Atmospherics

Seeing the Al Gore movie, as I mentioned at the time, made me curious about the actual prospect of curbing global warming, given the persistence of CO2 in the atmosphere. A couple of evenings ago I looked up that three-part New Yorker series from last summer at the campus library, made copies, and read them in the music library while listening to late Mozart piano concertos on CD. Somehow I've never really gotten around to listening to Mozart's piano concertos.

Actually, I only read two of the articles. Part II ran in an issue the library hadn't properly catalogued, so I've got I and III. They were written by Elizabeth Kolbert (probably not pronounced to rhyme with "Colbert Report," unfortunately) and are portentiously titled "The Climate of Man." Part III is about future prospects. Therefrom, a basic outline:

• The current CO2 level in the atmosphere is about 380 ppm. This has increased from 360 ppm in the last ten years, and is trending towards 500 ppm by the 2050s. The pre-industrial revolution CO2 level was about 280 ppm.


• CO2 persists for about a century in the atmosphere.


• Under "business as usual," emissions are predicted to double in the next 50 years (from 7 billion metric tons of carbon per year to 14 billion). According to Kolbert's two main scientist sources (see below), an urgent social & governmental effort to curb emissions could stabilize emissions at today's level — 7 billion metric tons per year — by the mid-2050s.


• In terms of atmospheric CO2 concentration, the emissions-stabilizing goal more or less corresponds to keeping CO2 under 500 ppm. Atmospheric CO2 was last at 500 ppm around 50 million years ago.

So, if the question is whether we can reverse the warming effects we're observing today under 380 ppm of CO2, the answer would seem to be "no." It appears that the question is more about how drastic the changes turn out to be.

Also, the kind of urgent social & governmental effort they're talking about would have to be drastic, immediate, and legitimately difficult. Junking the Green Car may have been a constructive first step to stabilizing emissions trends, but it is not nearly enough.

I haven't read the following links yet, but here's more on Kolbert's two main sources: Princeton engineering prof Robert Socolow (see here, and for a PDF article about his "stabilization wedge" concept, here) and NYU physicist Marty Hoffert (long essay, again PDF, here).

I'll bring copies of the Kolbert articles to Rhode Island next week; they're worth reading, and written very well.

In terms of some more upbeat observations, the late Mozart piano concertos are extraordinarily lovely: graceful as Mozart always is and often almost as poignant as his Clarinet Concerto. (But not as poignant. That's an impossibly poignant piece of music right there.) Listen especially to the last movement of the Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K491.

Oh man, what a fabulous sound from 1786.