LIVING IN A DYING WORLD
on Nov 23 2007 at 3:17 pm | Filed under: IPCC, arctic ice, global warming, penguins united, skiing without snow
The British newspapers are pretty darn direct and in your face. No beating around the global warming bush.
Geoffrey Lean, editor of the Independent in London, writing about the new international report about global warming puts it this way: “A world dying but can we unite to save it?”
Summarizing some of the findings of the IPCC, Lean writes:
Humanity is rapidly turning the seas acid through the same pollution that causes global warming, the world’s governments and top scientists agreed yesterday. The process – thought to be the most profound change in the chemistry of the oceans for 20 million years – is expected both to disrupt the entire web of life of the oceans and to make climate change worse.
The warning is just one of a whole series of alarming conclusions in a new report published by the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which last month shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore.
He kind of puts the recent World Series victory of my beloved Boston Red Sox in some perspective. Not to say I’m not thrilled that we re-signed Curt Schilling and Mike Lowell, but I’d like my friends at Penguins United to survive … Not to mention the billions of people threatened by rising seas and heatwaves and killer storms.
Scherer Coal-fired plant, Juliette Georgia
Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said yesterday: “The report has put a spotlight on a threat to the marine environment that the world has hardly yet realized. The threat is immense as it can fundamentally alter the life of the seas, reducing the productivity of the oceans, while reinforcing global warming.”
emissions of all the “greenhouse gas” pollutants that cause global warming increased 70 per cent between 1970 and 2004 alone, it reports, adding that levels of carbon dioxide, the most important one, in the atmosphere now “exceed by far” anything that the Earth has experienced in the past 650,000 years … “
I took a look at the Summary for Policy Makers that the scientists prepared. Here are some quotes:
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is evident from observations of increases in global air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level …
numerous long-term changes in climate have been observed. These include changes in arctic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salimity, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones …
Continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that would very likely be largely than those observed during the 20th century ….
Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the time scales associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilised …
I am not a scientist obviously but this is all very scary. If I understand this last paragraph, it means that even if we drastically cut back on emissions of greenhouse gases - a very very big if - we are still in the middle of experiencing the growing effects of all the stuff we’ve done in the last hundreds of years.
Each time we see a new report, the data seems to suggest that we have underestimated the effects of the climate crisis.
Global warming’s foes rarely cite ski resorts and golf courses among its victims.
But, though they may be less adorable than penguins and less gripping than melting ice caps, resort owners and tour operators will be directly and strongly affected by climate change. Indeed, few livelihoods are more dependent on the weather, other than farmers’ …
“The entire tourism product will be affected,” said Geoffrey Lipman, assistant secretary general of the United Nations World Tourism Organization, “Every destination has a climate-related component.”
Imagine a ski resort whose chairlifts are in the lower reaches of mountains without decent snow. Or a scuba club whose reefs succumbed to warmer and stormier seas. Or a golfing hotel in a district where water shortages made it impossible to keep fairways green.
Here in B-town it hasn’t really snowed yet and we just had our turkey.
Could I be living in a dying world?
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