The Catastrophe On Tour: Elizabeth Kolbert in Santa Fe

The usher kept warning ticket-holders to the Lensic Theater in downtown Santa Fe that the event was not likely to be an enjoyable experience. The host introduced the subject as an "obviously very non-comic topic." 

Finally, out marched Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker writer, Lannan fellow and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change (one of our Top Ten environmental books last year).  She promised not to take the time to convince her audience that global warming is real. Not in the Spring of 2008, she said, to a scattering of applause. Instead, she promised a snapshot of where we stand.  Cue "An Inconvenient Truth Lite," PowerPoint images of melting Arctic ice and graphs of CO2 emissions pushing 385 parts per million.  By most accounts it won't be long before  we're living in a very different world.  "Some people say," Kolbert said, "a different planet."

Kolbert spoke in unnervingly quiet and matter-of-fact tones about the stark realities of global climate change.  For example, that "we have already determined the climate for our children, and we are working on the climate for our grandchildren." That just to stabilize current greenhouse gas levels, we'd need to cut our emissions by 60 to 70 percent. That the Greenland Ice Sheet alone, fully melted, will raise the world's oceans by twenty feet. Nonetheless, global climate change is a problem whose solution can still be viewed as both a "moral obligation" and an "economic opportunity" for America. 

What to do about it? "The honest answer," Kolbert said, "is we need to do everything." Unfortunately, this is not how we like to solve problems. "We like silver bullets." But ecologists like to say that there are no silver bullets, "only silver buckshot."

From our archives, Bill McKibben agrees. He suggests we change in all sorts of ways right now to limit the warming.

Which leads me to the best question Kolbert asked the audience all night, "What exactly are we waiting for?"

--Matthew Fishbane

Comments

[Sun Tzu]

Everytime I read a Global Climate Change post, regardless of it leanings, I am stuck by this overwhelming notion that there are people who actually believe man can stop Global Climate Change. Even if we had the intellectual and physical capacity to do so, there would remain a nagging question: How would we know when we've actually stopped the change? I ask this question alot and rarely get a rationale answer. A rational way to address the question might be along the lines of the position of John A. Warden III in his Thinking Strategically About Global Climate Change . There is no doubt that achieving any sort of global consensus on an ideal climate would be difficult, but it might be useful to try!