Global Warming in Bill McKibben´s Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet

The thesis of these excerpts from Bill McKibben’s book, Earth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, is that humanity has permanently changed the earth through global warming. This idea relies on the assumptions that global warming has caused irrevocable changes to the environment and that humans have only recently changed the earth.

One key premise that these excerpts rely on is the idea that the changes caused by global warming are irreversible. McKibben argues that we have gone past the point where even drastic changes to how we live couldn’t prevent the worsening of global warming. Even if we were to do “everything possible to make ourselves lean and efficient” the research indicates that is “‘improbable’ that we’d be able to stop short of 650 parts per million [of carbon dioxide],” nearly twice the acceptable amount (McKibben 2010, 13). The author also believes that the changes of global warming are permanent because we can’t reclaim what we are losing. The rainforest, coral reefs, and glacial ice are disappearing and “Once trends like this get rolling, we can’t slow them. We don’t know how to refreeze the Arctic or regrow a rain forest” (McKibben 2010, 28). According to McKibben, the world has reached this point, at least in part, because we have already surpassed the acceptable amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which 350 parts per million. We learned that too late according to McKibben because by the time the research supporting this idea was presented the planet’s atmosphere already had nearly 390 parts per million of carbon dioxide (McKibben 2010, 12). For the author these irrevocable changes mean that “The earth that we knew—the only earth that we ever knew—is gone” (McKibben 2010, 18) which leads to the heart of the text, the idea that civilization will be just as irreversibly changed as the world.

The text also assumes that the earth has been stable throughout most of human history. On a large scale this is certainly true, when one considers that “the temperature has barely budged; globally averaged, it’s swung in the narrowest of ranges, between fifty-eight and sixty degrees Fahrenheit,” and that weather has been predicable with only “freak storms, disturbances” (McKibben 2010, 4). This doesn’t take into account the vast changes humans have caused on more local levels. Changing our environment is a defining attribute of human beings that shouldn’t be completely overlooked. This bypassing of humanity’s impact on the earth is partly due to the fact that McKibben, understandably, views the issue of global warming through a very human lens.