McKibben: The Most Important Number in the World

"What's the most important number in the world?"

by Bill McKibben

What's the most important number in the world?

The temperature of the human body? The freezing point of water? The length of a football pitch?

Or is it 350? It's a new number--almost no one knows about it yet. But it may well mark the line between a working human civilization and endless chaos.

Here's the story. Before the Industrial Revolution, the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide was 275 parts per million. Then the British, and the Europeans, and the Americans began burning coal and gas and oil. A couple of centuries later, the air holds 385 parts per million carbon dioxide.

Which is too much. As Al Gore said in his landmark July speech calling for an all-out American effort against global warming, "The climate crisis is getting a lot worse - much more quickly than predicted." Last summer the Arctic melted at an incredible rate—the Northwest Passage was open for the first time in history. And then global warming scientists, for the first time, gave us a real target to shoot for: 350. In fact, the American scientist James Hansen, who issued the first public warnings about climate change way back in 1988, published a paper this winter that used the starkest possible language. "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted," he said, then we have to reduce atmospheric co2 back to no more than 350 parts per million. We're already over the line, in other words—we're like the person who has eaten too much and whose doctor says 'cut it out, or else.'

In the case of the planet, that means going on a carbon diet. It means closing down coal mines and opening up windmills and solar panels. It means building many fewer cars and many more trains.

If we fail to do so, it's not just that the Arctic will keep melting. Sea levels may start to rise far faster than earlier predicted, endangering low-lying nations and farming belts. Monsoons will start to shift and fail. Subtropical glaciers will continue their rapid melt. The cycles of flood and drought now devastating parts of the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia will become ever more frequent. Dengue and malaria will continue their relentless spread. Storms will take an ever-rising toll. And civilization will be hard-pressed—especially, at first, the billions of people living closest to the edge economically. And if we succeed? Then we open up the possibility for a prosperous human future, where everyone has access to the power of the sun and the wind that wash across our planet every day.

So far human beings haven't risen up and demanded an end to global warming. So far the rest of the world hasn't demanded that the West end its wasteful ways, and that it use some of the money it built up burning cheap fuel to help the rest of the world develop without burning their own cheap coal. So far it's not the central issue for the planet's politics, even though it's clearly the central issue for the planet's destiny.

We need to change that. In the next 18 months, before world leaders gather in Copenhagen, Denmark to hammer out a new treaty on carbon, we need to spread this number to every corner of the world.

We've launched a website: 350.org. It works in more than eight languages. And it has just one goal: to help people take this abstract number and make it real.

So far people have organized bike rides with 350 cyclists, rung church bells 350 times, planned 350-mile marches. Artists and musicians have started taking the number and making it cool. Star athletes have joined Team 350. But we need many many more.

No one has ever really organized the whole world before, spread one message (except maybe Coca Cola). We need people from all the world's great faiths, from every continent and country, from every profession, to go to 350.org and join this effort. If you think about it, this is what the Internet was designed for: taking a simple message and communicating it to everyone on earth. 350 translates into any language—it's a number that makes sense.

And it's a number that can make history too. If we can get it on everyone's lips around the world, then the decision-makers who meet in Copenhagen in December of 2009 will know what bar they must meet to claim success. But it doesn't give us very long to spread the word, not if we're going to reach the entire world.

Bill McKibben is co-founder of 350.org, and author of the first book for a general audience on global warming, The End of Nature, which has been translated into 24 languages. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.