Short Speech at 350 for 350 Rally on FDR Bridge

I am about to convey some sobering information, after I am done talking about 350.org and climate change, you may actually consider buying a boat. You being here is a step in the right direction and perhaps if we all do our part, it wont have to come to that.

Bill McKibben gets the credit for publicizing the safe level of 350 ppm of CO2. But the determination of the safe level of 350 ppm of CO2 came from Dr. James Hanson, who is our Nations' Chief Climatologist. He works in a part of NASA's Goddard Space Center in the division of Earth Sciences.

Since the late 1970s, Hanson has worked on computer simulations of the Earth's climate, for the purpose of understanding the human impact on global climate.

The basic proposition behind the climate change is so firmly rooted in science that no reasonable person can dispute it. All other things being equal, adding carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere—by, for example, burning millions of tons of oil, coal and natural gas—will make it warm up.

That is because CO2 is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun, which heats the planet during the day. But it is relatively opaque to infrared, which the earth tries to reradiate back into space at night.

This causes a kind of chain reaction - warmer temperatures drive more evaporation from the oceans; and the water vapor itself is a heat-trapping gas. Ice and snow reflect sunlight but when they melt, they leave exposed ground which absorbs more heat.

Hansen said that it is implausible that the shrinking of the ice sheets would take thousands of years. "If we follow business as usual, Hansen can't see how west Antarctica could survive a century. We are talking about a sea-level rise of at least a couple of meters this century."

In a paper released this January, Dr. Hanson wrote, “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 387 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

The most recent major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects a temperature rise of three degrees Celsius, plus or minus 1.5 degrees—enough to trigger serious impacts on human life from rising sea level, widespread drought, changes in weather patterns, and the like.

But according to Hansen and his nine co-authors, who have submitted their paper to Open Atmospheric Science Journal, the correct figure is closer to six degrees Celsius. “We won’t get there for a while, but that’s where we’re going.” And although the full impact of this temperature increase will not be felt until the end of this century, Hansen says, the point at which major climate disruption is inevitable and it is already upon us.

"If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice - that's a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster - a guaranteed disaster."

Unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause irreversible damage to the earth.

We should be listening to the nation’s leading authority on this subject, James Hanson - global warming is beyond the tipping point, we need to act fast to fix it.