You Want Scale? We'll Give You Scale

Antarctica is losing ice. The rate of loss, according to researchers at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, who analyzed changes in the continent's gravitational pull, is around thirty-six cubic miles per year. (For comparison's sake, the city of Los Angeles uses about one-fifth of a cubic mile of water annually.) ... If the loss continues, it will mean that predictions for the rise in the sea level for the coming century are seriously understated.

--"Chilling," by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, March 20, 2006.

More Analogies We Wish We'd Thought of

There is a very broad consensus in the scientific community that global warming is under way. To the extent that there are conflicting views, they are usually over how exactly the process will play out ... To focus on the degree of disagreement rather on the degree of consensus, is, I think, fundamentally misguided. If ten people told you your house was on fire, you would call the fire department. You wouldn't really care whether some of them thought that the place would be incinerated in an hour and some of them thought it would take a whole day.

-- Q. & A., "A Planetary Problem," The New Yorker online, interview with Elizabeth Kolbert.

Analogies We Wish We'd Thought Of

Okay, so we all know, I think, that carbon emissions are killing ocean life incredibly rapidly, right? Policymakers, however, are still thinking in terms of "stabilizing" our emissions, rather than drastically reducing emissions, which appears to be the only choice if we hope to reverse global warming, or at least not worsen it.

Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at Stanford recently described going to Washington "to brief some members of Congress. 'I was asked, "What is the appropriate stabilization target for atmospheric CO2?"' he recalled. 'And I said, "Well, I think it's inappropriate to think in terms of stabilization targets. I think we should think in terms of emissions targets." And they said, "O.K., what's the appropriate emissions target?" And I said, "Zero."'

"'If you're talking about mugging little old ladies, you don't say, "What's our target for the rate of mugging little old ladies?" You say, "Mugging little old ladies is bad, and we're going to try to eliminate it." You recognize you might not be a hundred per cent successful, but your goal is to eliminate the mugging of little old ladies. And I think we need to eventually come around to looking at carbon-dioxide emissions the same way.'"

--"The Darkening Sea," by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 11/20/2006.

But Probably on the Money

In Elizabeth Kolbert's devastating three-part series on global warming, called "The Climate of Man," and published in 2005 in three successive issues of The New Yorker (which used to do a lot of serializing, by the way, and now almost never does), she quotes David Rind, from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies:

"We may say that we're more technologically able than earlier societies. But one thing about climate change is it's potentially geopolitically destabilizing. And we're not only more technologically able; we're more technologically able destructively as well. I think it's impossible to predict what will happen. I guess -- though I won't be around to see it -- I wouldn't be shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed." He paused. "That's sort of an extreme view."

--"The Climate of Man," The New Yorker, May 2, 2005, p. 71.

I highly recommend the series. It's no longer available online, though a few other shorter pieces by her on this topic are available at New Yorker dot com. She came out with a book this year, titled Field Notes from a Catastrophe. A Scientific American review of her book, posted on Amazon, says this of it:

The details are terrifying, and Kolbert's point of view is very clear, but there is no rhetoric of rant here. She is most directly editorial in the last sentence of the book, and by that point, she has built the case... For a friend of mine, Kolbert's New Yorker series was an awakening--the first time, she said, she really understood what was happening and why we must act.

Hear, hear.