DON'T SAY WE WEREN'T WARNED: "We now have evidence that the level of C[O.sub.2] and other greenhouse gases will, within just a few decades, equal those that caused the Permian extinction some 250,000,000 years ago when more than 95% of oceanic and 70% of terrestrial species died."(EYE ON ECOLOGY)

• Author: Erickson, George

IN 1866, a Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius estimated that doubling our Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide would raise global temperature by 9[degrees]F, which is why C[O.sub.2] is called a greenhouse gas. Some 90 years later, Charles Keeling, an American chemist and oceanographer, began to record the level of atmospheric C[O.sub.2] at Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory. Although Keeling proved that C[O.sub.2] levels were rising, his work drew little attention.

Acting like blankets, greenhouse gases limit how much of the Earth's heat can escape into space. If the blanket becomes too thin for too long, too much heat escapes, and an Ice Age follows. However, if it thickens excessively, too much heat is trapped, and the Earth develops a fever. (Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that our atmosphere is trapping almost twice as much heat as it did just 15 years ago.) If we give water vapor a rating of one, C[O.sub.2] would rate a five, but methane, which constitutes 90% of natural gas, initially is 80 times worse than C[O.sub.2], slowly becoming 20 times worse as it oxidizes to C[O.sub.2] and [H.sub.2]O, which takes decades.

Although carbon dioxide, on a molecule-to-molecule basis, is five times more potent a greenhouse gas than water, water vapor is a stronger accelerator of climate change than C[O.sub.2] because there is a lot more water vapor, and as the planet warms, even more is created.

That extra vapor traps additional heat, which raises ocean and land temperatures even higher. (In 2017, thousands of Europeans lost their lives due to a record-setting heat wave.)

In 2020, citing 6,000 scientific studies, the United Nations asserted that the world has 12 years to prevent a "climate change catastrophe."

For millions of years, our planet has been nurtured by a gassy comforter that, like Goldilocks' bed, has been just right. Those gases have served us well, varying only slightly while periodically providing nothing worse than a siring of harsh winters or abnormally hot summers before returning to normal. However, that has changed, and we are to blame.

Thanks to air bubbles trapped in ice from Greenland and Antarctica, we know that the level of atmospheric C[O.sub.2] has hovered near 280 parts per million (ppm) since the age of the dinosaurs. However, that number slowly began to rise about 250 years ago when the Industrial Revolution allowed us to burn increasing amounts of carbon. By 1950, atmospheric C[O.sub.2] levels had reached 300 ppm.

Alarmed at the increase, Bill McKibben, who concluded that atmospheric C[O.sub.2] must not exceed 350 ppm, formed 350.org and wrote his seminal 1989 book, The End of Nature, which failed to...