If you’ve been feeling depressed because you can’t get your anxieties prioritized–if you don’t know whether to worry first about the erosion of Chicago’s shoreline, Gorbachev’s domestic problems, or homelessness–cheer up. Global warming has come of age. It’s a kind of United Fund for angst: worry about it, and you don’t need to bother worrying about anything else.
After you regain consciousness, the question that instantly arises is: Do these guys know what they’re talking about? After all, at a greenhouse conference last June, the only statement the assembled mainstream climatologists could agree on was: “It is tempting to attribute [the 0.5 degrees C warming of the past 100 years] to the increase of greenhouse gases. Because of the natural variation of temperature, however, such an attribution cannot now be made with any degree of confidence.” Not exactly a call to arms.
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Since the 1950s, when scientists began monitoring carbon dioxide, its levels in the atmosphere have been rising. The amounts involved are tiny; even now, levels are only about 350 parts per million, up from the 280 ppm or thereabouts thought to have been typical for the last 10,000 years or so. Carbon dioxide is an inevitable by-product of the burning of fossil fuels, and the increase in the atmosphere seems to be strongly correlated with the increased pace of population growth and industrialization.
The scientific debate, simply put, boils down to three issues: Is it really getting warmer worldwide, or are the thermometers just in warm places? If it is getting warmer, is it happening unnaturally fast? Finally, are there natural mechanisms that will kick in and moderate the warming effect? Schneider answers all these questions, and he’s well-qualified to do it. He’s a climatologist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, founder and editor of the academic journal Climate Change, and author of several respectable science books for laypeople, including The Genesis Strategy and The Coevolution of Climate and Life. He’s also a frequent witness before congressional committees on atmospheric issues, which gives him special expertise in the field he calls “mediarology.”
Bill McKibben, staff writer for the New Yorker, denies us even that. His book, which was condensed in the magazine last fall, could serve as a case study in why, by and large, people don’t listen to prophets of doom. McKibben’s vision of the future is so dark that halfway through The End of Nature I stopped paying attention to what he was saying and started trying to figure out how he might be wrong and why he was trying to ruin my life.
Having diminished time, he sets about diminishing space. “To any one of us the earth is enormous, ‘infinite to our senses.’ . . . But from my house to the post office at the end of the road is a trip of about six and a half miles. . . . I’ve walked it in an hour and a half. If you turned that trip on its end it would take me a mile beyond the height of Mount Everest, past the point where the air is too thin to breathe without artificial assistance. Into that tight space, and the layer of ozone above it, is crammed all that is life and all that maintains life.”
