Hertsgaard asserts that the response must include slashing carbon emissions and protecting vulnerable communities by constructing flood walls and hurricane-proof buildings.
The author recommends a “Green Apollo’’ project on a scale of President Kennedy’s Apollo mission to reach the moon. President Obama can become the “Abraham Lincoln of our time,’’ Hertsgaard suggests. Just as we remember Lincoln for abolishing slavery, we would remember Obama “for saving the world from climate catastrophe.’’
One cannot help but wonder whether one more book about global warming will make much of a difference. After all Thomas Friedman, Al Gore, Bill McKibben, and scores of other writers have long been sounding alarm bells that have been greeted with a collective yawn.
Most Americans are living in relative comfort and are not yet feeling the effects of global warming, Hertsgaard notes. The worst climate outcomes will affect poorer nations first. Two-thirds of Bangladesh, for example, is less than 16 feet above sea level, and if the ocean rises as predicted, more than 20 million people will have to move to escape incoming floods.
But that possible scenario brings up another sticky point. Although there is a scientific consensus that human activity is causing a dangerous warming of the atmosphere, there is considerable disagreement about the precise long-term outcome, Hertsgaard says. Sea levels could rise a few feet, or as much as 80 feet, depending on variables such as whether the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets melt.
Despite scientific consensus that the world may be heading toward a climate Armageddon if nothing is done to reverse the present course, Congress for the most part has buried its head in denial, under pressure from corporations reluctant to give up their fossil fuel addictions.
Hertsgaard concedes that climate science is evolving so fast that some of what he writes might soon be outdated.
