Open letter to Al Gore  (I hope this finds you).

I have read your book "Earth in the Balance  - Ecology and the Human Spirit (1992)"

By then I had spent twelve years worried about global warming and was looking at the cost of carbon-free energy for heat, power, and chemicals.  My wife convinced me to turn around while in Hawaii heading towards winter Australia.  She said "Clinton and Gore were just elected, maybe now there will be honest support...".

I can't remember much support since then.  It's been so long.  But the current issue is fresh before us.  It seems we are about to repeat the Permian Extinction.  This is worse than getting hit by a big dinosaur-killing asteroid.  It is the worse case possible that is happening.  We are going to get hit real hard.

Global warming is melting the permafrost in the West Siberian tundra.  Melting of the Siberian permafrost will, over the next few decades, release hundreds of millions of tons of methane from formerly frozen peat bogs into the atmosphere.   Methane from those bogs is at least twenty times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide that currently drives global warming.  251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian era, a release of carbon dioxide from volcanic eruptions apparently heated the Earth's atmosphere by about 6 degrees Celsius.  This initial increase in temperature triggered, in turn, a massive release of methane from Arctic tundra and the oceans.  The result of this runaway global warming was the greatest mass extinction since life emerged from the sea -- 95 percent of all species in existence died.   1.

Our virgin forest nature conservancy was charted to last 136  years, so our forest is toast.  And my generation allows this to happen to the whole planet.  Losing a planet must be far more painful than losing a presidency.  Nothing else seems to matter anymore.  The whole planet.  Nation states disappear in chaos.  No Israel, no Iran, according to Lovelock, just war lords, all within one century.  "Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."  -- Lovelock

I am not doing normal things anymore.  I know the asteroid is coming.  Nothing else matters.  We are out of time.

I reject the premise that it is hopeless.  We have an excellent education, good technology, and brilliant creativity.   Institutions, governments, everyone will unite and work to solve global warming or else we perish.

We need leadership.

There is no plan B.

1.  http://www.alternet.org/story/25351/