Focusing on the work of some pioneering climate scientists and paleoclimatologists—Suki Manabe, Willi Dansgaard, Hans Oeschger, Ram Ramanathan, James Hansen, Wallace Broecker, Philip Heckel, and Chester Langway—Kicking the Carbon Habit builds a case that determined action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions is urgently required. The best-case prognosis, which is more or less a linear extrapolation from present-day trends and the best computer models, is that we will continue to see more flooding and droughts, violent storms, deterioration of crucial crop-growing regions, melting of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets as well as of tropical and subtropical glaciers, and extinction of species dependent on ecologies that are changing too rapidly for them to adapt.
The worst-case prognosis, given that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere already are at levels unprecedented in the last 700,000 years, is that there could be some kind of spontaneous reorganization of earth’s ocean-atmospheric systems, leading to changes as cataclysmic as those seen in the ice ages.
The United States owes it to itself and the rest of humanity to get in step with the global program to reduce global warming risks. Belatedly joining the Kyoto regime implies adoption of a program to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 20-25 percent as fast as possible. That in turn means that the country needs to discourage carbon-intense energy technologies, starting with coal, and encourage adoption of the zero-carbon and low-carbon technologies that are viable today—notably natural gas, wind, and nuclear.
That could be accomplished by means either of a cap-and-trade system imposed on the electricity sector and major industrial polluters or a stiff carbon fee. Putting a charge on carbon emissions has the advantage of discouraging all fossil fuels in the exact degree they aggravate the problem, while at the same time encouraging economy-wide conservation.
