Carbon Dioxide rises by an unprecedented, worst case scenario 3%

This is not good news.

Even as bad as a financial crisis threatening depression might be, and how threatening a 700 billion dollar bailout might sound. (A bailout which may be only a down payment on a wave of financial pain this generation has never seen before.)

This news makes a financial disaster pale by comparison.

Let's say it together...a 3% one year rise in Carbon Dioxide is a very bad thing.

Let me just try to put this into perspective. It's worse than the worst case scenario laid out by the IPCC just two years ago.

From an AP article about the rise:

What is "kind of scary" is that the worldwide emissions growth is beyond the highest growth in fossil fuel predicted just two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Ben Santer, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

Under the panel's scenario then, temperatures would increase by somewhere between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4 to 6.3 degrees Celsius) by the year 2100.

"We do have control over what happens over the next several decades," Santer said. "This illustrates the importance of exercising that control."

As badly as we here in the United States need to radically and urgently cut our CO2 emissions, the real challenges are in the developing countries which are now contributing 53% of the CO2 pouring into the atmosphere. Their contribution surpassed the emissions of the industrial countries three years ago, and are rapidly growing.

Part of the problem stems from industrial jobs which have been outsourced to developing countries, the other part, the need for energy to drive economic growth and the consumption driven by expanding consumer classes in the developing world, especially in India and China.

The real threat of all this, is that this puts us on track for the worst case scenarios regarding sea level rises...potentially 70 meters, and increases in temperature and erratic climate change.

One of our Presidential candidates, Barack Obama, laid out a 10 year plan to end dependence on carbon fuels. It's time to pick up that banner. We have no choice but to end dependence on carbon fuels for ourselves. And we have to solve the problem for the developing world.

And we have to do it quick.

Can it be done? I just don't know.