Back to the future.

(Another run at Steve Gardiner's Perfect Moral Storm,
   and perhaps A Way to a Way Forward.)
Up, Down. 

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Note:    Being crazy (but not clinically, and not given to violence) has its advantages, but generating useful opinions is not one of them, nor operational relationships &etc. I worked quite hard on this entry, but as I get ready to post it, I see how self-indulgent, superficial, and too-diffuse-to-be-of-use it really is. I would ditch it except I think 'Point #1' is solid (if unlikely to have much effect), and the criticism of Bill McKibben valid 'to a degree' and 'in a way'. So I am going to try (again) to change the direction of this blog (among other things). If any of you need anything or want support for some activity to shed light into the awful environmental predicament we are in, please call on me and I will answer as I am able to.

If you click on the thumbnail above-right you may enjoy a laugh with me - some fat old fellow with a sunburnt head outside of Peter Kent's (new and very secure) office in Thornhill, holding up a banner which conflates a number of issues (possibly not phrased in the most effective way except for the NGO involved) while giving the Tim DeChristopher salute :-) 

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Contents: Point #1, Point #1½, Dénouement, Way Forward, Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone.

The Book: A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change.
The Author: Stephen M. Gardiner, a professor at University of Washington (Seattle).

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There is something deeply unsatisfying about limiting one's response to the possible extinction of the human race to bearing witness - even if the species has devolved to nothing more than Homo grǽdum. But that's about the one sentence bottom-line jist of Steve Gardiner's A Perfect Moral Storm (by my lights).

[Even if your children and grandchildren write you off when you morph into a down-and-out curmudgeon, thus blurring or smudging some of the intergenerational gusto.]

Nonetheless, the idea that it is in the ethical dimension that the current environmental quandary primarily resides is so powerful as to be ... true. So I am having another run, the third or fourth, at this exceptional book.

In any collection of words around an issue there is an inevitable trimming of scope. The only exception I can think of is the KJV that runs (or tries to) from alpha to omega and back again, and look at how well we agree about that artefact (or even just consider the 'begats').

[Another, come to think of it, is Bucky's magnum opus - or magnum opera as the case may be - Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, but that one turns out to be almost entirely bogus.]

Steve Gardiner, an earnest and forthright investigator, performs two (or maybe 1½) major trimming operations in the first few paragraphs of Chapter 1.

In early readings I let them slide on by - but it is now becoming more ... poignant (please see the OED definition of 'quandary' and appreciate the phrases 'extreme perplexity' and 'great mental agitation or distress'). So I am putting them 'out there' in the hope that they are accidental rather than 'telling'. 

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The first is taking 'radical' abatement off the menu:

Possible responses to climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity (aka species extinction) &etc., in short 'the environmental crisis', fall onto a fairly short list (ordered from 'do what is necessary' to 'do nothing'): abatement, mitigation, adaptation, and a 'technological miracle' (and if you subscribe to any of the shades of this last nonsense you might just as well stop reading right now).

Here is the relevant paragraph (and the first sentence of the next):

One way of making this point vivid is to imagine an extreme case. Suppose that the president of the United States went on television tonight and said that he and other world leaders were declaring a global state of emergency and ordering an immediate radical cut in emissions (e.g., complete cessation, or an 80% cut). Such a cut would dramatically reduce the risks to future generations of catastrophic impacts from climate change. Still, the proposal is surely unreasonable and unethical. Since the global economic system — on which most people's way of life depends — is substantially driven by fossil fuels, an immediate radical cut in emissions would cause a social and economic catastrophe for current people. Since there is no way that the system could cope with an overnight change of this magnitude, such a policy would probably lead to mass starvation, rampant disease, and war. Civil society would collapse. Even it this did "solve" the climate problem for future generations, the moral objections to such an approach would be overwhelming.

The instant radical cut strategy is thus not discussed, and for good reason. ...

Cut to the chase:   The experience of Cuba from 1991 to about 1999, the so-called 'Special Period' (see the brief introduction at Wikipedia for a taste), simply and flat-out contradicts this premise.

Unless, that is, you posit a very clever and thorough cover-up of mass starvation and death perpetrated à la Ukranian Holodomor of Stalin or Great Leap Forward of Mao Zedong by the Castro brothers and their lying stinking pinko-commie politburo. But if this were the case I am sure the right-wing American establishment would be trumpetting it (which they are not).

QED. 

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The second (or 1½-th) is seeming to assume a Cap&Trade regime:

Here is a relevant bit (which happens to follow on directly from the first):

The instant radical cut strategy is thus not discussed, and for good reason. Nevertheless, the prospect raises important questions. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that such a cut would be what is best for future people. For example, suppose that it would be awful for those living through it, but that at some point later generations would be better off than under any alternative climate policy, and at least as well off as we are now. If such an option were available, the question would become: how far are current people entitled to inflict risks on the future in order to protect themselves? If the threat to the present were imminent and widespread social collapse, it seems that they are so entitled. But what if it were not? What if, instead, the cost facing the current generation were merely a slightly lower standard of living than they are currently used to? Moreover, what if this were necessary to save the future from a genuine catastrophe? The crucial thought here is that presumably at some point the interests of future people become so important, and those of current people relatively less so, that the balance tips to the future. This is relevant because a decision on where to set a global cap at a particular time implicitly answers the question of where we think this tipping point is. Of course, even without an explicit cap, our actual behavior — the emissions we allow at a particular time — also implicitly answers the question. At the time of writing, this answer is very strongly in our favor. Indeed, it suggests the view that our interests have absolute priority over the interests of the future: any interest of ours (however trivial) is sufficient to outweigh any interest of theirs (however serious).

Consider now the second main policy issue: once a global cap for a particular time is set, how do we decide how emissions are to be distributed under it? This is a very important question. ...

Not quite so clear-cut I'll admit.   Generally in this book he does try to stay away from specific policy recommendations. And assumptions may be made for many reasons - sometimes just to simplify (implicitly trim) further discussion of some part of the issue not deemed germane to the main 'thrust' (though even in this limited application they may go astray). What if avoiding specificity leads you into a cul-de-sac?

Take a careful look at Jim Hansen's ideas on carbon taxation - Fee&Dividend - and you may see at least that he sidesteps the necessity of an explicit cap. These ideas are laid out in Storms of My Grandchildren, Chapter 9 - An Honest, Effective Path: The Main Story (pages 205ff, ~7,000 words); and in this video presentation 'Why I must speak out about climate change' made at TED in March 2012, (20 minutes).

So. Not quite 'QED' perhaps, but pointed that way. In any event, important as a carbon tax is, it is part of the abatement in the first point above - it can be subsumed. 

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An Approximate Dénouement and mebbe A Way To A Way Forward:

It is our assumptions that do us in, and worst are those based on unstated cultural feelings we may not be very well aware of. All I know of Steve Gardiner is in his book: he's a lousy proof-reader (I will buy a copy of the paperback when it comes out just to see if any have been corrected.) ... the rest (except for the contents of the book) is just guessing ... but it is possible that he made some premature assumptions.

If Homo grǽdum cannot find a way out of the environmental trap it set for itself and then ran head-first straight into we are, in a word, cooked. If the only thing for people such as myself to do is bear witness then so be it - I will keep on about it until my last breath. (Even if the phrase 'bearing witness' does carry a sulphurous whiff of Christianity with it. Even if it might seem to imply such a nonsense as the existence of an adult somewhere in the room to whom we are bearing this witness for judgement or something.)

But IF there is more to be done than that - and I think there is (not 'hope there may be' or 'wish there were') - then let us winkle it out ASAP. Pitter patter, let's get at 'er.

In this very considerable speck that Steve Gardiner has made for us is a powerful idea, hugely powerful, and clues too - to finding a way to a way forward - regardless of a few questionable assumptions.

It's a start.

For an elementary exercise in 'the rudiments' you might try this: Who among whatever readers come this way is willing (or able or both) to stand up right now and state a clear and concise and unequivocal distinction between morality and ethics?

[Not me. Not quite.]

And yet we all use these words every day right? The question is: Do we have to depend upon 'experts'? Hire a consultant? Or is it possible for us to figgure it out among ourselves (the 'among' and the plural here are important)?

Any way forward will involve us speaking directly with one another, truthfully and so on, seeing each other in something like the way the good Samaritan saw the injured man in Luke 10:33 and in Ivan Illich's take on the story as recounted by Charles Taylor (the Canadian philosopher not the Liberian warlord) here.

[Full moon comin' up. It shines in my window from the south these nights, making light work   :-) ]

Be well. 

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This post is also a proposal, or a plea perhaps, to two colleagues whom I promised "some more-or-less careful and composed thoughts, some options, maybe a way to a way forward, for all of us." And while I can see the threads of that intention, tendencies in the mish-mash - probably just because I did write it after all - it could easily be so implicit & oblique as to be impenetrably opaque & obscure for y'all (i.o.o.o.).   So ... some possible planks of an operational platform as explicitly as I am able:

[Lest the biblical references become any kind of red herring - this is all entirely secular, non- (even anti-) theological. If you don't ignore the xenophobia in Matthew 10 for example, you may get confused (and join the Amish).]

0. Prerequisite:   Without a level of interaction, a mode of seeing something like that in Luke 10:33 & Ivan Illich I don't think there's anywhere to go at all. Language is ultimately about desire, will, and risk - either you want it or you don't, simple as that.   And, as they say: It takes (at least) two to tango.

 

1. Rebarbative:   Trying to describe this thing while downplaying doom & gloom is a silly and futile exercise in doublethink. Is there another way? Could Shakespeare be giving us a clue when he has Mercutio say: "And but one word with one of us? couple it with something; make it a word and a ..."? Not a blow surely, but there are other candidates, 'antidote' f'rinstance.

 

2. Kindness:   Welcome. Well [that you are] come. Bem vindo. Specially to those who obviously do not fit, the nutbars, the skeptics and fifteenth-rate sneerers, the silent, the shy; but explicitly to ALL COMERS.

 

3a. Generosity:   In particular generosity with information. Not the confusing (and ultimately parsimonious and self-serving) kind that comes from many of the pundits. Consider my question on numbers and units below - once you know that a petagram is a gigaton it becomes easier to think about the ~500 of 'em we have left to play with (or 250 more like). And in this culture that sometimes, often seems so full of wilful obfuscation, I call that generosity.

 

3b. Generosity:   Then there is generosity with time and attention: "Yes, I will take the time necessary to explain, and give you the attention you need to understand, and if it branches into apparently unrelated issues I will go there with you too as far as I can." One of the most effective tactics I have seen was a group of young people at Dundas Square with sandwich-boards that said "Do you have a question about Climate Change? Ask me!" (which does combine 3a & 3b).

 

4. Faith:   "The workman is worthy of his meat," says Matthew in 10:10. Every email I receive from Greenpeace and The Dogwood Initiative - and a holy host of others - is asking for a hand-out. And sure, they are all worthy of a donation without a doubt. But friends, the list just goes on and on and one becomes exhausted by it. On the other hand, there are those (like myself) with resources they only need to be asked for - except they must be asked in a certain way. We could talk about what that 'certain way' might be.

 

5. Positive Connections:   Every 'movement' necessarily involves the establishment of (mysteriously sticky) links between individuals doesn't it? That is the sine qua non is it not? And yet the agenda is almost always an hour of talking and away you go, or fifty minutes of talking and ten minutes of regimented 'questions from the floor' (and please be brief dammit!). Is not a more productive agenda ten minutes of talking, 30 minutes of no-holds-barred kibbitzing (in a physical environment suited to that activity), and 20 minutes of somehow bringing it together?

 

That's enough (or it is not). ... Maybe just one more bullet since I already mentioned risk (in point 0. above):

6. Risk:   A lot of stories come to mind, here are a few: 1. Grant Hadwin who put it all on the line (in a way that was guaranteed to be mistaken) and died for it. 2. Tim DeChristopher who did right and was swallowed up into the 'justice' system. 3. Jason Russell who visioned (I do not like this word but here it seems perfectly apt) such a thing as the Kony 2012 campaign, and was then betrayed by his own limitations and his colleagues' fear of the unvarnished truth. 4. Brigette DePape, Anjali Appadurai, Christina Ora, Severn Suzuki ... all of whom (and many more besides) so clearly and eloquently enunciated 'the truth' and then seemingly vanished, were somehow obscured, lost to view, swallowed up too? into some other thing? complacency? confusion? (I don't know, and I can't find out with this Internet thing. And why not? That's the real problem. Maybe there is a clue here, several clues.) 5. Those such as Arundhati Roy whose strident passionate hearts alienate so many of the weak and are to some extent marginalized because of it. 6. The saints who are gone: Irmã Dorothy, Zé Cláudio and Maria do Espirito Santo, many many many many nameless ones, Chico Mendes, Bahais in Iran ... Are there (there are!) such fools as to imagine either that these people set out to be martyrs? Or willingly accept it, as TS Eliot imagines Thomas Becket accepting his? Or who imagine that they still mysteriously 'speak' to us? They do not speak. They are dead, silent. We can do nothing 'for' them, and we can do nothing 'for them' - that kind of talk is pernicious nonsense. Oh yes, we can remember them, honour the memory of them, savour their stories, their histories and pass them on to the next generations - when it comes to avoiding mistakes knowing history is good.

(Keep in mind: The reason for going on about risk is ...?)

The other, more general risk is hopeful expectations. Not hope itself (though that argument is made by the likes of Derrick Jensen) but the instinctual hope that something you do will make some difference, measurable, however small. And of course, generally there is not even an echo. I am grappling with this one myself and have no answers. Obviously one can't go about doing things and 'not hoping' for some result - or maybe some can but that shade of craziness has not come to me yet. All I can do is give an example:   I met an activist the other night whom I've not seen in a while and when they greeted me they patted my shoulder, caressed me, um carininho. A physical contact. And that, as they say, lifted me, helped me out. You may think it speaks to my isolation that such a small thing would even register. Make of it what you will - if I go on and tell you that this activist is a beautiful young woman you will hare off and imagine that you know all about it eh? - and the rest of this as well, make of it all what you will.

 

And in a spirit of unrestrained kitchen-sink-ism here's something that always does it for me: Bob Marley's One Love interpreted by Playing For Change, a version with a 45 second introductory sermonette I happen to like but without Manu Chao, and another, more popular version with Manu Chao but also including some questionable (to me) 'packaging'.
[It has often been a despairing and disheartening and desperate and disappointing and depressing ride (d.d.d.d.d.) and at times a bitter and angry one since I gave up my seat on the plutocrat bus. And really, I am just noting it here so as not to forget one of those other moments, this one, when things do seem to begin to dovetail and fit together, "and for something like a second I'm cured and my heart is at ease." :-)

And the moment is immediately squandered trashing Bill McKibben? It upsets me. I didn't know how much until someone asked me what I thought of the Rolling Stone article ... and suddenly I was foaming at the mouth, 'veins in my teeth' ... SEND, click ... OOPsie!? In the thrall of powerful emotions. And it has been a week's climb back up out of that one. Oh well.] 

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Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone:

We can get started with the real work, or ... we can read Bill McKibben's latest in Rolling Stone: Global Warming's Terrifying New Math - Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe - and that make clear who the real enemy is.

The 'real' enemy is the fossil fuel industry. 'They' are doing 'it'. We stop 'em and then everything is hunky-dorey. Done like dinner! Right?

Any bells ringing yet?

Ok, read the thing, go and read every word. (For ease of reference I have posted it below, or if you like on a separate tab.) Have yourself a coffee or a single malt along the way - it's 6,000+ words. You can use CTRL+ if the text is too small to read comfortably.

Note that the overall structure is a Victorian Arch - like the novels of Thomas Hardy it begins and ends with similar images - in this case beginning a-and ending with scary weather stories.

[Well, and what's wrong with that?]

Humans talk about the weather all the time but it's a channel, a wavelength that is often no more than a carrier for the emotions and motivations of the moment, an entrée, a gambit. And yes, when the weather gets desperately bad we may come together to pick up the pieces, and when it is not quite desperate but close we may be filled with alarm, BUT when the silver lining shows up it is all behind us and soon forgotten.

And numbers ... Using 'new math' in the title may be a catchy rhetorical device, but how do you (personally) feel about the new math? How do you feel about numbers generally, or specifically about 565 and 2,795? Do those last two look familliar? They should, they are in the article - but even as I typed them again here I had to go back to check and be sure. How do you feel about purveyors of numbers? Statistics? The GDP?

What did you learn from this article that you will carry away?

How do you feel confidence-wise about purveyors of numbers who keep saying, "How good are these numbers? No one is insisting that they're exact ... they're generally right ... derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models ..." Feel any better? Any more confident? How do you feel about computers for that matter? Do you like them? Do they carry any moral weight? Do you know exactly what a 'computer model' is?

[Hey, waidaminit buddy! Wot's all this guff about feelin's? You tryin'a trick me?]

Ok, forget that then. Here, try this: see if you can repeat the carbon budget argument without looking back at the text. Just try. Why not? 565 gigatons. Is a gigaton the same as a gigatonne? How many are there in a giga? A million? 1,000,000? A billion? 1,000,000,000? A trillion? How many of those a year? How many years at 3% annual increase to double it? How much is up there now? Do you remember that? No, because he doesn't say. 

[Numbers and units:    I don't know why he didn't put it more simply in round numbers (see here):

The total 'budget', the total amount of CO₂ that can BE IN the atmosphere with a 50/50 shot of keeping warming (heating?) to 2°C is about one trillion tons, 1 teraton, 1,000 gigatons. We have already got about 500 gigatons (half of it) up there so there are about 500 gigatons left in the 'budget'.

The other unit that is often seen is PgC Petagrams of carbon: 1 petagram = 10¹⁵ (1,000 trillion) grams = 1 billion tons = 1 gigaton, or, to put it simply, petagrams and gigatons are the same.

See? Not really confusing and quite easy to remember too.

Any time I use a number above 100,000 the word 'about' is implicitly prefixed. These numbers beggar the human imagination. How long is a million seconds? Quickly without thinking! (about a dozen days).

And (while we're at it) how much is 1 ppm (part per million)? It's 1 gram in a million, or 1 gram in a ton - aka 'not very much' and a ppb (part per billion) is a thousand times less. One of the keys to understanding ppb is that a few ppb of endocrine disruptor in water is enough to change or muddle the sex of some fishes (!)

Some people will quibble over tons and metric tons (or tonnes) or otherwise get hung up in the great Metric/Imperial brouhaha. BUT    an Imperial ton of 2,240 pounds, is only about 2% heavier than a metric ton of 1,000 kilograms - which makes them close enough to 'the same' for the girls I go with. Even Wikipedia says, "For many purposes the Imperial and metric tons are so similar that it is not important to distinguish them."

QED.]

Let's come back to the 'They', to The Fossil Fuel Bad Guys.

What about smoking? Sex before marriage? Abortion? Cell-phone companies? Second-hand car salesmen? Insurance companies? Kiddy diddlers? Drunk drivers? Politicians? Casting the first stone? All clear on it are you?

How well did the 'War On Terror' turn out? Or the 'War On Drugs'? Any victory in sight yet? Does demonizing large numbers of people accomplish anything? Except maybe to benefit the (otherwise unemployable) airport workers and bureaucrats in the security services?

[Sorry, didn't mean to go and get all complicated on ya. Force you to think 'r nuthin'.]

Is there any sort of prescription in there at all Bill? Anywhere? Beyond hate the purveyors of fossil fuel? Shell Exxon BP, Rex Tillerson ...

[Oh yes! I hate them. I hate them! I HATE them!!]

Any bells ringing yet? A memory, say, of the 'moment of hate' at the beginning of the 1984 version of the movie Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Here, even adding this might redeem it to some degree (ready?):   What are we going to do? Well, for a start, print this article, carry it out into the street, to a park bench, find someone to talk it over with, listen to their opinions, agree to read it again and then meet again to discuss it some more. Get to know someone (better) over it.

Lame and unlikely I admit. In fact I did manage to get into one discussion that went through a couple of rounds, and I got to know someone better, and myself - so, it's ... possible at least. The point is that something has to be done to build community.

Instead I am left with unanswered questions:

Q1: Have you got anything to say about where to go from here?

and ... Q2: If the environmental movement has failed in the last two decades (since you wrote the first book on global warming) - or in the last fifty years as David Suzuki more accurately puts it - where did it go wrong? Or where did you go wrong? What can we all learn from those mistakes? What will you change in what you do from here on out? Nothing on that? Oh.

and ... Q3: You use the word 'moral' twice ('ethics' not at all): 1. "... realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell." and, 2. "But moral outrage just might – and that's the real meaning of this new math. It could, plausibly, give rise to a real movement."

This begs the question(s) (as they say), What is 'real' in this context? What might a 'real' movement look like? Nothing on that? Oh. (Or is there a 'real' buttton on Facebook now? Is that it Bill?)

Well   ... Bill ...   if this kind of threadbare self-serving feel-good (in a twisted sorta way being as it is entirely doom & gloom) vegepap were going to save us it would have done the trick ... already. Don't you think?    Eh?

In fact this article evokes uncanny echoes of your book Eaarth: one hundred pages of doom and gloom so dark that I (for one) found it difficult to read even knowing the material pretty well, followed by some airy-fairy nonsense about the 'Internet's gonna save us', and then ... nothing, no bottom line. Not'ing!



So.    How do you carry salt-fish to market? A yaffle at a time. What's a yaffle? A yaffle is a handful, it is what you can carry between your two hands. How much fish can you yaffle-up in a day? About 50 tons between three men (I know, I've done it).

As for how to get there from here? Well, I made a few suggestions above. 

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Global Warming's Terrifying New Math, Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone (August 2 Issue), July 19 2012.

Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe - and that make clear who the real enemy is:

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.

Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was "a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.

The First Number: 2° Celsius

If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate. The world's nations had gathered in the December gloom of the Danish capital for what a leading climate economist, Sir Nicholas Stern of Britain, called the "most important gathering since the Second World War, given what is at stake." As Danish energy minister Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the conference, declared at the time: "This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we get a new and better one. If ever."

In the event, of course, we missed it. Copenhagen failed spectacularly. Neither China nor the United States, which between them are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, was prepared to offer dramatic concessions, and so the conference drifted aimlessly for two weeks until world leaders jetted in for the final day. Amid considerable chaos, President Obama took the lead in drafting a face-saving "Copenhagen Accord" that fooled very few. Its purely voluntary agreements committed no one to anything, and even if countries signaled their intentions to cut carbon emissions, there was no enforcement mechanism. "Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight," an angry Greenpeace official declared, "with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport." Headline writers were equally brutal: COPENHAGEN: THE MUNICH OF OUR TIMES? asked one.

The accord did contain one important number, however. In Paragraph 1, it formally recognized "the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius." And in the very next paragraph, it declared that "we agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required... so as to hold the increase in global temperature below two degrees Celsius." By insisting on two degrees – about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit – the accord ratified positions taken earlier in 2009 by the G8, and the so-called Major Economies Forum. It was as conventional as conventional wisdom gets. The number first gained prominence, in fact, at a 1995 climate conference chaired by Angela Merkel, then the German minister of the environment and now the center-right chancellor of the nation.

Some context: So far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target. "Any number much above one degree involves a gamble," writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, "and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up." Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, puts it like this: "If we're seeing what we're seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much." NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet's most prominent climatologist, is even blunter: "The target that has been talked about in international negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster." At the Copenhagen summit, a spokesman for small island nations warned that many would not survive a two-degree rise: "Some countries will flat-out disappear." When delegates from developing nations were warned that two degrees would represent a "suicide pact" for drought-stricken Africa, many of them started chanting, "One degree, one Africa."

Despite such well-founded misgivings, political realism bested scientific data, and the world settled on the two-degree target – indeed, it's fair to say that it's the only thing about climate change the world has settled on. All told, 167 countries responsible for more than 87 percent of the world's carbon emissions have signed on to the Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two-degree target. Only a few dozen countries have rejected it, including Kuwait, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Even the United Arab Emirates, which makes most of its money exporting oil and gas, signed on. The official position of planet Earth at the moment is that we can't raise the temperature more than two degrees Celsius – it's become the bottomest of bottom lines. Two degrees.

[page 2]

The Second Number: 565 Gigatons

Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. ("Reasonable," in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.)

This idea of a global "carbon budget" emerged about a decade ago, as scientists began to calculate how much oil, coal and gas could still safely be burned. Since we've increased the Earth's temperature by 0.8 degrees so far, we're currently less than halfway to the target. But, in fact, computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere. That means we're already three-quarters of the way to the two-degree target.

How good are these numbers? No one is insisting that they're exact, but few dispute that they're generally right. The 565-gigaton figure was derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the latest climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Looking at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all," says Tom Wigley, an Australian climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "There's maybe 40 models in the data set now, compared with 20 before. But so far the numbers are pretty much the same. We're just fine-tuning things. I don't think much has changed over the last decade." William Collins, a senior climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agrees. "I think the results of this round of simulations will be quite similar," he says. "We're not getting any free lunch from additional understanding of the climate system."

We're not getting any free lunch from the world's economies, either. With only a single year's lull in 2009 at the height of the financial crisis, we've continued to pour record amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, year after year. In late May, the International Energy Agency published its latest figures – CO2 emissions last year rose to 31.6 gigatons, up 3.2 percent from the year before. America had a warm winter and converted more coal-fired power plants to natural gas, so its emissions fell slightly; China kept booming, so its carbon output (which recently surpassed the U.S.) rose 9.3 percent; the Japanese shut down their fleet of nukes post-Fukushima, so their emissions edged up 2.4 percent. "There have been efforts to use more renewable energy and improve energy efficiency," said Corinne Le Quéré, who runs England's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. "But what this shows is that so far the effects have been marginal." In fact, study after study predicts that carbon emissions will keep growing by roughly three percent a year – and at that rate, we'll blow through our 565-gigaton allowance in 16 years, around the time today's preschoolers will be graduating from high school. "The new data provide further evidence that the door to a two-degree trajectory is about to close," said Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist. In fact, he continued, "When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about six degrees." That's almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.

So, new data in hand, everyone at the Rio conference renewed their ritual calls for serious international action to move us back to a two-degree trajectory. The charade will continue in November, when the next Conference of the Parties (COP) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change convenes in Qatar. This will be COP 18 – COP 1 was held in Berlin in 1995, and since then the process has accomplished essentially nothing. Even scientists, who are notoriously reluctant to speak out, are slowly overcoming their natural preference to simply provide data. "The message has been consistent for close to 30 years now," Collins says with a wry laugh, "and we have the instrumentation and the computer power required to present the evidence in detail. If we choose to continue on our present course of action, it should be done with a full evaluation of the evidence the scientific community has presented." He pauses, suddenly conscious of being on the record. "I should say, a fuller evaluation of the evidence."

So far, though, such calls have had little effect. We're in the same position we've been in for a quarter-century: scientific warning followed by political inaction. Among scientists speaking off the record, disgusted candor is the rule. One senior scientist told me, "You know those new cigarette packs, where governments make them put a picture of someone with a hole in their throats? Gas pumps should have something like that."

The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons

This number is the scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a report in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks that climate change poses to their stock portfolios. The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it's the fossil fuel we're currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher.

The Carbon Tracker Initiative – led by James Leaton, an environmentalist who served as an adviser at the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers – combed through proprietary databases to figure out how much oil, gas and coal the world's major energy companies hold in reserve. The numbers aren't perfect – they don't fully reflect the recent surge in unconventional energy sources like shale gas, and they don't accurately reflect coal reserves, which are subject to less stringent reporting requirements than oil and gas. But for the biggest companies, the figures are quite exact: If you burned everything in the inventories of Russia's Lukoil and America's ExxonMobil, for instance, which lead the list of oil and gas companies, each would release more than 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it's already economically aboveground – it's figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It's why they've worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada's tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.

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If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today's market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren't exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won't necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can't have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That's how the story ends.

So far, as I said at the start, environmental efforts to tackle global warming have failed. The planet's emissions of carbon dioxide continue to soar, especially as developing countries emulate (and supplant) the industries of the West. Even in rich countries, small reductions in emissions offer no sign of the real break with the status quo we'd need to upend the iron logic of these three numbers. Germany is one of the only big countries that has actually tried hard to change its energy mix; on one sunny Saturday in late May, that northern-latitude nation generated nearly half its power from solar panels within its borders. That's a small miracle – and it demonstrates that we have the technology to solve our problems. But we lack the will. So far, Germany's the exception; the rule is ever more carbon.

This record of failure means we know a lot about what strategies don't work. Green groups, for instance, have spent a lot of time trying to change individual lifestyles: the iconic twisty light bulb has been installed by the millions, but so have a new generation of energy-sucking flatscreen TVs. Most of us are fundamentally ambivalent about going green: We like cheap flights to warm places, and we're certainly not going to give them up if everyone else is still taking them. Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself – it's as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition movement from slaveholders.

People perceive – correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2; by 2010, a poll found that "while recycling is widespread in America and 73 percent of those polled are paying bills online in order to save paper," only four percent had reduced their utility use and only three percent had purchased hybrid cars. Given a hundred years, you could conceivably change lifestyles enough to matter – but time is precisely what we lack.

A more efficient method, of course, would be to work through the political system, and environmentalists have tried that, too, with the same limited success. They've patiently lobbied leaders, trying to convince them of our peril and assuming that politicians would heed the warnings. Sometimes it has seemed to work. Barack Obama, for instance, campaigned more aggressively about climate change than any president before him – the night he won the nomination, he told supporters that his election would mark the moment "the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal." And he has achieved one significant change: a steady increase in the fuel efficiency mandated for automobiles. It's the kind of measure, adopted a quarter-century ago, that would have helped enormously. But in light of the numbers I've just described, it's obviously a very small start indeed.

At this point, effective action would require actually keeping most of the carbon the fossil-fuel industry wants to burn safely in the soil, not just changing slightly the speed at which it's burned. And there the president, apparently haunted by the still-echoing cry of "Drill, baby, drill," has gone out of his way to frack and mine. His secretary of interior, for instance, opened up a huge swath of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming for coal extraction: The total basin contains some 67.5 gigatons worth of carbon (or more than 10 percent of the available atmospheric space). He's doing the same thing with Arctic and offshore drilling; in fact, as he explained on the stump in March, "You have my word that we will keep drilling everywhere we can... That's a commitment that I make." The next day, in a yard full of oil pipe in Cushing, Oklahoma, the president promised to work on wind and solar energy but, at the same time, to speed up fossil-fuel development: "Producing more oil and gas here at home has been, and will continue to be, a critical part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy." That is, he's committed to finding even more stock to add to the 2,795-gigaton inventory of unburned carbon.

Sometimes the irony is almost Borat-scale obvious: In early June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled on a Norwegian research trawler to see firsthand the growing damage from climate change. "Many of the predictions about warming in the Arctic are being surpassed by the actual data," she said, describing the sight as "sobering." But the discussions she traveled to Scandinavia to have with other foreign ministers were mostly about how to make sure Western nations get their share of the estimated $9 trillion in oil (that's more than 90 billion barrels, or 37 gigatons of carbon) that will become accessible as the Arctic ice melts. Last month, the Obama administration indicated that it would give Shell permission to start drilling in sections of the Arctic.

Almost every government with deposits of hydrocarbons straddles the same divide. Canada, for instance, is a liberal democracy renowned for its internationalism – no wonder, then, that it signed on to the Kyoto treaty, promising to cut its carbon emissions substantially by 2012. But the rising price of oil suddenly made the tar sands of Alberta economically attractive – and since, as NASA climatologist James Hansen pointed out in May, they contain as much as 240 gigatons of carbon (or almost half of the available space if we take the 565 limit seriously), that meant Canada's commitment to Kyoto was nonsense. In December, the Canadian government withdrew from the treaty before it faced fines for failing to meet its commitments.

The same kind of hypocrisy applies across the ideological board: In his speech to the Copenhagen conference, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez quoted Rosa Luxemburg, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and "Christ the Redeemer," insisting that "climate change is undoubtedly the most devastating environmental problem of this century." But the next spring, in the Simon Bolivar Hall of the state-run oil company, he signed an agreement with a consortium of international players to develop the vast Orinoco tar sands as "the most significant engine for a comprehensive development of the entire territory and Venezuelan population." The Orinoco deposits are larger than Alberta's – taken together, they'd fill up the whole available atmospheric space.

So: the paths we have tried to tackle global warming have so far produced only gradual, halting shifts. A rapid, transformative change would require building a movement, and movements require enemies. As John F. Kennedy put it, "The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln." And enemies are what climate change has lacked.

But what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization. "Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to change those practices," says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate crisis. "But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It's what they do."

According to the Carbon Tracker report, if Exxon burns its current reserves, it would use up more than seven percent of the available atmospheric space between us and the risk of two degrees. BP is just behind, followed by the Russian firm Gazprom, then Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell, each of which would fill between three and four percent. Taken together, just these six firms, of the 200 listed in the Carbon Tracker report, would use up more than a quarter of the remaining two-degree budget. Severstal, the Russian mining giant, leads the list of coal companies, followed by firms like BHP Billiton and Peabody. The numbers are simply staggering – this industry, and this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they're planning to use it.

They're clearly cognizant of global warming – they employ some of the world's best scientists, after all, and they're bidding on all those oil leases made possible by the staggering melt of Arctic ice. And yet they relentlessly search for more hydrocarbons – in early March, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson told Wall Street analysts that the company plans to spend $37 billion a year through 2016 (about $100 million a day) searching for yet more oil and gas.

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There's not a more reckless man on the planet than Tillerson. Late last month, on the same day the Colorado fires reached their height, he told a New York audience that global warming is real, but dismissed it as an "engineering problem" that has "engineering solutions." Such as? "Changes to weather patterns that move crop-production areas around – we'll adapt to that." This in a week when Kentucky farmers were reporting that corn kernels were "aborting" in record heat, threatening a spike in global food prices. "The fear factor that people want to throw out there to say, 'We just have to stop this,' I do not accept," Tillerson said. Of course not – if he did accept it, he'd have to keep his reserves in the ground. Which would cost him money. It's not an engineering problem, in other words – it's a greed problem.

You could argue that this is simply in the nature of these companies – that having found a profitable vein, they're compelled to keep mining it, more like efficient automatons than people with free will. But as the Supreme Court has made clear, they are people of a sort. In fact, thanks to the size of its bankroll, the fossil-fuel industry has far more free will than the rest of us. These companies don't simply exist in a world whose hungers they fulfill – they help create the boundaries of that world.

Left to our own devices, citizens might decide to regulate carbon and stop short of the brink; according to a recent poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans would back an international agreement that cut carbon emissions 90 percent by 2050. But we aren't left to our own devices. The Koch brothers, for instance, have a combined wealth of $50 billion, meaning they trail only Bill Gates on the list of richest Americans. They've made most of their money in hydrocarbons, they know any system to regulate carbon would cut those profits, and they reportedly plan to lavish as much as $200 million on this year's elections. In 2009, for the first time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce surpassed both the Republican and Democratic National Committees on political spending; the following year, more than 90 percent of the Chamber's cash went to GOP candidates, many of whom deny the existence of global warming. Not long ago, the Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA urging the agency not to regulate carbon – should the world's scientists turn out to be right and the planet heats up, the Chamber advised, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we change our physiology seems right up there.

Environmentalists, understandably, have been loath to make the fossil-fuel industry their enemy, respecting its political power and hoping instead to convince these giants that they should turn away from coal, oil and gas and transform themselves more broadly into "energy companies." Sometimes that strategy appeared to be working – emphasis on appeared. Around the turn of the century, for instance, BP made a brief attempt to restyle itself as "Beyond Petroleum," adapting a logo that looked like the sun and sticking solar panels on some of its gas stations. But its investments in alternative energy were never more than a tiny fraction of its budget for hydrocarbon exploration, and after a few years, many of those were wound down as new CEOs insisted on returning to the company's "core business." In December, BP finally closed its solar division. Shell shut down its solar and wind efforts in 2009. The five biggest oil companies have made more than $1 trillion in profits since the millennium – there's simply too much money to be made on oil and gas and coal to go chasing after zephyrs and sunbeams.

Much of that profit stems from a single historical accident: Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free. Nobody else gets that break – if you own a restaurant, you have to pay someone to cart away your trash, since piling it in the street would breed rats. But the fossil-fuel industry is different, and for sound historical reasons: Until a quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous. But now that we understand that carbon is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, its price becomes the central issue.

If you put a price on carbon, through a direct tax or other methods, it would enlist markets in the fight against global warming. Once Exxon has to pay for the damage its carbon is doing to the atmosphere, the price of its products would rise. Consumers would get a strong signal to use less fossil fuel – every time they stopped at the pump, they'd be reminded that you don't need a semimilitary vehicle to go to the grocery store. The economic playing field would now be a level one for nonpolluting energy sources. And you could do it all without bankrupting citizens – a so-called "fee-and-dividend" scheme would put a hefty tax on coal and gas and oil, then simply divide up the proceeds, sending everyone in the country a check each month for their share of the added costs of carbon. By switching to cleaner energy sources, most people would actually come out ahead.

There's only one problem: Putting a price on carbon would reduce the profitability of the fossil-fuel industry. After all, the answer to the question "How high should the price of carbon be?" is "High enough to keep those carbon reserves that would take us past two degrees safely in the ground." The higher the price on carbon, the more of those reserves would be worthless. The fight, in the end, is about whether the industry will succeed in its fight to keep its special pollution break alive past the point of climate catastrophe, or whether, in the economists' parlance, we'll make them internalize those externalities.

It's not clear, of course, that the power of the fossil-fuel industry can be broken. The U.K. analysts who wrote the Carbon Tracker report and drew attention to these numbers had a relatively modest goal – they simply wanted to remind investors that climate change poses a very real risk to the stock prices of energy companies. Say something so big finally happens (a giant hurricane swamps Manhattan, a megadrought wipes out Midwest agriculture) that even the political power of the industry is inadequate to restrain legislators, who manage to regulate carbon. Suddenly those Chevron reserves would be a lot less valuable, and the stock would tank. Given that risk, the Carbon Tracker report warned investors to lessen their exposure, hedge it with some big plays in alternative energy.

"The regular process of economic evolution is that businesses are left with stranded assets all the time," says Nick Robins, who runs HSBC's Climate Change Centre. "Think of film cameras, or typewriters. The question is not whether this will happen. It will. Pension systems have been hit by the dot-com and credit crunch. They'll be hit by this." Still, it hasn't been easy to convince investors, who have shared in the oil industry's record profits. "The reason you get bubbles," sighs Leaton, "is that everyone thinks they're the best analyst – that they'll go to the edge of the cliff and then jump back when everyone else goes over."

So pure self-interest probably won't spark a transformative challenge to fossil fuel. But moral outrage just might – and that's the real meaning of this new math. It could, plausibly, give rise to a real movement.

Once, in recent corporate history, anger forced an industry to make basic changes. That was the campaign in the 1980s demanding divestment from companies doing business in South Africa. It rose first on college campuses and then spread to municipal and state governments; 155 campuses eventually divested, and by the end of the decade, more than 80 cities, 25 states and 19 counties had taken some form of binding economic action against companies connected to the apartheid regime. "The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century," as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, "but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure," especially from "the divestment movement of the 1980s."

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The fossil-fuel industry is obviously a tougher opponent, and even if you could force the hand of particular companies, you'd still have to figure out a strategy for dealing with all the sovereign nations that, in effect, act as fossil-fuel companies. But the link for college students is even more obvious in this case. If their college's endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won't have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree. (The same logic applies to the world's largest investors, pension funds, which are also theoretically interested in the future – that's when their members will "enjoy their retirement.") "Given the severity of the climate crisis, a comparable demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the planet would not only be appropriate but effective," says Bob Massie, a former anti-apartheid activist who helped found the Investor Network on Climate Risk. "The message is simple: We have had enough. We must sever the ties with those who profit from climate change – now."

Movements rarely have predictable outcomes. But any campaign that weakens the fossil-fuel industry's political standing clearly increases the chances of retiring its special breaks. Consider President Obama's signal achievement in the climate fight, the large increase he won in mileage requirements for cars. Scientists, environmentalists and engineers had advocated such policies for decades, but until Detroit came under severe financial pressure, it was politically powerful enough to fend them off. If people come to understand the cold, mathematical truth – that the fossil-fuel industry is systematically undermining the planet's physical systems – it might weaken it enough to matter politically. Exxon and their ilk might drop their opposition to a fee-and-dividend solution; they might even decide to become true energy companies, this time for real.

Even if such a campaign is possible, however, we may have waited too long to start it. To make a real difference – to keep us under a temperature increase of two degrees – you'd need to change carbon pricing in Washington, and then use that victory to leverage similar shifts around the world. At this point, what happens in the U.S. is most important for how it will influence China and India, where emissions are growing fastest. (In early June, researchers concluded that China has probably under-reported its emissions by up to 20 percent.) The three numbers I've described are daunting – they may define an essentially impossible future. But at least they provide intellectual clarity about the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. We know how much we can burn, and we know who's planning to burn more. Climate change operates on a geological scale and time frame, but it's not an impersonal force of nature; the more carefully you do the math, the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue; we have met the enemy and they is Shell.

Meanwhile the tide of numbers continues. The week after the Rio conference limped to its conclusion, Arctic sea ice hit the lowest level ever recorded for that date. Last month, on a single weekend, Tropical Storm Debby dumped more than 20 inches of rain on Florida – the earliest the season's fourth-named cyclone has ever arrived. At the same time, the largest fire in New Mexico history burned on, and the most destructive fire in Colorado's annals claimed 346 homes in Colorado Springs – breaking a record set the week before in Fort Collins. This month, scientists issued a new study concluding that global warming has dramatically increased the likelihood of severe heat and drought – days after a heat wave across the Plains and Midwest broke records that had stood since the Dust Bowl, threatening this year's harvest. You want a big number? In the course of this month, a quadrillion kernels of corn need to pollinate across the grain belt, something they can't do if temperatures remain off the charts. Just like us, our crops are adapted to the Holocene, the 11,000-year period of climatic stability we're now leaving... in the dust. 

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Down.