Is global warming for real? I can tell you that the weather has been strange this year, but is it global warming or just a cycle?
Science is a good tool here. Drill a six-inch hole a few thousand feet into a glacier, in Greenland or Antarctica. Bring up a core sample of glacier ice the same way you would if you were drilling for oil, nothing complicated. There is no hocus-pocus weird science interpretation of reality involved.
You have a time capsule of what the climate was thousands of years ago, frozen in layers. Scientists can divine, (a mass spectrometer works well) how much oxygen, nitrogen, CO2 and dusty bits were floating around in the air, then frozen in the ice. By counting down the number of layers you can put a year to it. The same works with lake sediment or tree rings. Nothing strange: Percentages of stuff and some rudimentary counting.
Science has figured out there is a range of normal for CO2, nitrogen, oxygen and other stuff. It has been more or less the same for 650,000 years. Yes, there are ups and downs. This is normal as the Earth is not a fixed system, but the variances are very small.
Pre-industrialization of our planet, the average number was 280 parts per million of CO2 in the air: Carbon Dioxide is naturally occurring. We need some to live. Too much and we change things.
In 2005, at high altitude over one of the tallest peaks in the middle of the windswept Pacific Ocean, one would expect air that would sit nicely in the average of the whole planet, over 650,000 years. The number is 341 parts per million of CO2. Or, way out of whack. Not in the range of normal.
The real point is that tiny little changes in our atmosphere can have devastating consequences far away from, or much later than the event. This is the truism of the single nail. For the loss of a nail, the shoe was lost. For the loss of a shoe, the horse was lost. For the loss of a horse, the battle was lost. For the loss of a battle, the war was lost. That is the way big systems seem to work. It is an eternal truth.
Lake Chad, once the sixth largest lake in the world, near Niger, is almost gone. A lake not much smaller that Lake Superior is gone? Yes. Look at two pictures of Mount Kilimanjaro, one from 1970 and one from 2005. The snow-covered peaks of Kilimanjaro, right? Today, it has a tiny wisp of snow around the very top that looks thinner than Jean Chretien’s comb-over.
The Earth is an interdependent system that is very finely tuned. Britain is mild because of the gulf stream. Change one factor, say move the gulf stream one hundred miles south of the UK. Edinburgh is not much further south than Goteborg, Sweden, or Churchill, Manitoba. You might wind up with 172 inches of snow in Edinburgh; an old fashioned Canadian winter.
Where do hurricanes, like Katrina or Rita come from? The answer is the east coast of Africa. Temperature changes, weather and ocean currents around Nigeria, or Gabon can put a topspin on weather going into the Gulf of Mexico. This might tweak the gulf stream, which could juggle things along Spain or Morocco. It all ties together very delicately and only takes a few degrees to make a change.
The other problem with global warming is it accelerates exponentially. It doesn’t go twice as fast, it goes four times as fast, then eight times as fast, then sixteen times as fast and so on. Thirty years’ difference in glacier size are quite telling of how fast it is running.
In the last two hundred years we went from agrarian to urban. We invented all kinds of things, like electricity, internal combustion engines, cures for hundreds of diseases, skyscrapers, nuclear energy, subways, cars, airplanes, radio, radar, microwaves, fascinating ways to conduct wars, air conditioning, the Slinky, aerosol cheese, the Backstreet Boys and iPods. We also created a catastrophe called Global Warming. The science is irrefutable. We did it in, oh, give or take, seventy years.
I’m not saying we go back to the Grand Old Days of 1806 to fix it. Remember them? Before medicine, when E.Coli was a condiment? You got unpasteurized milk out of the family cow? You saw a village twice a year? Your family had to grow enough hay to feed the horses over the winter to have a live horse in the spring to pull the plow? School was three or four years, at the most, if you lived near one? You could die a painful death if you broke an arm? A refrigerator was a hole in the ground, but so was the toilet?
A rural, agrarian, self-sufficient life would kill most of us, probably from starvation, in the first year. We’ve lost the skills and the wisdom from 1806. We don’t live near the resources anymore. I can’t get to, or store, or tote five cords of split, dried firewood into a fourteenth floor apartment, even if I had a fireplace. The park outside isn’t that big. I can’t keep a cow up here. I can’t plant crops up here.
We can’t un-invent our present. But we can change our present.
Buy a smaller, fuel-efficient car or a hybrid if you can afford it. Take public transit where you can. Turn off lights. Turn off the air conditioning. Conserve electricity. Plant trees. Save water. Avoid aerosols. Leave as small a carbon footprint as you can by recycling, reducing and reusing things.
Stir up some shit with politicians. Conservation has a faster, better payback than trying to build new generation capacity. In Ontario they’re talking about building a new nuclear generation program. It takes at least 10 years to get one up and running, but we need the electricity now. With that kind of money, $40 Billion, invested in energy conservation and green generation programs, we could save as much power as the new reactors would produce, probably in half the time and even create some jobs out of the deal.
Do one other thing for me, will you please? Go and see “An Inconvenient Truth”. It is the Al Gore global warming film. Even if you wouldn’t trust Al Gore to tell you the correct time, just go and see it, then decide for yourself. He tells the story and the science better than I can.
RoadDave 