This is your Moment of Clarity #233: For the first time in 3 million years the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide is over 400 parts per million. Scientists say this is well beyond a sustainable level, and it's increasing every day.

Keep fighting,

Lee

There are some records we'd rather not see broken. Carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time since the U.S. government began recording the concentration of the gas in the air, and likely the first time in millions of years. High levels of carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere and increases global temperatures. The last time it reached 400 parts per million was in the epoch called the Pliocene at least 3 million years ago, when sea levels may have been as much as 60 to 80 feet higher than they are today. For all of human civilization, carbon-dioxide levels have hovered around 280 parts per million.

Already we're seeing the deadly effects of climate change in the form of rising seas, wildfires and extreme weather of all kinds, and passing 400 PPM is an ominous sign of what might come next.

The safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmostphere is 350 parts per million, but the only way to get there is to immediately transition the global economy away from fossil fuels and into into renewable energy, energy efficiency, and sustainable farming practices in all sectors (agriculture, transport, manufacturing, etc.).

While the level fluctuates seasonally and varies across different latitudes, this is yet another sign that our dependence on fossil fuels is out of control.

What This Means

Bill McKibben, Co-Founder, 350.org: "We're in new territory for human beings--it's been millions of years since there's been this much carbon in the atmosphere. The only question now is whether the relentless rise in carbon can be matched by a relentless rise in the activism necessary to stop it."

Dr. James Hansen, Former NASA Climatologist: "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced ... to at most 350 ppm."

Payal Parekh, Coordinator, Global Power Shift: "Crossing the 400 ppm threshold is a somber reminder that we haven't taken the action we need. Nevertheless there is good reason for hope -- activists all across the globe are fighting the fossil fuel industry and demanding clean, just and affordable solutions to our energy needs. At Global Power Shift, a convergence in Istanbul this June, 500 mostly young climate activists from 135 countries will come together to plan a global strategy for change. Upon returning home they'll escalate action and create the global power shift our world needs to push for 350 ppm."

Brad Johnson, Campaign Manager, Forecast the Facts: "May 9, 2013, is a historic day in the worst possible sense of the word. For the first time in the history of the human race, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen above 400 parts per million, NOAA reports. During the ice ages as homo sapiens ("wise man") evolved, levels were between 180 and 300 ppm. During the rise of human civilization, CO2 concentrations were only 280 ppm. Hundreds of billions of tons of fossil-fuel pollution have poisoned our climate, bringing to our world increasingly extreme floods, droughts, and wildfires. We must respond with urgent resolve to end this uncontrolled experiment on our only home.

"Yet the Republican Party maintains climate change denial as a central tenet of their party platform, and President Obama refuses to admit the threat projects like the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline pose to our future survival. The scientific observations are not in doubt, and the facts are not negotiable. We are fed up, and we will continue to hold those who are pushing us off the climate cliff accountable."

Deirdre Smith, West Coast Fossil Free Organizer: "My grandmother said that we are always walking toward our goals or away from them. As we reach 400PPM I am thinking about her, and wondering which way the the Board of Trustees from any of the 40 fossil free campus campaigns I work with are walking. Perhaps, this will be the moment we decided to walk toward our common goals, to treat each moment as a chance to invest in our future. That's what my grandmother would hope, that's what I hope, that's what students are fighting for now."

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Watch the trailer for "Elemental."

Elemental tells the story of three individuals united by their deep connection with nature and driven to confront some of the most pressing ecological challenges of our time.

The film follows Rajendra Singh, an Indian government official gone rogue, on a 40-day pilgrimage down India’s once pristine Ganges river, now polluted and dying. Facing community opposition and personal doubts, Singh works to shut down factories, halt construction of dams, and rouse the Indian public to treat their sacred “Mother Ganga” with respect. Across the globe in northern Canada, Eriel Deranger mounts her own “David and Goliath” struggle against the world’s largest industrial development, the Tar Sands, an oil deposit larger than the state of Florida. A young mother and native Denè, Deranger struggles with family challenges while campaigning tirelessly against the Tar Sands and its proposed 2,000-mile Keystone XL Pipeline, which are destroying Indigenous communities and threatening an entire continent.

And in Australia, inventor and entrepreneur Jay Harman searches for investors willing to risk millions on his conviction that nature’s own systems hold the key to our world’s ecological problems. Harman finds his inspiration in the natural world’s profound architecture and creates a revolutionary device that he believes can slow down global warming, but will it work?

Separated by continents yet sharing an unwavering commitment to protecting nature, the characters in this story are complex, flawed, postmodern heroes for whom stemming the tide of environmental destruction fades in and out of view – part mirage, part miracle.

Available in Select Theaters and iTunes May 2013.

The fossil fuel industry is killing us.

They have five times the amount of coal, gas and oil that is safe to burn -- and they are planning on burning it all. Left to their own devices, they'll push us past the brink of cataclysmic disaster -- life as we know it will be irrevocably altered forever. Unless we rise up and fight back.

Do The Math chronicles follows the climate crusader Bill McKibben as he works with a rising global movement in a David-vs-Goliath fight to change the terrifying math of the climate crisis.

This growing groundswell of climate activists is going after the fossil fuel industry directly, energizing a movement like the ones that overturned the great immoral institutions of the past century, such as Apartheid in South Africa. The film follows people who are putting their bodies on the line the Keystone XL Pipeline and leading universities and institutions to divest in the corporate polluters hellbent on burning fossil fuels no matter the cost.

The film also features a veritable who's who of the climate movement including Dr. James Hansen (Director, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies), Naomi Klein (Author, The Shock Doctrine), Lester Brown (President, Earth Policy Institute), Michael Brune (Executive Director, Sierra Club), Majora Carter (Founder, Sustainable South Bronx), Jessy Tolkan (Co-Executive Director of Citizen Engagement Laboratory), Phil Radford (Executive Director of Greenpeace), James Gustave Speth (Co-Founder of Natural Resources Defense Council), Mike Tidwell (Executive Director, CCAN), Van Jones (CNN Correspondent & Author, The Green Collar Economy), Bobby Kennedy Jr. (President, Waterkeeper Alliance ), among others.

Join the Movement at http://www.350.org

The "Do the Math" Movie is being screened at house-parties and screenings across the country on April 21st. At 42 minutes, it tells the story of the rising movement to change the terrifying math of the climate crisis and fight the fossil fuel industry.

Two panel discussions featuring Bill McKibben, Dr. James Hansen, and movement allies and leaders will be live-streamed at 8 p.m. ET and then at 8 p.m. PT.

The documentary follows 350.org founder Bill McKibben on last November's Do the Math tour that reached over 25,000 people at sold-out shows in 21 cities across the country (and tens of thousands more online). Part TEDTalk, part revival meeting, the Do the Math show built off of an article called "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math" that Bill had published in Rolling Stone earlier in the summer. The piece became one of the most viral stories ever published by the magazine, garnering over 125,000 likes on Facebook and millions of page views.

In the article, and onstage throughout the tour, Bill laid out three numbers that explain our current crisis: In order to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius, scientists say we can emit only 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but the fossil fuel industry has roughly 2,795 gigatons of carbon dioxide just in their reserves, over five times too much. In other words, the fossil fuel industry is a rogue industry, outlaws not against the laws of the United States -- for the most part they get to write those laws but against the laws of physics and chemistry.

You can find out more information about the livestream and organize your own screening at: 350.org/math.

The esteemed Dr. Ingraffea, the Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, summarizes the best available science on the intersection between hydraulic fracturing and climate change.

Dr. Ingraffea has taught structural mechanics, finite element methods, and fracture mechanics at Cornell for 37 years. Dr. Ingraffea's research concentrates on computer simulation and physical testing of complex fracturing processes. He and his students have performed pioneering research in using interactive computer graphics in computational mechanics, and together they have authored more than 250 papers in these areas. He has been a principal investigator on more than $35 million in R&D projects from the NSF, NASA, Nichols Research, AFOSR, FAA, Kodak, U. S. Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station, U.S. Dept. of Transportation, IBM, Schlumberger, EXXON, the Gas Research Institute, Sandia National Laboratories, the Association of Iron and Steel Engineers, General Dynamics, Boeing, Caterpillar Tractor, and Northrop Grumman Aerospace. For his research achievements he has won the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics "1994 Significant Paper Award" for one of the five most significant papers in the category of Computational/Analytical Applications, twice won the National Research Council/U.S. National Committee for Rock Mechanics Award for Research in Rock Mechanics (1978, 1991), and the George Irwin Medal form the American Society for Testing and Materials (2006). He was named a Fellow of the International Congress on Fracture in 2009. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the premier journal in his field, Engineering Fracture Mechanics.

From our friends at NASA comes this amazing 13-second animation that depicts how temperatures around the globe have warmed since 1950. You’ll note an acceleration of the temperature trend in the late 1970s as greenhouse gas emissions from energy production increased worldwide and clean air laws reduced emissions of pollutants that had a cooling effect on the climate, and thus were masking some of the global warming signal.

The data come from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York (GISS), which monitors global surface temperatures. As NASA notes, “All 10 of the warmest years in the GISS analysis have occurred since 1998, continuing a trend of temperatures well above the mid-20th century average."

From Superstorm Sandy to soaring temperatures in Australia, ongoing drought that has parched more than 60% of the U.S., and flooding from hurricanes around the world, we are experiencing the consequences of our carbon pollution now. We are paying the cost of these dirty weather disasters and other climate impacts through taxes, medical bills, and insurance rates (to name just a few). It’s past time to talk about the real cost of carbon pollution and to take action so that the polluters are paying their fair share.

Carbon pollution is not only disrupting our lives, it’s hitting our wallets. Comedian and musician Reggie Watts shows how, laying out the billion-dollar connection between fossil-fuel energy and dirty weather events like Superstorm Sandy caused by carbon pollution.

In the spirit of moving forward to solve the climate crisis, it’s time to jump-start a real carbon conversation.

For more information, visit The Climate Reality Project.

Watch the video to see how We Love Our Land came up with their idea on how to fight the Enbridge pipeline. It's quite clever, and the native American Indian music is beautiful.

#RLblockade Nizhawendaamin Inaakiminaan (We Love Our Land) is a group of Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, joined by blockaders and solidarity activists. The encampment is located in Northern Minnesota near the town of Leonard. Tom Poorbear, vice president of the Ogalala Sioux Nation declared, "We fully support the Red Lake Nation and its members who are opposing the Enbridge pipeline to stop the flow and remove the illegal pipeline from their land." The occupation of the Red Lake Ceded Land began Thursday, February 28. Similar action camps around the United States have been fighting the fossil fuel industry to stop the destruction of sacred lands. Red Lake tribal members demand the immediate shutdown of the flow through the pipes and intend to remain on the land until their demand is met. "I imagine everyone involved in the planetwide resistance to fossil fuel is watching them with thanks," said Bill McKibben founder of 350.org and leader of the recent Forward on Climate Rally. Chief Bill Erasmus of the Dene First Nation stated, "We fully support and are inspired by the Red Lake members and their resistance as it is stated in the Mother Earth Accord; affirming our responsibility to protect and preserve for our descendents, the inherent sovereign rights of our indigenous nations, the rights of property owners, and all inherent human rights." Most band members were unaware of Enbridge's illegal activity until the encampment started. "When I was informed about the illegal trespassing of the company Enbridge on my homeland, I knew there was something I could do. I started calling as many Red Lakers as I could to try and make them aware," said Angie Palacio who initiated the encampment with the support of the Indigenous Environmental Network.

Here's some new video footage of the protest at TransCanada's Massachusetts office that I wrote about on Monday. It captures the full mock funeral that the demonstrators held before the arrests begin.

They were there to hold TransCanada accountable for the degradation of our planet and the impoverishment of the future of the world's youth.

They were there to amplify the cries of the people in frontline communities, from indigenous peoples at the point of tar sands extraction, to the black and latina communities who live fence-line to the refineries where these toxic tar sands will be refined in the Gulf Coast.

They were there to pledge resistance to the Keystone XL Pipeline and all tar sands development.

More about this group here.