Carbon Dioxide at 1000 ppm

I read a fascinating and short article today on the NYTimes DotEarth Blog. A prominent Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric scientist (he did the bulk of the early scientific work on the ozone hole) predicted soberly that carbon dioxide would hit 1000 ppm (parts per million) before humanity stabilized it.

The professor and one other Nobel Laureate colleague believe the civilizational challenge of fixing our multi-trillion dollar-sized energy and transportation networks and ending deforestation is going to be too slow a change to avoid this spike in carbon dioxide.

What would a world of 1000 ppm carbon dioxide be like? “I have no idea,” Dr. F. Sherwood Rowland said. He was not smiling.

1000 ppm CO2. That's 1 part per 1000 air molecules, roughly 4 times the highest concentration for the last million years, and twice the 450 ppm tipping point for environmental disasters to unfold. At the rate we are going, we could hit 1000 pm sometime around 2200.

Think what the climate was like when all the coal and oil was laid down in the ground: a world-wide tropical greenhouse with continents half-drowned by shallow seas and rain-forests growing in Alaska. Now put it on fast-forward: seas rising 10-50 meters, hurricanes putting an end to coastal cities, decadal droughts that empty entire regions, and a complete loss of all Arctic ice, and devastating damage to ecosystems around the world.

I don't often get Four Horseman about environmental problems; I believe our culture is narcissistic about its eventual end. But 1000 pm in less than 200 years? Realistically, there is a distinct possibility that billions will die from famine and disease, countries will collapse, and over 50% of the life on earth will go extinct. The climate will change so quickly that we may not be able to see the big blows coming, let alone adapt.

Crazy talk, you say. Push this globe hard enough, I say, and she will turn around on you. That's not politics--it's physics.