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Measurement began in February 1958. Within two years his instruments showed that the world's store of airborne carbon dioxide had increased in that period from about 313 parts per million to about 315 parts per million. Keeling worked on Mauna Loa from 1958 until his death in 2005, during which time the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air rose to 380 parts per million. Combined with the work by Revelle and Suess, Keeling's meticulous, d..
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Charles C. Mann |
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To their dismay, DeConto and Pollard had realized that Antarctica might be more vulnerable than previously thought. Increasing temperatures would attack the ice in two ways: warmer air would melt it from above, forming pools on the surface, and warming ocean currents would eat at the underside of the sheet, creating large cracks. The pools on the surface could drain through the cracks, widening them and splitting the ice sheet into unstable..
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Charles C. Mann |
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For a geophysicist, what's going on is stunning," my friend told me. "We used to believe these systems needed thousands of years to make these shifts. Instead it's happening so fast that it's terrifying. Conceivably, you could start seeing truly bad effects in a hundred years."
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Charles C. Mann |
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And this is one of the great difficulties in thinking about climate change: what seems terrifyingly fast on the geological scale is unfathomably long on the human scale. By "truly bad effects" DeConto meant flooded coasts, vanished islands, awful droughts, and, maybe, storms of unprecedented power. But even if these occur in the time he fears--even if they transpire in the geologically insignificant span of a century--they will not be seen ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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On the one hand, forcing other people to clean up our mess violates basic notions of fairness. On the other hand, actually preventing climate-change problems would require societies today to make investments, some of them costly, to benefit people in the faraway future. It's like asking teenagers to save for their grandchildren's retirement. Or, maybe, for somebody else's grandchildren. Not many would do it.
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Charles C. Mann |
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Intuitively, I am hard-pressed to believe that most people would endorse the notion that the future of humankind is worth no more than a single apartment. Chichilnisky, a major figure in the IPCC, has argued that this kind of thinking about discount rates is not only ridiculous but immoral; it exalts a "dictatorship of the present" over the future. Economists could retort that people say they value the future, but don't act like it, even wh..
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Charles C. Mann |
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The belief that human life will continue, even if we ourselves die, is one of the underpinnings of society.
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Charles C. Mann |
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Logically speaking, the desolation in Children of Men is peculiar. As Scheffler points out, all people have known from childhood that they will die. As individuals, we have no long-term future. Personal extinction is guaranteed. But this tragedy--one that will be directly experienced by every single man, woman, and child--provokes no public alarm. No tabloid has ever blared the headline, "All 7.3 Billion of Us to Vanish Within Decades." Our..
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Charles C. Mann |
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What this suggests is that, contrary to economists, the discount rate accounts for only part of our relationship to the future. People are concerned about future generations. Even if the logic is hard to parse, they think that humanity's fate is worth more than an apartment.
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Charles C. Mann |
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In the middle, where most people spend their days, it is hard to distinguish morally between positions. It is easy to disparage people who think only of their family or neighborhood. But higher up the ladder is not necessarily better--think of the numberless instances where people, genuinely believing that they are acting for the benefit of larger entities, have ended up doing awful things. Would the world have been better off if the soldie..
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Charles C. Mann |
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Climate scientists encountered Lorenz's ideas in 1965, when he gave the keynote address at a conference in Colorado called "The Causes of Climate Change," the first big scientific gathering devoted to the subject. As he described the instability he had uncovered, his audience made the connection with carbon dioxide. Conference organizer Roger Revelle, who had been skeptical, was persuaded. If small changes in initial conditions could have e..
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Charles C. Mann |
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Geoengineering may reduce temperatures globally, but there will still be local losers and winners--places that experience too much or too little rainfall, places subject to sudden temperature extremes. And no matter how much sulfur dioxide humankind throws into the heavens, the carbon dioxide will remain; to counteract the ever-increasing total, more sulfur must be launched into the air every year. Indeed, stopping it suddenly would be disa..
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Charles C. Mann |