Reply To: Global warming is well underway

[Martin W]

Interesting interview transcript on Alternet; includes Bill McKibben of http://www.stepitup2007.org saying:

Quote:

[re the wildfires now raging across parts of California:] This is the kind of disaster that we see more and more of as we begin to change the basic physics and chemistry of the planet we live on. One of the people leading the really brave rescue effort out there yesterday said, one of the San Diego authorities said, this is the driest it’s been in at least ninety years. It’s dry because they’ve had terrific heat and not much rain. And those are just the conditions for that part of the world that all the modeling suggests come about when you begin to raise the temperature.
…
to call it “global warming” is correct, but almost a misnomer. What we’re really doing is adding immense amounts of energy to a system, and that energy is expressing itself in all kinds of ways: more evaporation, more precipitation, higher wind speeds, rapid melt of ice across the Arctic and across every glacial system that we know about, on and on and on.

It is — you know, we used to think that we were still a decade or two away from the real emergency. That’s what we would have said twenty years ago, when I wrote The End of Nature. Now, we understand, the modeling makes clear, that the planet was more finely balanced than we’ve understood. What we’ve done so far has been enough to throw every physical system on earth out of kilter.

What we’re fighting for now is not to prevent global warming. There is going to be some global warming; there already is. What we’re fighting for now is to keep that miserable and difficult century of global warming from turning into an absolute catastrophe that rewrites the geology and biology of this planet for eons to come.

Are the Wildfires in So. California Related to Global Warming?