‘In the Great Ship Titanic’

The Department of Energy is at the center of U.S. efforts to end our dependence on foreign oil, roll back climate change and create new jobs. Fareed Zakaria sat down last week with the department's new head, Nobel physicist Steven Chu, at NEWSWEEK's Energy Independence 2020 Forum Luncheon to talk about smart grids, solar panels and more. Excerpts:
Zakaria: Skeptics say there's still conflicting evidence on global warming.Chu: I urge everyone to do this: Google the 2007 IPCC report. The 100-year trend is unmistakable. The first thing to emphasize is don't get excited about one or two years. It's just like you should not get excited that one very bad hurricane is evidence there's global warming.
Can we really prevent global warming? Or should we be thinking more about adaptation? Building coastal fortifications may be cheaper than halting the release of CO2.Right now, the climate scientists feel that if all humans shut off carbon emissions today, it will still glide up by about 1 degree centigrade. In the business-as-usual scenarios, Nicholas Stern says there's a 50 percent chance we may go to 5 degrees centigrade. We know what the Earth was like 5 or 6 degrees centigrade colder. That was called the Ice Ages. Imagine a world 5 degrees warmer. The desert lines would be dramatically changed. The West is projected to be in drought conditions. And certain tipping points might be triggered. We can adapt to 1 or 2 degrees. More than that, there is no adaptation strategy.
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What do you mean by tipping points?There's lots of carbon in vegetation that has grown and died in the northern tundras of Russia, Canada. Normally what happens when a tree falls and dies is the microbes come and gobble it up and they recycle in terms of carbon dioxide, methane. But in the frozen tundra, those microbes are asleep. So the big fear is that once the tundra thaws, those microbes wake up, they digest all that carbon. It goes up in the atmosphere. At that point, no matter what humans do, it's out of our control. This is the realization in the last decade that has caused many of us to get very, very concerned. Adaptation at 1 or 2 degrees will be painful, it will cause a lot of hurt and pain, but adaptation at 5 or 6 degrees—I'm terribly frightened that that's catastrophic.
Aren't we in pretty bad trouble no matter what we do? We're not going to be able to stop burning fossil fuels for quite a while.We're in the great ship Titanic, the Earth is, and it's going to take a half century to really turn the ship. But that doesn't mean we can't start doing it today, and we must. It's possible that the United States can greatly reduce its use of energy in our buildings, which consume 40 percent of our energy, and our personal vehicles.
You're basically talking about insulating buildings and using more fuel-efficient cars?Well, not only insulating buildings—we haven't taken full advantage of the technologies that exist today. They haven't been integrated into making smarter buildings that can be 60, 80 percent more energy-efficient than existing buildings.

(Part I - from Newsweek.com)