Climate Change Kills The GOP, Too
The NYT is reporting that:
I used to propose to anyone that would listen that I wanted to approach the NAS and propose an experiment. My experiment was simple. I'd propose to dump millions and millions of tons of CO2, methane, and other gases into the atmosphere annually - at an ever increasing rate - just to see what happens. In the best tradition of science, you see.
Imagine the look of horror on the faces of the assembled climatologists as I was making this proposal?
It isn't difficult to see the collective horror on their faces as they had obviously witnessed a colleague gone entirely mad.
But this mad experiment is exactly the one that we are now performing on the earth. Of course in the real world, the rate of greenhouse gas level rise is being compounded by deforestation/desertification - the source of the second largest carbon sink on the planet.
I've been saying for two and a half decades that the way we treat the earth is by orders of magnitude greater than any other possible political issues that confront us. It is the only one that can lead to our extinction.
Everything else is temporal. Economies flow and ebb. The social pendulum swings left and right whilst throughout it all, we are slowly but inexorably making the planet uninhabitable. Particularly uninhabitable for a large bipedal mammal, and the sources of food on which it(we, really) depend.
Will the human race survive?
Perhaps. But the way in which are choosing to ignore this truly transcendent issue makes a good case for our supplantation by another species.
Get active! Decrease your own carbon footprint. Now.
Then go on and change the world.
My next entry will be less cheery, I promise ;)
Shafts of ancient ice pulled from Antarctica's frozen depths show that for at least 650,000 years three important heat-trapping greenhouse gases never reached recent atmospheric levels caused by human activities, scientists are reporting today.(much more at link)
The measured gases were carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Concentrations have risen over the last several centuries at a pace far beyond that seen before humans began intensively clearing forests and burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels.
The sampling and analysis were done by the European Program for Ice Coring in Antarctica, and the results are being published today in the journal Science.
The evidence was found in air bubbles trapped in successively older ice samples extracted from a nearly two-mile-deep hole drilled in a remote spot in East Antarctica called Dome C.
I used to propose to anyone that would listen that I wanted to approach the NAS and propose an experiment. My experiment was simple. I'd propose to dump millions and millions of tons of CO2, methane, and other gases into the atmosphere annually - at an ever increasing rate - just to see what happens. In the best tradition of science, you see.
Imagine the look of horror on the faces of the assembled climatologists as I was making this proposal?
It isn't difficult to see the collective horror on their faces as they had obviously witnessed a colleague gone entirely mad.
But this mad experiment is exactly the one that we are now performing on the earth. Of course in the real world, the rate of greenhouse gas level rise is being compounded by deforestation/desertification - the source of the second largest carbon sink on the planet.
I've been saying for two and a half decades that the way we treat the earth is by orders of magnitude greater than any other possible political issues that confront us. It is the only one that can lead to our extinction.
Everything else is temporal. Economies flow and ebb. The social pendulum swings left and right whilst throughout it all, we are slowly but inexorably making the planet uninhabitable. Particularly uninhabitable for a large bipedal mammal, and the sources of food on which it(we, really) depend.
Will the human race survive?
Perhaps. But the way in which are choosing to ignore this truly transcendent issue makes a good case for our supplantation by another species.
Get active! Decrease your own carbon footprint. Now.
Then go on and change the world.
My next entry will be less cheery, I promise ;)
No comments :
Post a Comment