How would you define climate change? Something different, like strawberry Kool-Aid rain? Or the same, except more and worse? Let’s go with the latter, because that’s what we’re seeing. Since global warming was first presented as a threat to humanity, climate change was generally considered to be its gradual manifestation. We wouldn’t become Venus overnight — we would just be seeing variations on familiar themes: storms would become more frequent and ferocious, winds would become more forceful, rain would become more abundant and destructive, droughts would become drier and more prolonged, snowstorms would be heavier and more crippling, heat waves would be hotter and longer. Have I left anything out?
We’ve been seeing all this. It’s becoming noticeable. Make that obvious. Gentle showers are but a fond memory. Summer leapfrogs over spring. There’s almost universal consensus among scientists now that global warming is real, that profound climate change is what we will experience in our lifetimes, and that human activity is the cause. It can’t be a coincidence that we’ve seen measurable changes in atmospheric greenhouse gases since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Yet our leading pinhead, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), has not backed down from his assertion that global warming is a hoax, and a few Republican dim bulbs have raged about the coming ban on incandescents.
Surely they can’t all be that stupid, yet Republicans continue to strip funding for environmental agencies and programs. Republicans steadfastly refuse to engage in a serious discussion about an energy policy that would come to grips with the problems we face. It’s almost as if they’re determined to destroy the world we live in.
As unified as science is about the cause and effect of global warming now, what no one seems to be able to agree on is whether or not it’s too late to do anything about it. Have we, in other words, passed the tipping point? Can we reverse the trend and return to a more familiar climate state? Well, we have to look at what would be required.
That can be summed up this way: we would have to be removing more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than we add — carbon dioxide and methane, principally. It wouldn’t be enough to simply reach a zero net increase state. That would leave us where we are now, which isn’t necessarily desirable, because our current climate trends would continue, our poles would melt. and our sea levels would rise. The resulting chaos is unimaginable.
Part one of the solution, then, is drastically reducing the amount of greenhouse gases we add to the atmosphere. Part two is to find a way to remove what’s already there. Nature has a mechanism to keep these gases in balance. It’s called “photosynthesis” — the process of converting carbon dioxide into organic matter. This happens when plants absorb CO2 and grow and multiply. Plants (on land and in the oceans) are stored carbon, and we simply don’t have enough plants to keep up. If we did, we wouldn’t be here now.
The oil and coal we’re now burning is carbon that was captured by plants eons ago, over millions of years, and converted to familiar fossil fuels by the pressures beneath the surface of the earth. One doesn’t need to be a climate scientist to understand that we’ve released millions of years’ worth of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere in about 200 years. One doesn’t need to be a rocket scientists to see the logic behind climate change.
So back to the question: is it too late to turn things around? Well, I can only say that I won’t see it happen in my lifetime.
How would you define climate change? Something different, like raining Kool-Aid? Or the same, except more and worse? Let’s go with the latter, because that’s what we’re seeing. Since global warming was first presented as a threat to humanity, climate change was generally considered to be its gradual manifestation. We wouldn’t become Venus overnight — we would just be seeing variations on familiar themes: storms would become more frequent and ferocious, winds would become more forceful, rain would become more abundant and destructive, droughts would become drier and more prolonged, snowstorms would be heavier and more crippling, heat waves would be hotter and longer. Have I left anything out?
We’ve been seeing all this. It’s becoming noticeable. Make that obvious. Gentle showers are but a fond memory. Summer leapfrogs over spring. There’s almost universal consensus among scientists now that global warming is real, that profound climate change is what we will experience in our lifetimes, and that human activity is the cause. It can’t be a coincidence that we’ve seen measurable changes in atmospheric greenhouse gases since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Yet our leading pinhead, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), has not backed down from his assertion that global warming is a hoax.
Surely they can’t all be that stupid, yet Republicans continue to strip funding for environmental agencies and programs. Republicans steadfastly refuse to engage in a serious discussion about an energy policy that would come to grips with the problems we face. It’s almost as if they’re determined to destroy the world we live in.
As unified as science is about the cause and effect of global warming now, what no one seems to be able to agree on is whether or not it’s too late to do anything about it. Have we, in other words, passed the tipping point? Can we reverse the trend and return to a more familiar climate state? Well, we have to look at what would be required.
That can be summed up this way: we would have to be removing more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than we add — carbon dioxide and methane, principally. It wouldn’t be enough to simply reach a zero net increase state. That would leave us where we are now, which isn’t necessarily desirable, because our current climate trends would continue, our poles would melt. and our sea levels would rise. The resulting chaos is unimaginable.
Part one of the solution, then, is drastically reducing the amount of greenhouse gases we add to the atmosphere. Part two is to find a way to remove what’s already there. Nature has a mechanism to keep these gases in balance. It’s called “photosynthesis” — the process of converting carbon dioxide into organic matter. This happens when plants absorb CO2 and grow and multiply. Plants (on land and in the oceans) are stored carbon, and we simply don’t have enough plants to keep up. If we did, we wouldn’t be here now.
The oil and coal we’re now burning is carbon that was captured by plants eons ago, over millions of years, and converted to familiar fossil fuels by the pressures beneath the surface of the earth. One doesn’t need to be a climate scientist to understand that we’ve released millions of years’ worth of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere in about 200 years. One doesn’t need to be a rocket scientists to see the logic behind climate change.
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