The NYT columnist Tom Friedman has another terrific global warming piece today, “Mother Nature’s Dow.” He is the only major national columnist or reporter consistently warning the public of what science now tells us is likely result of continuing on our current greenhouse gas emissions path — unmitigated unconscionable catastrophe. And he is the only one laying out the solution in detail. In this post I will endeavor to annotate his column for new and old readers who want more.
Friedman begins by noting, “I’m convinced that our current financial crisis is the product of both The Market and Mother Nature hitting the wall at once.” This piece is in some sense a sequel to his one from three weeks ago, see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?” He then lays out the climate realist position, noting:
If you follow climate science, what has been striking is how insistently some of the world’s best scientists have been warning — in just the past few months — that climate change is happening faster and will bring bigger changes quicker than we anticipated just a few years ago.
He cites two scientific sources:
- Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, whose extended views can be seen here.
- M.I.T.’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, whose full analysis can be seen here: M.I.T. joins climate realists, doubles its projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C.
For more sources on this climate realist position, see “An introduction to global warming impacts.”
Then he lays out the five key policies needed to avert this catastrophe, the “climate bailout.” He cites Hal Harvey, CEO of “a new $1 billion foundation, ClimateWorks, set up to accelerate the policy changes that can avoid climate catastrophe by taking climate policies from where they are working the best to the places where they are needed the most”:
NYT’s Tom Friedman updates the global warming threat and spells out the solution
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