“Damn! I think we just passed the last exit for the Holocene!”
“I’m sorry, honey, I wasn’t looking.”
“We have to get off this highway. What’s the next exit?”
“It’s a long way ahead. Goes to somewhere called Perdition.”
That’s syndicated columnist Gwynne Dyer’s little allegory in The Salt Lake Tribune on where we are at with global warming. The Holocene has treated us well in the last 10,000 years or so. The civilisation project is coming along nicely and our numbers have increased about a thousandfold, many living with a degree of comfort and wealth simply unimaginable in the history of the species during the last ice age.
James Hansen, she writes, says we need to go in a different direction from that recommended by scientists to date. Tamino at Open Mind in his recent post on Hansen also points out that the Holocene has served us well, with CO2 levels “varying between about 260 and 285 ppmv (parts per million by volume)”. He quotes Hansen as saying:
“We’re toast if we don’t get on a very different path,” Hansen told The Associated Press. “This is the last chance.”
