Not (entirely) guilty
|
While Earth has experienced many changes in climate over
the past 65 million years, recent decades have experienced
the most significant climate change since the beginning of
human civilized societies about 5,000 years ago. We can't
blame the
sun (especially not now), so who CAN we blame? The answer,
alas, is us.
In 2007, a report by the UN showed strong scientific
evidence that climate change is mostly due to human
activities, but they weren't able to prove that the same thing
has caused the melting poles (which could lead to a
devastating sea level rise). Now they are.
In BBC News, Pallab Ghosh quotes climatologist Phil Jones as
saying, "Our study is certainly closing a couple of gaps in the
last IPCC report. But I still think that a number of people,
including some politicians, are reluctant to accept the
evidence or to do anything about it until we specifically come
down to saying that one particular event was caused by
humans like a serious flood somewhere or even a heatwave.
Until we get down to smaller scale events in both time and
space I still think there will be people doubting the evidence."
Researcher Charles Greene says, "The rate of warming we are
seeing [now] is unprecedented in human history?As climate
changes, there are going to be winners and losers, both in
terms of biological species and different groups of people.
The cod fishermen are out of luck, but the fishermen that
have decided to go after snow crab and shrimp are very
successful now." In other words, adapting to climate change
is partly being able to predict what we can expect.
OK, we caused it, and we know we'll have to adapt, but can
we FIX it? It's the engineers' turn to figure that out. Some of
the ideas that are being proposed are putting mirrors in space
to reflect sunlight away from the earth, seeding the
atmosphere with particles to act as a sun block and using
iron filings to stimulate the growth of plankton in the oceans,
which would cause them to absorb more CO2.
In BBC News, Ghosh quotes geo-engineer Andrew Watson as
saying, "Some of the ideas [that have been proposed] might
have unpleasant side effects, some of them might be very
expensive and some of them might not work." But hey, we've
got to try.
Art credit: gimp-savvy.com
Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on getting
the word out about global warming, and he deserves it! But
don?t forget where you heard about these
dramatic changes for the
FIRST
time?
while everyone else was still denying it. Help us keep the
truth alive:
subscribe
today!
To learn more,
click here, here and
here.
