Today is Earth Day, a day to focus on the environment and our increasingly damaged biosphere.  Folks will be blogging about it, kids doing projects in schools, big public events, beach clean-ups, etc. That’s all good, but not enough. The news on the earth is not good, and getting worse. Singing fun songs and putting in compact fluorescent light bulbs isn’t going to do it.  We need to move to a post-carbon economy as fast as possible.

Australian bushfires. (REUTERS/Mick Tsikas)

Following climate science for several years can get depressing, as every worst case scenario turns out to not be bad enough.  The catastrophic changes are coming faster and harder than expected, bigger hurricanes, faster glacier melting, collapsing ice sheets, massive bush fires in Australia, etc. It isn’t taking 100 years to see the changes–we’re seeing them now. Meanwhile, the oil companies and their enablers have spent millions confusing the issue and introducing doubt about the anthropogenic causes of climate change, while pumping millions of years worth of carbon sequestered in the earth’s crust into the atmosphere.  They’ve been very successful at introducing false doubt, as today Treehugger reports that only 35% of US voters believe global warming is caused by human activity.

I’ve been struggling to understand why people cannot get their head around the science, or doubt that introducing gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere wouldn’t have an impact on the climate. Even with most Americans’ scientific illiteracy and the successful campaign by the oil and coal companies to confuse the issue, why do so many people not accept anthropogenic climate change?  I’m beginning to think that it may be psychological–along the lines of the stages of grief when someone finds out they have a terminal disease.  The first stage is denial.  One psychiatrist has addressed this, as well as her profession’s responsibility:

Our Moral Obligation to Act

As practitioners we help people to face reality. We chip away at their denial knowing it can be a cover for behaviors that destroy their lives. When they see the world more clearly, we urge them to take charge – warning of the dangers of being passive…

Lethal global overheating – strike the innocuous sounding “global warming” – is not something that may happen in the next century or even mid-century – it is happening now.

Scientists aren’t helping, as pointed out in this from the Guardian:

Far from over-playing their hand to swell their research coffers, scientists have been toning down their message in an attempt to avoid public despair and inaction.

Just 7% of the 261 experts surveyed (200 of whom were researchers in climate science or related fields) said they thought governments would succeed in restricting global warming to 2C. Nearly two-fifths thought this target was impossible and 46% thought a 3 to 4C rise by the end of the century was most likely.

A 3 or 4C rise might not sound much but the climatic shifts accompanying it would be massive. At 3C one to four billion extra people would face water shortages and 150 to 550 million more people would be at risk of hunger. With an extra degree of warming on top of that, seven million to 300 million would be put at risk of coastal flooding due to sea level rise.

As usual, Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a great post up I would encourage you to read, Let’s Dump “Earth Day”:

Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves

With 6.5 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable. But if we warm significantly more than 2°C from pre-industrial levels — and especially if we warm more than 4°C, as would be all but inevitable if we keep on our current emissions path for much longer — then the environment and climate that made modern human civilization possible will be ruined, probably for hundreds of years (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).  And that means misery for many if not most of the next 10 to 20 billion people to walk the planet…

We have fiddled like Nero for far too long to save the whole earth or all of its species. Now we need a World War II scale effort just to cut our losses and save what matters most. So let’s call it Triage Day. And if worse comes to worst — yes, if worse comes to worst — at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.

We’re poorly adapted as a species to responding to slow moving threats with a long time horizon and no immediate impact on us.  We need to move beyond “Earth Day” and kids singing the Earth Day Rap to real changes, real movement, and a full-on effort to avert disaster.  Just ask an Aussie who got burned out in the fires last month.

If you’re interested in the science, the two best blogs are Climate Progress and Real Climate, both written by some of the top scientific experts on climate.  Dig into the links, especially the posts and links to the evidence for climate change and current revisions on how fast things are happening.

Just so this post isn’t all bad news, I’ll end on a light note with a great look at marketing Earth Day to kids: