The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
The Holocene era is that blessed time of stable, warm climate (but not too hot) and unchanging sea levels in which human civilization was born and grew to its present size. In ten thousand years our numbers have increased about a thousandfold Ð but we may be about to leave the Holocene, and that would be too bad. No other climatic state would let us maintain our current numbers, and massive die-backs are no fun at all. James Hansen, the director of NASAÕs Goddard Space Flight Center in New York, is one of the most respected scientists working in the field of climate studies. It was his famous speech to the U.S. Congress 20 years ago that put climate change on the U.S. political agenda, and led indirectly to the Earth Summit and the Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Now he has something else to say. For most of the past decade, Hansen adhered to the emerging consensus among climate scientists that the maximum permissible concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 450 parts per million (ppm). That was believed to give us a 50 per cent chance of getting away with an average global temperature only 2 degrees C hotter than it was at the beginning of the 1990s. Now Hansen doesnÕt believe in 450 ppm any more. You can do a lot with climate models, but the Earth hasnÕt actually seen a carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration as high as 450 ppm since about 35 million years ago. So Hansen and some colleagues went to work on exactly that period, and came back with some bad news. If you leave the world at even 425 ppm for very long, all the ice will probably melt: Greenland, Antarctica, the lot. And the sea level will go up 240-270 ft. How do they know? Because the world was very hot and completely ice-free for a long time before 35 million years ago, but the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was falling gradually. When it reached 425 ppm, Antarctica began to freeze over. So if thatÕs where the first permanent ice appeared while CO2 was on the way down, itÕs probably where the last permanent ice will disappear when CO2 is on its way back up. Now, thereÕs a big margin of error when you are dealing with 35 million years ago: plus or minus 75 ppm, in this case. That means that the fatal number when all the ice disappears could be as high as 500 ppm Ð or it could be as low as 350 ppm. If that is the range within which all the worldÕs ice will eventually melt, and you like living in the Holocene, then you probably should not put all your money on a 450 ppm ceiling for CO2. So James Hansen is now spearheading a campaign to get 350 ppm recognized as the real long-term target we should be aiming at. Tricky, since we are already at 387 ppm and rising fast, but recently, when I spoke to him in Sweden, he explained: ÒTo figure out the optimum is going to take a while, but the fundamental thing about the 350 [ppm target], and the reason that it completely changes the ball-game, is precisely the fact that itÕs less than we have now.Ó ÒEven if the optimum turns out to be 325 or 300 or something else, weÕve go to go through 350 to get there. So we know the direction now that weÕve go to go, and itÕs fundamentally different. It means that we really have to start to act almost immediately. Even if we cut off coal emissions entirely, CO2 would still get up to at least 400, maybe 425, and then weÕre going to have to draw it down, and weÕre almost certainly going to have to do it within decades.Ó But there is time. The oceans and the ice-sheets react so slowly to changes in the air temperature that you can overshoot the limit for a while, so long as you get the temperature back down before irreversible changes set in. Stop at 450 ppm in 25 yearsÕ time, then get back below 400 in another 25, and down to 350 by, say, 2075. It could work: there is still one last exit for the Holocene.
