Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

preface S xi
carbon footprint from 22 tons per person per year to 1–2 tons or
even less. But even then, “when this centuries-long climate storm
subsides, it will leave behind a new, warmer climate state that will
persist for thousands of years. That’s the basic outlook” (Archer,
2009, p. 45).
Even in the near term it is already too late, however, to avert
signifi cant disasters, and that is a diffi cult message to convey without
inducing paralysis or denial even among those willing to listen.
It is a great deal easier for all of us to hit the snooze button
on the alarm clock, go back to sleep, and hope that it all goes
away, or to pretend that dire circumstances present only opportunities.
Climate change presents opportunities for some, certainly,
but for the Tuvalu islanders, the victims of fl oods and droughts
and of larger hurricanes and typhoons, those living in low-lying
areas like Bangladesh, and the 150,000 who die each year in climate
change–driven weather events, the word “opportunity” has
a peculiarly hollow sound. It will as well for the 250,000,000 or
more climate refugees that the United Nations estimates will be
homeless by midcentury.
Through the coming decades and centuries of the bottleneck,
great leadership at all levels will be essential. We will need
leaders fi rst, with the courage to help the public understand and
face what will be increasingly diffi cult circumstances. The primary
cause is climate destabilization, described in four consensus
reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over
20 years and hundreds of other scientifi c reports. Often, however,
we dismiss bearers of bad news or inconvenient truths until the
point of crisis, when reality can no longer be evaded. The mythical
fi gure of Cassandra and the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah
were fated to be ignored until it was too late to avoid the dire
things they foretold. The same disbelief has greeted the increasingly
frequent and rigorous warnings in our time. One of the
earliest, for example, was issued by the Council on Environmental
Quality in the Carter administration and published in 1980 as the