This is one to read carefully, save and pass on to others. Today’s New York Times has excellent coverage of the damage; all of which reifies McKibben’s understanding and passionate plea. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30
Ed
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/29/bill_mckibben_will_hurricane_irene_be
Bill McKibben: Will Hurricane Irene Be a Wake-Up Call about Climate Change?
Democracy Now
August 29, 2011
Amy Goodman: Hurricane Irene received a massive amount of media coverage, but television reports made little or no reference to the role global warming played in the storm. We speak with someone with his eye on climate change and its impact. "We’ve had not only this extraordinary flooding, but on the same day that Hurricane Irene was coming down,
While they talked about Hurricane Irene, what about global warming?
NBC ACTION NEWS: People up and down the East Coast are preparing for the worst, as Hurricane Irene approaches. This morning, President Obama announced all indications point to this being a historic hurricane.
SCOTT PELLEY: Hurricane Irene is moving in, and people along the East Coast are moving out. The first watches and warnings went up today for what could be the most powerful hurricane to hit the East Coast in seven years.
ANTHONY MASON: This is a CBS News hurricane update. I’m Anthony Mason. Irene is nearing
JIM SCIUTTO: The hurricane is still several hours away from landfall here, but we’re already feeling the strength of the storm, the winds gusting about 50 miles an hour. There are times when you really have to hold on here.
ALI VELSHI: CNN
WOLF BLITZER: In
AMY GOODMAN: Wall-to-wall coverage of Hurricane Irene. And yet, who talked about global warming? One person that has made this a central tenet of his work is Bill McKibben, a
Bill, we welcome you to Democracy Now! As you listen to your governor, Governor Shumlin in
BILL McKIBBEN: Hey, Amy. It was very good to hear Governor Shumlin. And, of course, it’s unbelievably hard not to be home. My town is taking a beating. The town next door,
AMY GOODMAN: We did not hear those words, "global warming." I watched a lot of the media coverage this weekend. What about this? I mean, to say the least, there was time in the endless coverage.
BILL McKIBBEN: Yes. First of all, here’s what’s going on. I mean, I wrote the first book about climate change 22 years ago. And I should begin by saying, there’s very little satisfaction in saying, "I told you so." We knew then enough to predict exactly what was going to happen. And climatologists, 22 years ago, were saying, this is what to look forward to.
The basic physical property here is that warm air holds more water vapor than cold. You can get stronger storms. The atmosphere is about four percent wetter than it was 40 years ago. That’s an enormous change in a basic physical parameter. It loads the dice for both drought, as you’re getting increased evaporation, and deluge and downpour and flood. And that’s what we’re seeing all over the planet. You remember the pictures from
It’s, on the one hand, entirely predictable and, on the other hand, the greatest sort of series wake-up calls that we could possibly be getting. So far this year—it’s only August—so far this year, the
One, as Governor Shumlin says, is figure out how we protect places against trouble that we can no longer completely prevent. We’ve already raised the temperature of the planet a degree. That’s not going away. The scientists tell us there’s another degree in the pipeline that’s coming at us from carbon we’ve already emitted. So that’s job one.
Job two, equally important, is stop pouring more into the atmosphere. And that’s why I think that message is getting through. I was worried that Hurricane Irene would slow down these protests that have been building in
AMY GOODMAN: Explain. In the last few weeks, we’ve experienced earthquakes, which many scientists say are not related to climate change—
BILL McKIBBEN: Not related.
AMY GOODMAN: —and I’d like to get your view on that.
BILL McKIBBEN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And then we move right to this unprecedented hurricanes. And again, for people to understand how hurricanes work, and why, for example,
BILL McKIBBEN: Floods worse than 1927, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And so many of—so much was wiped out at that time, that a lot of time you can trace 80 years to what we saw in Vermont in 1930, what was it, 1938 and 1927—
BILL McKIBBEN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —the great hurricane, these two great disasters.
BILL McKIBBEN: We’re in unprecedented, off-the-charts territory. It’s not that there haven’t been disasters before. There have always been disasters. Nature is relatively random in that sense. But now we’re seeing two things. One, disasters that go beyond the bounds of what we’ve ever seen before. Because there’s more water in the atmosphere, it’s possible to have bigger floods, record snowfalls when it’s cold, record rainstorms. And we’re seeing more of them in conjunction. I mean, think about what’s been going on just on this continent this year. We’re about one-and-a-half percent of the surface area of the globe in the continental
It doesn’t mean that everything that happens is caused by global warming. Hurricanes aren’t caused by global warming. They’re caused by tropical waves drifting off the coast of
Earthquakes, with rare exceptions, are not climate-related. There is reason to think that in certain localized places, earthquakes are now resulting from some of this kind of fracking, attempts to get oil and gas out of the ground through unconventional means. And in
Everything else bears our thumbprint now, and the only way to deal with that is to quickly get off coal and gas and oil. We’re not, at the moment, in our Congress, you know, prepared to do that. That’s why it’s good news that, at the very least, President Obama can keep us from getting in any deeper. Without even asking Congress, he can veto this Keystone pipeline thing and prevent us from taking the next step into the brave new world of unconventional energy.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill McKibben, finally, the State Department ruling, why so many are being arrested in
BILL McKIBBEN: Yeah. This pipeline goes to the second-largest pool of carbon on the planet, the tar sands of
That’s why hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people have been arrested here. This protest at TarSandsAction.org has taken off in ways that we couldn’t have expected when we started a week ago. It’s turned into something very, very large. All the environmental groups said last week that this was now the premier challenge on the environment for President Obama between now and the election. And they said, we expect nothing less than his veto, which he can do without even asking Congress. There’s never been a purer test of whether or not we’re prepared to stand up to climate change or not. I’m going back down to the White House this morning. There will be more than a hundred people arrested, on and on and on for the next few days, right through September 3rd. We hope that people will join us at TarSandsAction.org.
This has, sort of unexpectedly, spiked into the biggest thing of its kind in a very long time, and that should be very good news. Part of the way that we react to traumas like Irene is to figure out how to prevent them from happening. I’m eating away at me not to be in
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much for being with us, Bill McKibben, in
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