Take a Breath
Go ahead, do it now, take a breath. (It is free after all.) Breath the air in, and then out. That breath has 20% more carbon dioxide in it, than it did in 1960. Yes, 20% more.
This is personal. This is not a distant far away problem only for factory workers or occupants of large cities. The yearly measurements at Moana Loa, a high mountain peak in Hawaii, a place as remote from large factories and large cities as any place on Earth, represents the air of the entire world. But you don’t need to go to Moana Loa, you can easily measure the CO2 content of the air anywhere, even here at home.
Look at the Sky
Step outside for a moment and look up. The atmosphere is big. It extends to the horizon as far as you can see, and far beyond that, and it is hundreds of miles thick. That is a lot of air. In less than 60 years, that entire volume now has 20% more CO2 than it had 60 years ago — less than one lifetime. That is a lot of CO2.
Take another breath. This is collective. We are all breathing the same air. Selfish executives and their politicians say “the pollution will just blow away.” But there is no place “away” for it to blow. We have changed the chemical composition of the entire atmosphere at every spot on earth, even at the tops of remote mountains in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
There is a Limit
We can’t keep doing this forever. As vast as the atmosphere is, we have changed it significantly in less than a lifetime. Any sane person must conclude that we can not keep digging carbon from underground and simply burning it because it is a cheap source of energy. CO2 is at 410 ppm today, it was 320 ppm in 1960, and for most of the history of mankind it was around 280.
But, oh!, the endless debate on exactly how much further can we keep on polluting before we have to stop. Why do today what easily can be put off until tomorrow, or next year, at least until after I die and no longer care about it. Why stop at 410 ppm, we can take the Earth up to much higher levels just like millions of years ago. Sure, the Earth will do just fine with or without a breathable atmosphere, but those of us who live here have our limits. CO2 is absorbed into the ocean forming an acid that kills off life there, and ultimately our own food supply. It won’t kill all of humanity because we can move underground, breath out of oxygen tanks, turn vegetarian because after all, plants love CO2.
Take another breath. Any sane person will realize that there certainly must come a time when all of humankind learns to live sustainably. We have to balance the CO2 we put into the air, with CO2 we take out. We have to manage the atmosphere as if it was a critical life-giving but finite resource that we all share. We absolutely have to some day learn to live within our means, so that future generations can enjoy the same beautiful planet that we were lucky enough to grow up in. This is science, not politics.
This is Our Home
Imagine a house where a sewer pipe has broken, and raw sewage is collecting in the back yard. Do we fix the pipe today? After all, the backyard is a big place, and we don’t necessarily need to go out there. Tomorrow might be as good. In fact, why not wait a few years. It is not like sewage is a new thing. And it does not actually kill you right away, it is just a slight increase in catching a disease. We can clean it all up years from now so why worry? And maybe in a few years I will be dead and not have to do anything about it.
Take another breath. In just 30 years, half of the coral reefs in the world have been wiped out. Do we wait until we kill the other half? Do we owe ANYTHING to future generations? Some will argue that these oceans, these forests, these ecosystems are OURS to do what we like to them. Selfish bastards.
The Challenge
We have to change the habits of 7, maybe 8, billion people. We have to abandon traditions that go back thousands of years. This will be harder than putting a man on the moon. It is hard primarily because there are people with a business model that depends on continuing to pollute. Rich people. The oil industry, the richest industry in history, has a vested interest in keeping everyone polluting, because otherwise their bonuses will be diminished. There is a cost to cleaning up the pollution, but these people simply don’t want to have to do that. Every one of us has benefited from cheap energy of fossil fuels, but we have a habit of pointing at those other people who are so much worse at it than ourselves.
While we are at it, lets argue about those climate models, and how inaccurate they are. We can’t predict exactly how bad it will be, so let’s just keep on polluting and profiting from it. In 1953 leading scientists collaborated to publish a book called “Climatic Change” (Harlow Shapley, Harvard Press, ISBN 9780674367166) which outlined the effects of increasing CO2. While there might have been some disagreement 67 years ago, we have been living out the world predicted by this book. Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth also made predictions, and things have turned out pretty much like predicted. People can use politics to run a denial campaign and get the mob confused, but the basic trend is well understood and denied only by people with an agenda to keep on polluting. We know that money and greed is behind the ongoing pollution, and money is a powerful foe.
Your Part
Take a breath. Do you care about future generations? Do you care about the world that you pass to your children and their children and their children. Understand that corporate executives will claim that they have a duty to their shareholders to cut costs as much as possible even if this means polluting the world. Corporations have no soul, and no children, and no obligation to maintain the world. Politicians are in the pockets of the rich corporate donors. Currently the US government subsidizes the oil industry with billions of dollars of taxpayer money to encourage them to keep the flow of carbon coming. That must be turned around. The system must be changed to reward those who live sustainably, and to tax/punish those who pollute our air. It must be changed here, and it must be changed across the entire world. Take action today, and tell others, that the system must be changed.
Consider a tiny baby. Either crying out, or sleeping peacefully, each tiny breath has 20% more CO2 than two generations ago. We all breath the same air. What world will this baby grow up in while we continue to dump our waste CO2 into the air? When will we stop?