The elevator speech (climate crisis)

From my Dot Earth posting:

A stalled-elevator speech is too improbable, but opportunities for a one-minute speech happen every day so that you can get in practice for a 40-story ride with someone influential:
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"Wouldn’t mind the bad weather so much except [time this for elevator liftoff] for that sinking feeling that the climate is shifting fast.

We’ve already had 50 years of more and more wildfires, and on every continent. Same thing for major floods. Probably windstorm damage as well. That’s climate change, not just bad weather moving around.

And it looks as if permanent drought is going to make the poor Mediterranean into a dust bowl. Same thing for Perth, Cape Town, and southern California. The tropics are expanding, just as the earliest climate models said they would.

Just imagine what will happen when all the students and young professionals finally realize that it’s their future that is being trashed.

And some of the changes, in retrospect, have been a sudden step up, the way worldwide drought stepped up during the big 1982 El Niño. Unusual dryness went from 15% of all land to 25% and stayed there. It has gone to 35% but come back down to 25. Maybe not, next time.

We’ve had three of those really big El Ninos now: 1972, 1982, 1997. At that rate, we’re about due for another.

And the real danger with a big one is fire. Judging by how dried-out the Amazon was at the end of the last mega-Nino, a longer one could kill off the rain forest, real fast. Our CO2 excess would pop up by 40% and our problems even more.

All that from just one event. And without all those leaves, the routine carbon emissions do 50% more damage each year. Nasty trend, real nasty even if we don’t get a uncontrollable runaway.

One thing clear from the climate models is that we don’t have a lot of time, with the next ten years being crucial. You don’t solve such a big problem quickly with new light bulbs.

We’ve got to act as we would on the eve of a great war, turning on a dime as we did in 1941. And the politicians who can pull this off are going to be heros, just like those guys that pulled off the American Revolution in 1776."

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Too bad I didn’t invent this speech in time to slip it into my book, out in April: Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change (University of Chicago Press, a mere $22.50).

William H. Calvin is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.
http://Global-Fever.org