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Offsets - Hype Or Hope? Print E-mail
bridges vol. 15, Sept 2007 / Feature Article

by Joseph Romm


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antarctic_glaciers.jpg
Glaciers in Antarctica: Rapidly shrinking
The question of how significantly any strategy – including carbon offsets – can contribute to climate mitigation can be understood only with a full understanding of the scale of climate mitigation the nation and the world must pursue. Global concentrations of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, are rising at an accelerating rate in recent years, and are already higher than at any time in the past 3 million years. As recently as six years ago, most scientists thought that neither the Greenland nor the Antarctic ice sheets would contribute significantly to sea level rise by 2100, yet both ice sheets are already losing mass. This led Penn State climate scientist Richard Alley to note in May 2006, “The ice sheets seem to be shrinking 100 years ahead of schedule.”

Worse still, the oceans will continue reradiating heat into the earth's atmosphere even after we eliminate the heat imbalance, meaning the planet will keep warming and the glaciers keep melting for decades after we cut greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, we must act in an “anticipatory” fashion and reduce emissions long before climate change has finally become painfully obvious to everyone.

The planet has warmed about 0.8°C since the mid-19th century, primarily because of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Unless we sharply reverse the increase in global greenhouse gas emissions within the next decade, we will be committing the world to an additional 2° to 3°C warming by century's end, temperatures not seen for millions of years when Greenland and much of Antarctica were ice-free and sea levels were 80 feet higher.
How fast can the sea level rise? Following the last ice age, the world saw sustained melting that raised sea levels more than a foot a decade. NASA’s James Hansen – the country's leading climate scientist – believes we could see such a catastrophic melting rate within this century.

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