Last year, NASA climatologist Jim Hansen explained that atmospheric
carbon dioxide (CO2) needed to be reduced from 385 parts per million
(ppm) “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which
civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.”
Scientists have identified 350 ppm as the safe upper limit of CO2 in the
earth’s atmosphere, a number Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Terry Tempest
Williams and others have seized on in their support for the
environmental activist organization 350.org.
Reigning in carbon emissions won’t be easy as, McKibben pointed
out in The Nation,
but “We do have one thing going for us: this new tool the
web, which at least allows you to imagine something like a grassroots
global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for
sharing this number, for making people understand that ‘350’ stands for
a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.” Visit
350.org to learn more about the science behind this important figure and how you can get involved before the International Day of Climate Action on
October 24, 2009.
—Corbin Hiar
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