I stopped worrying too much about global warming a few years ago because it seemed like finally everyone was worrying about it and therefore something was going to be done about it and therefore I didn't need to worry. It kind of fell out of the news there for a while, too, and there were terrorists and wars to worry about and I had real life to worry about. I figured the scientists had global warming covered and the politicians were coming around and everything was going to be fine.
But Bill McKibben's recent article, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math, scared me. And pissed me off. How dare he write 5 pages of words and numbers that are supposed to add up to "The sky is falling! Do something!" but not include a single informative graphic? The article is trying to be terrifying but ends up being stupifying. People — real people with jobs and kids and lives to deal with — cannot read that crap and get anything meaningful out of it.
Do you know the story of the Challenger launch? Not the one where it blew up and everyone was shocked. No. I mean the one where the engineers knew the very cold temperatures that day were going to make the launch a catastrophe but couldn't explain that clearly enough to the people who could have stopped it.
And that's the problem with climate change. Honestly curious, because I'm not a climate scientist and I've pretty much always just accepted "global warming is scary!" because that's the message I've gotten my whole life, I went googling for some basic information after reading McKibben's article. I figured it's such a big deal and so many people have been so concerned about communicating it for so long that there have to be some really great infographics and stuff out there.
But no. Most of what I found was either extremely vague pronouncements in the media, or super technical stuff with lots of numbers and chemistry lessons and caveats. Numbers are thrown around that are meaningless to me and to most other normal people. Billions of metric tons. Parts per million. One hundred thousand years. Two degrees celsius.
And THERE's the other problem. Two degrees? Wait, I understand two degrees! Two degrees is nothing! Even if two degrees celsius is 3.4 degrees fahrenheit... I mean, I've fought over a 2 degree difference on the thermostat, but it's still hard to get too freaked out by 2 measely little degrees, right?
But it turns out, two degrees (we're already about half way there, by the way) is quite a lot when we're talking about long term shifts in the global average temperature instead of daily shifts in the temperature of a living room.
One or two degrees, according to NASA, defined the Little Ice Age! Just one or two degrees and glaciers were shoving Swiss farmers off their land, New York Harbor was freezing solid, and crops were failing, killing a tenth of the population in European countries through starvation. (thanks, Wikipedia)
And there's plenty of reason to think that we'll be up more than 2 degrees by the end of this century. I won't be here, but my kids might. And I hope their kids will be.
So, two degrees is actually a big f-ing deal.
But let's not leave it at that. Let's take just a minute to look into the parts-per-million thing and the gigatons of carbon dioxide thing, since I went to all the trouble of filtering this stuff out of the Internet and firing up my calculator.
First of all, the most shocking news in the McKibben article comes from a recent report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative, which looks at the oil and coal industries from the dispassionate perspective of investment banking. Let's look at how much coal and oil and gas is on the books, ready to be dug or sucked out of the ground, they say. And let's see how that compares to how much we can stand to burn before the world becomes something utterly different.
Oh, yes, let's. See, there's this number that people have come up with. That number is 565 gigatons. Supposedly, we can pump another 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and still have some hope of staying within 2 degrees of change.
But, get this. The various coal, oil, and gas producers have already found and accounted for 2,795 gigatons of carbon dioxide. It's worth $27 billion to them and that's what the Carbon Tracker Initiative is concerned about because that's a lot of money being counted before it's made off of burning a lot of stuff that we can't actually burn because...
Well. What the heck is a gigaton??? Giga sounds big. Ton sounds heavy. But carbon dioxide sounds light. Invisible. Hardly measurable. Right?
Ok, but it turns out it isn't that complicated, afterall. The atmosphere is made up of a bunch of different gases (I'm partial to oxygen, myself) and gases are made up of molecules and — guess what! — you can count molecules. So we can measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that way. Corral a million molecules of air and count how many of them are carbon dioxide molecules.
And here, thankfully, the numbers become nice and normal again, something you can actually wrap your head around. Because for the past 100,000 years, which is quite a bit longer than the entire existence of humans (I always have to look that up), the atmosphere has been between 270 and 290 ppm carbon dioxide (that's "parts per million", meaning 270 to 290 carbon dioxide molecules in every hunk of a million random molecules).
Until the Industrial Revolution started. Since then, we've burned a lot of carbon and that's put a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
We're now at 394 ppm.
Woah. I was pretty shocked to find that. You mean, the entire existence of humankind we've been at 270 to 290 and now we're at 394??? That sounds like an awfully big change already. That sounds kind of scary.
So, what about the 565 Gigatons they say we can still put into the air?
That would take us to 459 ppm.
And 2,795?
That would be 745.
Humans have only ever lived with 270 to 290 and now we're well on our way to 459? And somebody's already counted the $27 billion they're going to make by pushing us to 745?
I'm not a scientist. But those are numbers I can wrap my head around. Those are numbers most of us can wrap our heads around, I'd say. So, scientists, stop confusing us with gigatons and stop trying to scare us with 2 silly little degrees, and start showing us 270 climbing to 394, heading for 459 and threatening 745. Maybe something like this:

You know the craziest thing? According to an investment analyst, the coal and oil and gas companies are still spending $100 billion dollars a year looking for more. How about for starters we make that stop? How far to a wind, solar, geothermal future would $100 billion dollars a year get us?