Bill McKibben: it's time to freak out--and get to work

1Sky board member Bill McKibben has a must-read article in this month's Mother Jones called "The Most Important Number on Earth" that delivers a simple but strong message: it's time to freak out--and get to work.

Why is it time to "freak out"? Because according to the latest and most reliable science, we now have a hard number for the amount of carbon we can tolerate in our atmosphere beyond which it's unlikely we can keep the planet safe for our civilization. That's the number Bill calls the most important on Earth: 350, as in 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere:

Above 350, we are at constant risk of crossing other, even worse, thresholds, the ones that govern the reliability of monsoons, the availability of water from alpine glaciers, the acidification of the ocean, and, perhaps most spectacularly, the very level of the seas. It is at least conceivable that instead of a slow, steady rise in the height of the oceans, we could see rapid melt in Greenland and the West Antarctic, where much of the world's frozen water resides. We can't rule out, warns Hansen, a sea level rise of up to 20 feet this century. Plug that into Google Earth and watch waterfront developments turn into high-priced reefs. We can't rule out, in other words, the collapse of human society as we've known it.

I did plug it into Google Earth, and I have to say GE has never been less fun. You can try it yourself by following the instructions at the Google Earth blog. Here's a sample animation of the potential impacts of rising sea levels in Manhattan:

The significance of the 350 number can't be overstated. As Bill says, it means that we can't pivot our economy away from fossil fuels are the leisurely pace we once thought (and the fossil fuel industries still hope) we could. It means we have to overhaul everything much more quickly. It means a world-wide coordinating effort we haven't seen since World War II. That takes care of the "freak out" part.

As for the "get to work" part, Bill lays out a three-point agenda, two of which are at the core of the 1Sky Solutions (the third being massive investments in green jobs and clean energy):

• No more coal plants (and no wasting resources on the myth of clean coal);
  
  
• A cap on carbon emissions;
  
  
• An international agreement, including China and India, to do the same thing around the world.

Bill ends his piece with an uplifting riff on the power of the Internet to facilitate cooperation around the world to meet the climate challenge:

The list of things on which we've achieved a broad and deep global consensus is pretty much limited to...Coke Is It. And that took billions of dollars and several decades, and it involved inducing people to drink sugar water. The odds against a strong global movement about anything tougher than that are low, with language barriers, religious barriers, cultural barriers. And we start from such incredibly different places—Americans use 12 times the energy of sub-Saharan Africans.

And yet we do have this one tool that at least offers the possibility, a tool that wasn't fully there even a few years ago. The Internet—and its attendant technologies, like cell phones and texting—does link up most of the known world at this point. You can get pretty far back of beyond in most of the world, and someone in that village has a mobile.

Very soon, 1Sky will launch the Climate Precinct Captains program: a major effort to build a network of climate leaders covering all of the nearly 300,000 electoral precincts nationwide. It will be a great example of just the kind of possibility the Internet offers to mobilize the massive grassroots movement it will take to make real climate solutions a reality. Stay tuned for more details! And take a few minutes to read all of Bill's piece--it will be well worth your time.