[Sosfbay-discuss] Environmental Economics and the Electorate

[Wes Rolley]

Dave Roberts at Grist Mill gets right to the heart of the problem in 
this post.  I would add to this that the Pacific Ocean off the West 
Coast of America has absorbed enough CO2 to raise the acidity level to 
the point where it can begin to dissolve and weaken oyster shells.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/29/105757/723

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Feel like you're just not depressed enough today? Read the last bit of 
this Dot Earth post 
<http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/nobel-winner-co2-going-to-1000-parts-per-million/>:

    During a break, I asked [Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Dr.
    F. Sherwood] Rowland two quick questions. The first: Given the
    nature of the climate and energy challenges, what is his best guess
    for the peak concentration of carbon dioxide? ...

    His answer? "1,000 parts per million," he said.

    My second question was, what will that look like?

    "I have no idea," Dr. Rowland said. He was not smiling. 

What will a planet with 1,000 ppm of CO2 in its atmosphere look like? 
Worldchanging runs an excerpt 
<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006386.html> from Peter Ward's 
/Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, 
and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future/ 
<http://astore.amazon.com/gristmagazine/detail/006113791X>, wherein he 
describes just such a world, which actually existed toward end of the 
Triassic period:

    Waves slowly lap on the quiet shore, slow-motion waves with the
    consistency of gelatin. Most of the shoreline is encrusted with
    rotting organic matter, silk-like swathes of bacterial slick now
    putrefying under the blazing sun ... [W]e look out on the surface of
    the great sea itself, and as far as the eye can see there is a
    mirrored flatness, an ocean without whitecaps. Yet that is not the
    biggest surprise. From shore to the horizon, there is but an
    unending purple color -- a vast, flat, oily purple. No fish break
    its surface, no birds or any other kind of flying creatures dip down
    looking for food. The purple color comes from vast concentrations of
    floating bacteria, for the oceans of Earth have all become covered
    with a hundred-foot thick veneer of purple and green bacterial soup.
    ...There is one final surprise. We look upward, to the sky. ... We
    are under a pale green sky, and it has the smell of death and
    poison. We have gone to Nevada of 200 million years ago only to
    arrive under the transparent atmospheric glass of a greenhouse
    extinction event, and it is poison, heat and mass death that are
    found in this greenhouse.

In other words: 1,000 ppm will look like the end of industrial 
civilization and possibly the human race.

*But hey, let's stay focused on the /real/ problem: high gas prices!*

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Now that last line will tell you much about the American Electorate that 
we have not yet convinced to "go Green."

-- 
"Anytime you have an opportunity to make things better and you don't, then you are wasting your time on this Earth" Roberto Clemente

Wes Rolley
17211 Quail Court, Morgan Hill, CA 95037
http://www.refpub.com/ -- Tel: 408.778.3024