I’m reading a fascinating book, Fixing Climate, by Wallace S. Broecker and Robert Kunzig. The book provides a step-by-step development of scientific knowledge about climate change, from the nineteenth century to today, or to this year, anyway. It also covers the range of uncertainties about how fast global warming will affect us. While these uncertainties are significant they are of the nature of how much of Florida, or Bangladesh, will be under water by mid-century. That is, it’s not whether the oceans will rise but how fast and how much. The same goes for the intensity of hurricanes, deluges and droughts. Even if we completely stopped burning fossil fuels and producing CO₂ today, the global climate change has enough inertia so that it will keep warming for decades, according to Broecker and Kunzig. Meanwhile, the rate of change appears to be accelerating.

I know, Al Gore covered these trends in An Inconvenient Truth, but his book/movie doesn’t slog through the details the way Fixing Climate does. If you still doubt the realities of climate change, read both books. In both cases the conclusion is: stop/reduce using carbon-based fuels unless you have certain ways of sequestering the carbon.

Which, naturally, brings us to telework. Here’s something every worker can do whose job includes a certain amount of location independence: Continue reading Telework and CO2 →