Climate Concerns

Posted January 2nd, 2007 by Chris Gurney

With a mild December behind us, and not a spot of snow on the ground in the first week of January, I am more concerned than usual that something’s amiss with the environment.

I watched An Inconvenient Truth again over the holidays with my family. Seeing it a second time, I recognized how the film provides a great lesson on how to give an effective presentation that really gets a point across, but I digress.

The film included an update about events and facts that have unfolded since the movie was shot. Regrettably, I can’t find video of this online, but from what I can recall Mr. Gore noted that:

• Glacial earthquakes in Greenland were an indicator of rising temperatures on the continent, as their frequency has more than doubled since 2002. If you have seen the movie, you will know that the melting of ice on this continent could have a devastating effect on the North Atlantic Current.
• Records for high temperatures continued to be broken around the world in 2006.
• Melting permafrost is destroying human and animal habitats that have relied on it for so long.
• The explosive growth of the world’s population will level off at just over 9 billion over the next few decades. Indeed, looking at this page on the U.S. Census Bureau’s site, world population growth started to decline after 1970, which is good news.

Consider these further events that have only been brought to light in just the last few weeks:

• The scariest thing I’ve read recently was that an island in India has disappeared due to rising ocean levels, and more are threatened.
• Back in 2002, Antarctica made the news when the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed. Over the holidays word spread that another giant ice shelf had broken free in the Arctic in 2005 and it was only just noticed. There is still a lot we don’t know about these ice sheets and about how they are influenced by outside forces.
• With all of the above going on, biologists are apparently “baffled” as to why millions of penguins have vanished. If that weren’t enough, the U.S. government could designate polar bears a “threatened” species.

It’s easy to see that politics are getting in the way of wider recognition of these problems. As this editorial points out, instead of looking south at what the U.S. is doing, Canada should be looking north.

Anyway, no matter what side of the fence you are on with regards to this issue, there’s no denying that humans have had an impact on the Earth; you could say that Earth has a case of the humans.

Thank you for reading! Please sign-up for email updates, or subscribe via RSS, or follow me on Twitter.
 
See more posts tagged with: Sustainability