Despite all the recent publicity, many people are understandably skeptical about this potential threat. After all, the record global temperatures of the past decade are running only one degree Celsius (two degrees Fahrenheit) over the average global temperatures back in 1900. A couple of degrees doesn’t sound like much, does it? In fact, a slight warm up could be nice with a few more days at the beach, a longer growing season and a few less days of snow and ice to deal with. And it’s not like we’ve never seen warm temperatures like this before. A thousand years ago, there was a “Medieval Warm Period” in Europe with temperatures comparable to today’s record highs. Droughts and killer heat waves struck every few decades in the southwest United States throughout the 20^th century. Even the dire warnings of increasing numbers of intense hurricanes haven’t lived up to the hype. In fact, in the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season, not a single hurricane made landfall on the US coastline. Based on our daily observations, it’s easy to conclude that the greenhouse effect really isn’t a big deal.

In order to understand the magnitude of the problem though, it is necessary to have a grasp of just what the greenhouse effect and global warming are all about. If you’ve ever gone out to your car on a hot sunny day and found the steering wheel too hot to touch, then you’ve got an idea of what global warming can do. Visible and ultraviolet light pass through the car windows and are absorbed by the dark surfaces within the car, heating things up. The infrared heat radiated back off of the dashboard and upholstery is trapped by the windows leading to sweltering temperatures. In the same way, certain gases in our atmosphere such as carbon dioxide, methane and ozone allow sunlight to reach the earth’s surface but prevent the heat generated from escaping from our atmosphere. Since the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has increased by 25% in the past 200 years due to the use of coal, oil and natural gas—and the concentration is going up every year—more heat is being trapped and our climate is slowly warming.

So how big of a problem is this? In the short term, it’s hard to say for sure. We’ve seen Hurricane Katrina flood New Orleans in 2005. We’ve seen flooding in Bangladesh in the summer of 2004 lead to $6.7 billion in damage and 2000 deaths. We’ve seen hundreds of thousands of Kenyan herders lose their livelihood as ongoing drought has claimed their livestock in the past decade. Each of these catastrophes, and many more like them, were very likely worsened by the effects of global warming. By how much, no one can really say; but the World Health Organization has estimated that 160,000 people die each year due to the direct and indirect effects of global warming. Furthermore, Nature reports that by 2050, we can expect 37% of all species on Earth to be on their way to extinction due to rising temperatures and worsening drought conditions.

As if these numbers aren’t alarming enough, there’s far worse trouble coming down the road. With temperatures rising in the Arctic and Antarctic, ice sheets are melting.  As a result, ocean levels are rising. As the reflective ice melts, replaced by heat-absorbing land and bodies of water, the rate of warming will increase. Eventually our coastlines will be overwhelmed.  London, Tokyo, Mumbai, New York, Miami and Los Angeles could all be flooded as sea levels rise by 18 feet according to Bette Otto-Bliesner from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Jonathan Overpeck from the University of Arizona. Large areas of Bangladesh and the Netherlands could be rendered uninhabitable and many island communities could cease to exist.  

When can we expect these kinds of drastic changes? Scientists can’t say for sure. It could be as soon as 2100 or perhaps not until centuries later. But the important thing to understand is that these changes are on the way. Unlike a car, where you can roll down the windows to let the heat escape, we have no easy way to rid ourselves of the greenhouse gases that we’re pumping into our atmosphere every day. Trees and other plants do remove carbon dioxide from the air, but even if we stopped using fossil fuels such as coal and oil it would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years to restore greenhouse gases to pre-industrial revolution levels. Temperatures are going to rise in the next hundred years. There’s no way around it.

All we can really hope to do is to slow down the process and limit its eventual impact. Some countries have already taken the first step by signing the Kyoto accords that require the 140 nations which ratified it to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases by 2012. The United States and Australia are not among the nations to ratify the agreement but California has issued regulations to reduce greenhouse emissions by 30% by 2016. Many leading scientists believe that we need to do more. James Hanson, one of the leading researchers in the world on global warming, warned in a recent interview on 60 Minutes that if we don’t take drastic action soon (perhaps within the next ten years), global warming may reach a point of no return. Regrettably, political leaders in the United States have chosen to ignore and actually censor such scientific opinions in an effort to avoid the painful economic impact of a reduction in the use of fossil fuels.

It’s time to make a hard decision. Are we going to be wise stewards and try to leave a better world for our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren to live in? Or are we going to put our comfort first and let upcoming generations deal with the consequences of our bad decisions? Is our quest for a high standard of living more important than the risk of our children and their children facing unprecedented droughts, floods, heat waves, epidemics and famine?

We can all make a difference no matter how small. Turning down the thermostat a few degrees and wearing a sweatshirt; driving the speed limit; buying a fuel efficient car; using energy efficient light bulbs; walking or riding a bike instead of driving; installing a ceiling fan and turning down the air conditioning; writing your government representative and encouraging them to support environmental causes. Together, all these small steps can carry us a long way. Please join in and do what you can.

---

Comments

Add New Search RSS

sophie   |2008-01-16 18:05:59 this doesn't have ANYTHING i need god! can u ever c heat waves move!? Reply 0   0

vjrurqalxy   |2007-07-06 07:09:18 Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! galrdxtgbc Reply 0   0

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."