I know I feel warm.

I don't often write about global warming but I decided to give it a go after listening to this story on NPR. I was listening to it while getting ready for work and it scared the boogers out of me.

Below you'll find the my eco-article concerning climate change followed by the websites of the news stories I reference. Let's discuss!

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Ideas Driving Climate Change Salvation
Becky Haltermon, Boone County Solid Waste Education Coordinator
February 2009

I just got back from Columbus.

It’s a solid two hour drive from the Columbus suburb my boyfriend now calls home to my desk here in Burlington and it is a drive I imagine I’ll making quite often in the coming months. Like I said, my boyfriend now officially resides in Columbus. Talk about an inconvenient truth.

Two hours is a lot of time and if you’ve ever piloted a vehicle up I-71, you know that there isn’t a whole lot of landscape to divert your mind while on the road. Perhaps that’s why, after wondering why I drive my loved ones to relocate to remote Ohio towns, I began to ponder the inexorable evil of global warming.

Climate change is not a topic I broach lightly. A Pew Research Center poll in January found that global warming ranks dead last in a list of priorities people want our new president to deal with. We want the leader of the free world to wrangle tax cuts and tackle the deficit before he tries to save the planet and I understand that. It’s hard to worry about the plight of polar bears when your mortgage lender is breathing down your neck.

At the same time, we’re facing a climactic catastrophe that could make the current recession pale by comparison. Under the upbeat headline, “Climate Change is Coming No Matter What We Do,” Steve Graham reports that according to Heinz Center senior scholar Dennis Ojima, Ph.D, “The latest data shows actual carbon emissions exceeding the most extreme scenarios envisioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading world agency on global warming.”

Robert Correll, another Heinz Center bearer of unhappy news told NPR that even if the US and other leading greenhouse gas emitters meet their extremely ambitious goals for pollution reduction, it won’t solve our problems. “Absolutely not so,” Correll intones.

The report goes on to say that to stave off major planetary decimation, we’d need about a five percent reduction in carbon emissions from industrialized countries and a stabilization of the CO2 pollution rates for the rest of the world. Just in case you think that that sounds doable, Correll wants you to know that, “Five percent per year is huge!”

This reduction could cost tens of trillions of dollars over time and would require the cooperation of all of the industrialized world. “This is sort of a wake-up call,” Correll explains. No kidding.

Lest you suggest that I give in to a doom and gloom scenario, I confess that I’m not building an ark just yet. One reason is because our nation’s new energy secretary, Stephen Chu, is also a little upbeat. Last year, he told NPR that he is, “actually optimistic,” about reducing energy consumption in the US. “With new tech coming online,” he says, “and things that one hopes to develop, the goal is not to say: 'OK, everybody uses less energy, don't heat your homes, don't light your homes, don't use AC.'” Don’t drive to Columbus. “That is not the goal. The goal is to have a standard of living that is carbon neutral and works well with the world. And I think it's possible.”

Dan Sarewitz of the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes based at Arizona State University also refuses to throw in the towel. "The idea,” he told NPR, “is to take the political heat off of climate change and instead move this into the realm of policy wonkdom where many many small decisions made across many agencies, many types of policies, many domains, set the conditions for moving in the right direction without demanding that people accept that this is the most important problem in the world."

So the next time I hop in my small silver sedan on an extended trek to see my man, maybe I could try to see if those gray clouds crowding the sky above the interstate have a silver lining.

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That quote from Secretary of Energy Stehpen Chu was culled from this NPR article.

Climate Change is Coming No Matter What We Do can be found here.

This is the article that features Robert Correll and Dan Sarewitz.

Here is that Pew Research Center poll.

You can learn more about the Heinz Center here.

Whew.