The Coming Greenhouse World

“Look. I’m going to do my best to end up in a kind of hopeful optimistic place. But – I am by nature, by sort of profession, I am kind of a professional bummer-outer of people. So we’re going to have to deal with that for a little while. Because there’s no use not. We need to figure out just where we are, in order to figure out where we need to go.”

Yes, it's ugly being Green these days. That was Bill McKibben, opening a speech in Colorado, touring with his new book "Eaarth", the post-Copenhagen capitulation to a new and damaged planet. Download the whole speech as an mp3 from our Climate 2010 page.

I'm Alex Smith. This is Radio Ecoshock, where reality becomes the new horror genre.

Not the oil blowing into the Gulf of Mexico. Not the BP dispersants, the largest chemical experiment on the ocean, ever. Not even the phony permits, non-existent backup plans, the cover-up.

The real unreported tragedy: nobody gets this story. Humans now know they are shifting the climate toward a Greenhouse world. We just had the hottest January to April global temperatures ever recorded. Over 200 scientists just put out a warning, that press didn't bother to print.

And yet the Green champions in the Senate still brought out a bill calling for more offshore drilling. The Canadian government still approves even deeper wells on the East Coast, drilling now as you hear this, with even less hope of recovery from an accident. And they want to do it in the Arctic, on the West Coast.

The shame, we say, is that we didn't get a chance to burn all that oil, to send the carbon into the atmosphere, where some will fall back into the ocean anyway, into the Gulf of Mexico, and all oceans, turning them acidic, killing off life at the basis of the food chain.

Nobody wants to say, if we cared for our children and grandchildren at all, if we cared about the world, we would stop all oil exploration, anywhere, today. Call it off! The atmosphere can't take another drop hauled out from under the sea, from under the land, from the Tar.

We will all drive away from this accident, as though the Greenhouse world isn't coming, arriving slow and almost unstoppable, visible and denied.

In this Radio Ecoshock special on the coming Greenhouse World, I'll interview Melanie Lenart, a scientist from the University of Arizona, and author of the intriguing new book "Life in the Hothouse - How A Living Planet Survives Climate Change."

Plus clips from a new speech by Professor George Kennedy from the University of California, Riverside. Title: "What Awaits Us In the Greenhouse World" (transcribed in the full blog entry below).

And I'll review a book "The Cretaceous World" - the time of the dinosaurs - which may give us a clue where we are heading next.

READ MORE (with loads of links)