Thom Hartmann - Why is 350 the most important number in the world?

Run time: 11:18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToK-73-KT7w   Posted on YouTube: September 12, 2009 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: September 12, 2009 By DU Member: thomhartmann Views on DU: 1256

 
The Thom Hartmann Program can be heard daily M-F 12-3pm ET. Visit www.thomhartmann.com to listen live, join the community or purchase a podcast.

and hoping to get the 25th off to see him in Ithaca. Rec'ing for those new to the Hartmann, you'll be glad you listened.

and to which the plants and animals that we eat are also adapted. Not to change the climate to the way it was when mammals were things that got squashed under the feet of huge reptiles. Ideally, we'd even keep human civilisation too, by not raising the sea level and flooding all the coastal cities.

That'd be nice, huh?

so, it's better not to increase the temperature ourselves. Since we have to reply on the crops we have to support billions, which we didn't before that time (and human life before then also tended towards nasty, brutish and short), aiming for anything else is playing Russian Roulette with all our cultures.

However, since there's no sign of that happening, that's an academic question. We're really thinking in terms of 'what happens in the next 1000 years', not the next 10,000 or more. When we've got things right at the shorter timescale, we can enlarge our horizons.

that we can stabilize at without incurring permanent environmental degradation of a magnitude to seriously threaten human society - meaning things like massive death, destruction, and conflict. The ultimate results of passing 350 could also result in species death on a massive scale - and that might pose more of an existential threat than the global war (involving nuclear armed nations) that might come from the huge population displacement and misery caused by rising sea levels and other more direct environmental impacts.

The above is according to thousands of scientists and highly educated experts.

Of course, we have already passed 350 (currently around 390), with no real indication of a turnaround.

I highly recommend to anyone reading this thread who is genuinely interested, watch or listen to the Teaching Company course "Earth's Changing Climate" with Professor Richard Wolfson. (It may be available from your library system - that's how I got it.) Lecture 6, where he describes how long it takes to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere and why, will scare the shit out of you. What McKibben (who I highly respect) and others don't want to talk about, is that we are already are in the mitigation phase. We've already lost the opportunity to avert disaster - UNLESS the scientists were wrong AND we manage to turn back before the number gets to the actual threshold. But they give 350 as the number because that's the consensus threshold.

In short, we're already f*cked, but we can either be more f*cked or less f*cked in the long term, depending whether we can turn this around.

Oh and your graphic is completely irrelevant, unless all you care about is the "survival" of the planetary object called Earth, without respect to whether any life at all, or certain species (like humans) survive. It also makes no sense to me because the only "logical" argument I've heard against taking action against global warming comes from fundamentalist Christians, who truly believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old, and that "God will take care of it". If you believe as they do, that God takes care of everything, that's a logical argument. But if you believe as they do, then the chart you posted is meaningless because the Earth hasn't been around that long.

is for everyone to plant trees and plant hemp. Hemp puts out more oxygen and uses a lot more carbon dioxide than an equal land mass of trees.
I don't understand why people don't get it.
Trees use the carbon dioxide and give us oxygen..Stop cutting the damned trees!!!! Plant more trees!
End these stupid laws that prohibit the growing of hemp. You cant get high on plain ol hemp and it is also a great cash crop that would create jobs.
duh...

from a talk you gave on your new book "Threshold"

but didn't realize til I heard him on your show, that Bill had built a 350 dot org, that people all over the world are tuning into to unite behind the urgency of getting back to 350.

Very exciting. I'll mark Oct 24th on my calendar. And visit www.350.org soon.

The smartest guy on radio!

Plant bamboo and it will gobble up huge amounts of CO2.