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An Inconvenient Truth

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Brandon
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« on: January 22, 2007, 08:40:39 pm »

Predator/Prey Disruptions and Misplaced Cities

So this same phenomenon of changing all these patterns is also changing the seasons. Here is a study from the Netherlands. The peak arrival date for migratory birds 25 years ago was April 25. Their chicks hatched on June 3, just at the time when the caterpillars were coming out: Nature's plan. But 20 years of warming later the caterpillars peaked two weeks earlier. The chicks tried to catch up with it, but they couldn't. So they are in trouble. There are millions of ecological niches that are affected by global warming in just this way. This is the number of days with frost in southern Switzerland over the last one hundred years. It has gone down rapidly. But now watch this. This is the number of new exotic species that have rushed in to fill the new ecological niches that are opening up. That's happening here in the United States too. You've heard of the pine beetle problem? Those pine beetles used to be killed by the cold winter, but there are fewer days of frost. So the pine trees are being devastated. This is part of the 14 million acres of spruce trees in Alaska that have been killed by bark beetles, the exact same phenomenon. There cities that were founded because they were just above the mosquito line. Nairobi is one. Harare is another. There are plenty of others. Now the mosquitoes with warming are climbing to hirer altitudes.

Infectious Disease

There are a lot of vectors for infectious diseases that are worrisome to us that are also expanding their range, not only mosquitoes but all these others as well. We've had 30 so-called new diseases that have emerged in just the last quarter century. A lot of them like SARS have caused tremendous problems. The resistant forms of tuberculosis. There has been a re-emergence of some diseases that were once under control. The Avian flu, of course is quite a serious matter, as you know. West Nile Virus came to the eastern shore of Maryland in 1999. Two years later it was across the Mississippi. And two years after that it had spread across the continent. These are very troubling times.

Coral Reefs

Coral reefs all over the world because of global warming and other factors are bleaching and they end up like this. All the fish species that depend on the coral reef are also in jeopardy as a result. Overall species loss is now occurring at a rate 1000 times greater than the natural background rate.

The Second Canary: Antarctic Peninsula Sea Ice

This brings me to the second canary in the coal mine, Antarctica, the largest mass of ice on the planet by far. A friend of mine said in 1978, "If you see the break up of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula, watch out, because that should be seen as an alarm bell for global warming. If you look at the peninsula up close, every place where you see one of these green blotches is an ice shelf larger than the state of Rhode Island that has broken up in just the last 15 to 20 years. I want to focus on just one of them called Larsen B. I want you to look at these black pools here. It makes it seem almost as if we are looking through the ice to the ocean beneath. But that's an illusion. This is melting water that forms this pool. If you were flying over it in a helicopter, you'd see it 700 feet tall. They are so majestic, so massive. In the distance are the mountains, and just before the mountains is the shelf of the continent. This is floating ice, and there is land based ice on the down-slope of those mountains. From here to the mountains is about 20 to 25 miles. They thought this would be stable for about a hundred years, even with global warming. The scientists who study these ice shelves were absolutely astonished when they were looking at these images. Starting in January 31, 2002, in a period of 35 days, this ice shelf completely disappeared. They could not figure out how in the world this happened so rapidly. They went back to figure out where they had gone wrong. That's when they focused on those pools of melting water. Even before they could figure out what had happened there, something else started going wrong. When the floating sea-based ice cracked up, it no longer held back the ice on the land. The land-based ice then started falling into the ocean. It was like letting the cork out of a bottle. There's a difference between floating ice and land-based ice. It's like the difference between an ice cube floating in a glass of water, which when it melts doesn't raise the level of water in the glass, and a cube sitting atop a stack of ice cubes, which melts and flows over the edge. That's why the citizens of these pacific nations had all had to evacuate to New Zealand.

West Antarctica Land Based Ice

I want to focus on West Antarctica, because it illustrates two factors about land-based ice and sea-based ice. It's a little of both. It's propped on tops of islands, but the ocean comes up underneath it. So if the ocean gets warmer, it has an impact on it. If this were to go, sea levels worldwide would go up 20 feet. They've measured disturbing changes on the underside of this ice sheet. It's considered relatively more stable, however, than another big body of ice that is roughly the same size. Greenland

Impact of 20 Foot Rise in Sea Level

In 1992 they measured this amount of melting in Greenland. 10 years later this is what happened. And here is the melting from 2005. Tony Blair's scientific advisor has said that because of what is happening in Greenland right now, the map of the world will have to be redrawn. If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida. This is what would happen in the San Francisco Bay. A lot of people live in these areas. The Netherlands, the low-countries: absolutely devastating. The area around Beijing is home to tens of millions of people. Even worse, in the area around Shanghai, there are 40 million people. Worse still, Calcutta and, to the East Bangladesh the area covered includes 50 million people. Think of the impact of a couple hundred thousand refugees when they are displaced by an environmental event and then imagine the impact of a hundred million or more. Here is Manhattan. This is the World Trade Center Memorial Site. After the horrible events of 9/11 we said never again. But this is what would happen to Manhattan. They can measure this precisely, just as the scientists could predict precisely how much water would breech the levy in New Orleans. The area where the World Trade Center Memorial is to be located would be under water. Is it possible that we should prepare against other threats besides terrorists? Maybe we should be concerned about other problems as well.



Civilization and Earth

This issue is the same for China as it is for the US.

Separating the truth from the fiction and the accurate connection from the misunderstanding is part of what you learn here. When the warnings are accurate and based on sound science, then we as human beings, whatever country we live in, have to find a way to make sure that the warnings are heard and responded to.

We both have a hard time shaking loose the familiar patterns that we relied on in the past. We both faced completely unacceptable consequences.

We are witnessing a collision between our civilization and the Earth. There are three factors that are causing this collision.

Population - when the baby boom generation was born after WW II the population had just crossed the 2 billion mark. I'm in my 50s and it's already gone to 6 « billion. If I reach the demographic expectation for the baby boomers, it will go over 9 billion. If it takes 10,000 generations to reach 2 billion and then, in one human lifetime, ours, it goes from 2 billion to 9 billion, something profoundly different is going on right now. We're putting more pressure on the Earth. Most of it's in the poorer nations of the world. It puts pressure on food demand. It puts pressure on water demand. It puts pressure on vulnerable natural resources, and this pressure is one of the reasons we have seen such devastation of the forest, not only tropical but elsewhere. It is a political issue. This is the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. One set of policies here. Another set of policies here. Much of it comes not only from cutting, but also burning. Almost 30% of the CO2 that goes up into the atmosphere each year is from forest burning. This is a time-lapse picture of the Earth at night over a six month period showing the lights of the cities in white and the burning forests and brush fires in red. The yellow areas are the gas flares like these in Siberia.





The way we think about it is the third and final factor that transforms our relationship to the Earth. If a frog jumps into a pot of boiling water, it jumps right out again, because it senses the danger. But the very same frog if it jumps into a pot of luke warm water that is slowly brought to a boil, will just sit there and it won't move. It will just sit there even as the temperature continues to go up and up. It will stay there until.. until.. it is rescued. It is important to rescue the frog. The point is this: Our collective nervous system is like that frog's nervous system. It takes a sudden jolt sometimes before we become aware of a danger. If it seems gradual, even it is really adapting quickly, we are capable of just sitting there and not reacting.
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« Last Edit: January 22, 2007, 08:45:08 pm by Brandon » Report Spam   Logged
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