Posted on 07/03/2006 9:52:18 AM PDT by Sgt_Schultze
I saw Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and learned I didn't know the half of it.
The planet we've known since the beginning of recorded time is changing more rapidly than believed possible. Most convincing are the before-and-after photos of glaciers and snow-capped mountains that show the ice melting at unprecedented rates, the graphs Gore uses to explain complex climate concepts, and the collected data that definitively show humans are overwhelming the earth's ability to regulate itself.
Both the Arctic and the Antarctic are melting away from the inside out. People on faraway Pacific islands and nearby Smith Island, Md., have already had to relocate because their homelands are sinking under rising sea levels. Gore explains that if even half of Greenland or Antarctica melt away, the resulting water could raise sea levels worldwide 20 feet, thus drowning areas at or below sea level around the world, places where millions of people live.
Sure we've been influencing the environment ever since we cut the first tree, killed the first animal, built the first fire and planted the first crop. All organisms modify their environment by their very being. But as Gore points out, the number of humans was pretty consistent over time, thanks to nature's checks and balances. Nature could take what we were dishing out.
No more. Once we started making more efficient tools and learning how to manipulate our world, we gained the upper hand and population began increasing: worldwide population is slated to increase to 9.22B by 2075. These advances have allowed us to do increasing harm to the basic life support systems sustaining us.
More people demand more food, fuel and shelter from finite resources and create more waste, including the greenhouses gases that are trapped in our atmosphere and are warming the planet. We are depleting the very resources that help regulate the atmosphere and make life livable on this planet: the only planet known to support life.
I'm bewildered. What's it going to take for people to accept humans are causing global warming and do something about it? More Hurricane Katrinas? I'm trying to do my part by changing my behaviors and writing this column. I'm gravely concerned about my son's future.
Recently, a reader left a message telling me I was entitled to my opinion, but he considered people like me "environmental wackos." Galileo was considered a wacko, too, when he pointed out the earth revolves around the sun. Us "wackos" just want people to understand the threats that have been known to us for over 30 years and act before it's too late. If I'm a wacko, so are the scientists at the National Academies of Science, the 255 mayors who have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement and the leaders of over 160 countries who, by signing the Kyoto Protocol, acknowledge that global warming is an extreme issue that demands immediate attention.
A congressman once called global warming a "hoax" perpetrated on the American people. How so and by whom? The only thing believers have to gain are healthier futures for all. But we could lose much of what we cherish if we don't start working to reduce carbon dioxide emissions right now. We have the technology and smarts to do it; we lack the leadership.
That's a good definition of liberalism: believing that the nuclear reaction (i.e., the sun) that they see every day has less of an impact than their neighbor's Suburban.
And usually it's really because the neighbor can afford the Suburban and the liberal can't.
The Sun is mostly hydrogen and small fluctuations in the amount of energy emitted by the Sun can have a large impact on earth. The Sun will increase in size in about a billion years, before that total solar irradiance will incresase overall brightness, UV wavelengths and magnetic flux.
Aanthropogenically cause of global warming is a political theory and the solar variation theory is more a fact.
Global warming: just another excuse by the politicians to control our way of life.
"ice melting at unprecedented rates"
In addition to Earth and Mars, Saturn and Pluto are also warnibg
That's a hell of a lot of water. 20ft over the entire globe? Nonsense.
I'm waiting for Ms. Stenley to bravely do her part and reduce the strain on earth's resources by one. Every little bit helps!
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