Slate has published my reply to economist’s Steven Landsburg’s ill-informed hit-piece, “Save the Earth in Six Hard Questions: What Al Gore doesn’t understand about climate change.”

The editor wisely cut out some of my snarkier comments (Note to self: Slate is not Climate Progress!) but kept the title: “Save the Earth in Two Not-So-Hard Questions: What Steven Landsburg doesn’t understand about climate change” and the last paragraph:

Landsburg seems to believe that only economists can discuss climate change seriously, while the rest of us are wasting everyone’s time: “If you’re not talking about discount rates and levels of risk aversion, you’re blathering.” Landsburg’s piece proves that you can talk about those things and still be blathering.

I do have a serious point to make in the piece. There are two key questions that everyone in the climate change debate needs to answer:

1. How great a threat does inaction on climate change pose for future generations’ quality of life–and for life itself?
2. Will significant action on climate change require sacrificing our quality of life in any meaningful sense?

To see that the answer to the second question is a definite “no,” you need to define the threat in question 1, which I do at length in my book (and on Climate Progress) and briefly in the piece. My bottom line:

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The important new study, “Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks,” that we blogged on earlier is now available online (tip o’ the hat to John M). You can get the abstract here and download the full study here.

What carbon sinks are saturating? A recent and persistent increase in winds (photo, British Antarctic Survey) “over the Southern Ocean, caused by greenhouse gases and ozone depletion, has led to a release of stored CO2 into the atmosphere and is preventing further absorption of the greenhouse gas”(original Science article here).

Let me quote one key, sobering paragraph from the new study:

Growth in Atmospheric CO2. Global average atmospheric CO2 rose from 280 ppm at the start of the industrial revolution (circa 1750) to 381 ppm in 2006. The present concentration is the highest during the last 650,000 years and probably during the last 20 million years. The growth rate of global average atmospheric CO2 for 2000–2006 was 1.93 ppm. This rate is the highest since the beginning of continuous monitoring in 1959 and is a significant increase over growth rates in earlier decades: the average growth rates for the 1980s and the 1990s were 1.58 and 1.49 ppm respectively.

What is particularly novel about this Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper is that the authors provide the first quantitative explanation I have seen for this accelerated growth rate:

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No, the profile of famed scientist James Lovelock in Rolling Stone will not give you renewed hope about humanity’s fate in the face of global warming. It will make you — or Al Gore or James Hansen or even me — look optimistic by comparison:

Lovelock has come to an unsettling conclusion: The human race is doomed. “I wish I could be more hopeful”….

In Lovelock’s view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. “The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia,” Lovelock says. “How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable.” With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes — Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

By the end of the century, according to Lovelock, global warming will cause temperate zones like North America and Europe to heat up by fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, nearly double the likeliest predictions of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sanctioned body that includes the world’s top scientists. “Our future,” Lovelock writes, “is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.”

Doh!

But surely we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avoid this terrible, terrible fate. Lovelock says, no, it’s too late:

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