thing’s pretty funny (Oh, I know, I know, climate change is no laughing matter!). This Hertsgaard guy writes that “they” say “everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an ‘Oh, sh*t’ moment” (O.S.M.). “They” really do say some fascinating things, don’t they? But, wait, Hertsgaard has apparently had several of these moments. The one he’s describing here is just his “most recent.” So the O.S.M. isn’t, in fact, an epiphany as he makes it sound. If it were an epiphany, there’d be only the one, because he’d “finally” get it. Instead, he keeps having these moments as if he forgets how Super Serious climate change is. My experience is that people who keep having the same epiphany over and over again are quite excitable. Indeed, you might even say they’re prone to panic and overstatement. Well, you might not say that, but I have it on excellent authority that They do.
And that would make sense given the rest of Hertsgaard’s jeremiad. The notion that some German study “proves” America must abolish all carbon emissions by 2020 is just ludicrous on its face, almost as ludicrous as the possibility that might happen. And just because it gave Hertsgaard another one of his apparently too-numerous-to-count Oh Sh*t Moments doesn’t have all that much persuasive power, I’m afraid to say.
That’s too bad because, warns Hertsgaard, only a “wartime mobilization” against the carbon enemy “might” save us from merely “the worst impacts of climate change.” “The alternative is more and more ‘Oh, sh*t’ moments for all of us.”
Oookay Francis.