{"id":17974,"date":"2016-02-18T13:19:15","date_gmt":"2016-02-18T18:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17974"},"modified":"2016-02-18T13:19:15","modified_gmt":"2016-02-18T18:19:15","slug":"tomgram-bill-mckibben-its-not-just-what-exxon-did-its-what-its-doing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=17974","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: Bill McKibben, It’s Not Just What Exxon Did, It’s What It’s Doing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Bill McKibben, It’s Not Just What Exxon Did, It’s What It’s Doing<\/a><\/h3>\n
The time scale should stagger you.\u00a0 Just imagine for a moment that what we humans do on this planet will last at least 10,000 more years, and no, I\u2019m not talking about those statues on Easter Island or the pyramids or the Great Wall of China or the Empire State Building.\u00a0 I\u2019m not talking about any of our monumental architectural-cum-artistic achievements.\u00a0 Ten thousand years from now all the monuments to our history may be forgotten ruins or simply obliterated, while what we\u2019re doing at this very moment that\u2019s truly ruinous may outlast us all. \u00a0I\u2019m thinking, of course, about the burning of fossil fuels and the sending of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) into the atmosphere.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s becoming clearer by the month that, if not brought under control relatively quickly, this process will alter the global environment in ways that will affect humanity and everything else living on this planet for what, from a human point of view, is eternity.<\/div>\n
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In essence, there\u2019s no backsies when it comes to climate change. \u00a0Once you\u2019ve begun the full-scale destabilization and melting of the\u00a0Greenland ice sheet<\/a>\u00a0and of the vast ice sheets in the\u00a0Antarctic<\/a>, for instance, the future inundation of coastal areas, including many of humanity\u2019s major cities, is a foregone conclusion somewhere down the line.\u00a0 In fact, a\u00a0recent study<\/a>, published in the journal\u00a0Nature Climate Change<\/em>\u00a0by 22 climate scientists, suggests that when it comes to the melting of ice sheets and the rise of seas and oceans, we\u2019re not just talking about how life will be changed on Planet Earth in 2100 or even 2200.\u00a0 We\u2019re potentially talking about what it will be like in 12,200, an expanse of time\u00a0twice as long<\/a>\u00a0as human history to date.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Bill McKibben, It’s Not Just What Exxon Did, It’s What It’s Doing The time scale should stagger you.\u00a0 Just imagine for a moment that what we humans do on this planet will last at least 10,000 more years, and no, I\u2019m not talking about those statues on Easter Island or the pyramids or the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[7013,3193,113,141,1004,4390,369,6462],"class_list":["post-17974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-bill-mckibben","tag-carbon-dioxide","tag-carbon-emissions","tag-climate-change","tag-co2","tag-exxon","tag-global-warming","tag-tomgram"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17974"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17975,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17974\/revisions\/17975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}