Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Why Obama and Cancún Miss the Point

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: At the edge of the holidays, as everyone suddenly launches that familiar, desperate search for the right gift at the last moment, let me recommend a few books that have featured prominently at the site this year: Andrew Bacevich’s bestselling Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (whose introductory chapter appeared here); the late Chalmers Johnson’s final great book in a remarkable career, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, significant parts of which were first written for TomDispatch; TD Associate Editor Nick Turse’s The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan, the only book out there making the case for getting out of the worst of all wars; Michelle Alexander’s sensational The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness; and Ann Jones’s powerful testament to women in the gun sights, War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War.

Two other books you don't want to miss: award-winning author John Dower’s newest work, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq, which contains at almost book length the single most brilliant history of terror bombing from World War II through 9/11 that will ever be written; and for those of you who live in the San Francisco Bay Area or, like me, simply miss it, Rebecca Solnit’s well reviewed delight of a new atlas, Infinite City.

And don’t forget my own new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, which has received superb reviews from both The Nation and American Conservative Magazine, a reminder of what a new world we’re actually in. If you’re interested in my past writing life, check out The End of Victory Culture, my idiosyncratic history of the Cold War (updated through the Bush era) which the inimitable Studs Terkel once called “as powerful as a Joe Louis jab to the solar plexus,” or my novel about my long-time work world of choice, The Last Days of Publishing, which all these years later couldn’t be less dated. And keep in mind that anything you buy after you’ve arrived at Amazon via one of TD’s book links will contribute a little money to this site at no extra cost to you. Tom]

At the moment, if you live in the American Midwest, where part of the roof of a football stadium just collapsed under the weight of a massive snowfall, or in Europe in the grips of a frigid cold spell, it may seem strange to be talking about warming, global or otherwise, no less vanishing ice. But the long-term trends seem ever clearer as 2010 threatens to be the warmest year on record. With the Midwest blizzarded in, it doesn’t seem as if melting ice should be the story of the hour and yet the ice-face of the planet is morphing and shrinking remarkably rapidly and global ice melt turns out to be -- if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor -- the canary in the mineshaft of climate change, and so a leading indicator of problems to come.

In the Himalayas, which contain the largest non-polar ice mass on the planet and whose run-off waters feed 10 major rivers in Asia, the glaciers are receding and scientists, according to expert Orville Schell, fear a “43% percent decrease in land mass covered with ice in these mountains by 2070”; in Argentina, a Greenpeace expedition has just presented evidence that the Ameghino glacier has receded by four kilometers in the past 80 years; of the 150 glaciers that existed in 1850 in what is now Montana’s Glacier National Park, only 25 remain today (and they, too, are melting away); in Greenland, where a 250-square-kilometer island of ice broke off a glacier this summer, fears about the “rapid disintegration” of the southern part of its vast ice sheet are rising; in the Arctic Sea, recent years have seen the rapid summertime melting of its year-round ice cover, leading toward seasonally ice-free waters; in northern Canada, Hudson Bay was basically ice-free this November, a historical oddity; and even in the Antarctic, covered with ice to a depth of up to three miles in some locations, the melting seems to have begun.

Beyond the vision of rising ocean waters inundating coastal areas (in or near which a significant portion of humanity lives), it’s hard even to take in what this means for us, other than increasingly severe weather and disruptions of every sort, potentially staggering migrations of destitute populations, and the sort of future possibilities that once were restricted to science fiction. It’s in this context that the just concluded global warming conference in Cancún, enmeshed as it was in the usual politics, has proven so expectably disappointing, as TomDispatch regular Bill McKibben indicates below. The author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, creator of the remarkable 350.org, and winner of the prestigious Puffin Prize, McKibben understands that while almost anything on this planet is theoretically negotiable, the rate of ice melt can’t be negotiated with glaciers, nor the rise in sea levels with the oceans of the planet. If only our politicians grasped the same. (To catch a TomCast audio interview in which McKibben discusses various kinds of global-warming denial, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom

Everything Is Negotiable, Except with Nature

You Can’t Bargain About Global Warming with Chemistry and Physics

By Bill McKibben The UN’s big climate conference ended Saturday in Cancún, with claims of modest victory. "The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine," said Tim Gore of Oxfam. “Not as rancorous as last year’s train wreck in Copenhagen,” wrote the Guardian. Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican foreign minister who brokered the final compromise, described it as "the best we could achieve at this point in a long process." The conference did indeed make progress on a few important issues: the outlines of financial aid for developing countries to help them deal with climate change, and some ideas on how to monitor greenhouse gas emissions in China and India. But it basically ignored the two crucial questions: How much carbon will we cut, and how fast? On those topics, one voice spoke more eloquently than all the 9,000 delegates, reporters, and activists gathered in Cancún. And he wasn’t even there. And he wasn’t even talking about climate.