Global Warming: The Beginning of the End, or perhaps a New Beginning?
June 28th, 2008There is as we speak, a growing awareness about Global Warming, and a growing controversy about the dangers it poses, and the possible solutions which could address those dangers. Some believe that Global Warming is the end of life as we know it, and others dismiss it as environmental quackery. To my mind, however, there is enough scientific evidence of the threat of Global Warming, such that the risk of not doing anything about it, is far greater than the risk of doing something, and later finding out that is wasn’t really necessary to do so. In other words, the risk posed by Global Warming is so great, that it is worth doing something about it, even if we’re not exactly sure that the problem really exists.
I don’t want to bother you with all the scientific data. Al Gore and his colleagues can certainly do a better job of that. That being said, I watched a show on TV a couple of days ago on the National Geographic channel. The scientists there pointed out that the polar ice caps used to be the size of the U.S. until recently, and are now about 2/3 of the size they once were. If they continue to melt at present rates, they could disappear by the year 2050, which is right around the corner, and the sea level could rise by as much as 20 feet, which would flood approximately 60% of humanity.
Global Warming is not just an environmental issue. It is an issue with ideological dimensions. It is a problem that brings into sharp focus what is important in life, and what we, as a species, will choose as our collective destiny. Yes, we are now charged with the onerous task of choosing our own destiny.
Some 150 years ago, relatively a bleep in the history of man, we decided, as part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution, to run our economies on fossil fuels. Could that decision have been a wrong turn taken by man as he made his way through the annals of history; a mistaken direction? And is it time now to retrace our steps and to find the right path once again? And is it just possible that Global Warming will force us, once and for all, to decide what is important in life, and to organize ourselves around principles which make more sense, which will bring more justice, and which will sustain us on this good earth?
If it is indeed true, as is quickly becoming apparent, that Global Warming, if left unchecked, will bring us storms and floods on the scale of those described in the story of Noah, then we have no choice but to rethink our priorities, to use our God-given Common Sense, and to reorganize ourselves ideologically, economically, and environmentally, in a more sensible and sustainable manner.
Strange as it may seem, Global Warming, the ultimate threat to our existence as a species, can also be the impetus for the kind of change that can better assure our long term survival. If we take the threat seriously, we will conform our behavior to the dictates of Common Sense, as opposed to the lure of greed, and reorganize ourselves consistent with a Vision of Hope, thus averting the abyss, and building a new future for ourselves, one based on justice and sustainability.
Common Sense suggests that in a world of limited resources, that the need for a sustainable environment trumps short-sighted economic policies which leave vast economic disparities, ideological extremisms, and environmental wastelands, in their wake. Common sense suggests that we in the industrialized world owe it to future generations to move toward green technology and renewable energy, and that we do so by creating good paying jobs around the world, which are aimed at producing green products which will protect and sustain the environment.
Such jobs will help to mitigate economic disparities, will help to neutralize ideological extremism, will help to clean up and sustain the earth, and will inspire people with a sense of hope by showing them a way out of the clutches of extreme poverty. Investment in green technology jobs by the Western world, and even by the Arab world, will have the added benefit of conferring to the investor countries, and their people, a sense of spiritual awakening, and restoring in them a sense of purpose and hope.
All this may seem like just talk, but talk which is persuasive can lead to action. As an example of where we need to go; the Japanese car company, Honda, just came up with a car, “Clarity,” which runs on a hydrogen fuel cell, with zero carbon emissions, just water vapor. And as you may know, Japan is investing heavily in developing industrial zones in the West Bank. Let me ask you this: Why can’t a plant to build this car be built in the West Bank? Why can’t Palestinian, Israeli, and Japanese business people collaborate, for a change, to make this happen? Why can’t Palestinian workers be hired and trained to produce a product that can help to protect the earth? Why can’t Saudi financing be used to finance the project as a way of converting oil profits to green profits, and as a way of neutralizing extremism?
Why? Why? Why? If it makes sense, and if it is now time to make sense of our lives, then why don’t we at least just give it a try?
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Hi Nissim.
We cannot but admit the importance of what you are talking about. Some times the crisis leads to better understanding of what really needs to be addressed or what really needs to be taken seriously by all people of the world. I hope ME would collaborate with other countries of the word to deal with this issue. This would be a very good news if we hear about news of production and activity in the conflicting regions, in a way that world would benefit, that would be some thing to be proud of. Amen
Hi Elinor, I agree with what you have to say, “Sometimes crisis leads to better understanding.”
For me, Global Warming is God’s way of calling upon us to account for ourselves. Many of us beleive that wee were created in God’s image, and therefore, like Him, we can create as well. What have we created? We have created a world that is not capable of sustaining itself. We have strayed far from the Common Sense that He gave us. We substituted our own agenda for His, and we find ourselves scratching our heads wondering where we went wrong.
So God is watching us, and in effect asking us to choose which way do we want to go. Are we going to use our technology to come together economically, as part of a global economy where everyone on earth has a place at the table, a stake in his or her future? Is that where we’re heading? Or are we instead going to allow our technology to be used against us in war, with the resulting death, destruction, and despair that are part and parcel of war.
Will we use our common sense, the collective wisdom born of shared experience, to solve the environmental problems we face, such as: Global Warming, water shortages, hurricanes, food shortages, disease, etc. Or are we instead going to allow the agendas of big business, and ideological extremists, to take us down the path of our own undoing.
It is as if God is losing patience with us, and is beckoning us, once and for all, to make a choice: Do we choose life, or do we choose death? How we choose will make all the difference in the world, and everything we love and hold dear hangs in the balance.
You say: “there is enough scientific evidence of the threat of Global Warming.” What evidence is that? It certainly isn’t the “revelation” that there is clear water at the North Pole. That has happened many, many times, here’s just a few instances and some references to some real observational science, rather than computer models:
20 August, 2000, North Pole ice ‘turns to water’
The BBC’s Adrian Campbell “These dramatic images are likely to rekindle anxieties about climate change” Dr James McCarthy, Harvard University: “All along our way the ice was both thin and intermittent” Arctic ice has become a mile-wide ocean, say scientists.
THERMAL PATHS TO THE POLE,THE CURRENTS OF THE OCEAN, BY SILAS BENT, SAINT LOUIS: 1872.
Just as the work was completed upon these currents in the North Pacific, in 1855, the news was received in the United States that Dr.Hane had discovered an open sea near the Pole, and people began to ask how that could be possible, when it was well known that a belt or region of ice several hundred miles in width must lie to the south of that sea, and which was never dissolved.
THE NORTH WEST PASSAGE BEING THE RECORD OF A VOYAGE OF EXPLORATION OF THE SHIP “GJOA” 1903 – 1907 BY ROALD AMUNDSEN
“We encountered no ice with the exception of a few narrow strips of old sound ice, carried by the wash. Of large Polar ice we saw absolutely nothing. Between the ice and the land, on either side, there were large and perfectly clear channels, through which we passed easily and unimpeded.
The entire accumulation of ice was not very extensive. We were soon out again in open water. Outside the promontories, some pieces of ice had accumulated; otherwise the sea was free from ice. The water to the south was open, the impenetrable wall of ice was not there.
At 5.30 P.M. we met a quantity of ice off Cape Maguire,a fairly broad strip of loose ice. Beyond this we could see clear water.
Captain Knowles reports the season the most open he has ever known. He entered the Arctic on the day we left Sari Francisco, May 22, and thinks the straits were open even earlier than that.
The ice of the Arctic Ocean is never at rest. Even in the coldest winters it is liable to displacement and pressure by the currents of air mid water. Tho expansion and contraction, due to changes in temperature, also assist in this disturbance.”
There are scientific papers showing that current conditions are not unique (and not a Texas oilman in sight):
Anomalies and Trends of Sea-Ice Extent and Atmospheric Circulation in the Nordic Seas during the Period 1864–1998 Issn: 1520-0442 Journal: Journal of Climate Volume: 14 255-267 Authors: Vinje, Torgny:
“It is not until the warming of the Arctic, 1905–30, that the NAO winter index shows repeated positive values over a number of sequential years, corresponding to repeated northward fluxes of warmer air over the Nordic Seas during the winter. An analog repetition of southward fluxes of colder air during wintertime occurs during the cooling period in the 1960s. Concurrently, the temperature in the ocean surface layers was lower than normal during the warming event and higher than normal during the cooling event.”
Taurisano, A., Boggild, C.E. and Karlsen, H.G. 2004. A century of climate variability and climate gradients from coast to ice sheet in West Greenland. Geografiska Annaler 86A: 217-224.
“the temperature data “show that a warming trend occurred in the Nuuk fjord during the first 50 years of the 1900s, followed by a cooling over the second part of the century, when the average annual temperatures decreased by approximately 1.5°C.” Coincident with this cooling trend there was also what they describe as “a remarkable increase in the number of snowfall days (+59 days).”
Climate variation in the European Arctic during the last 100 years Hanssen-Bauer, Inger, Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Co-Author Førland, Eirik J. (CliC International Project Office (CIPO) 21 June 2004)
“Analyses of climate series from the European Arctic show major inter-annual and inter-decadal variability, but no statistically significant long-term trend in annual mean temperature during the 20th century in this region. The temperature was generally increasing up to the 1930s, decreasing from the 1930s to the 1960s, and increasing from the 1960s to 2000. The temperature level in the 1990s was still lower than it was during the 1930s. In large parts of the European Arctic, annual precipitation has increased substantially during the last century.”
Igor Polyakov, who works at the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks says the warming of the Arctic Ocean has happened before, in a pattern that scientists call multidecadal variability. Since Norwegian explorer
Fridtjof Nansen first recorded Arctic Ocean temperatures in the late
1800s, the temperature of the Arctic Ocean has been higher than average
during two periods: from the 1920s to about the 1950s, and from the early 1980s to the present.
There are instances of a much warmer climate in the “frozen north”:
The Times June 1, 2006
The balmy North Pole of 50 million years ago
GLOBAL warming 49 million years ago was of such intensity that it left the
Arctic warm enough to become overgrown with vegetation, research shows.
Studies of sediment cores from the sea bottom reveal that long before the North
Pole froze it was covered with floating ferns. Six million years earlier the
water on the surface of the Arctic Ocean was a balmy 23C (73F) or higher,
equivalent to today’s subtropical seas.
Oldest DNA samples found on Greenland
By Steve Connor, Science Editor, Independent 06 July 2007
The world’s oldest DNA samples, retrieved from beneath a mile-deep cap of ice, have revealed a “lost world” of forest animals and plants that once thrived on Greenland before it became a frozen desert. Muddy sediments from the bottom of a 2km (1.2 mile) ice core have, for the first time, provided direct evidence that Greenland was covered in a dense forest teeming with flora and fauna less than a million years ago.
Just to wrap up with a couple of definitions, applying to both Poles:
Lead:
Any fracture or passage-way through sea ice which is navigable by surface vessels. A more general description of a lead is an area of open water or new ice between ice floes, although the term is generally applied to linear features. If the open area is very large it may be called a polynya.
Leads permit large transports of heat and mass between the ocean and the atmosphere. Deep within the ice pack, leads provide vital access to the ocean for seals and penguins, and breathing holes for whales.
Polynya
Any non-linear shaped opening enclosed in ice. Polynyas may contain brash ice and/or be covered with new ice, nilas or young ice; submariners refer to these as skylights. Sometimes the polynya is limited on one side by the coast and is called a shore polynya or by fast ice and is called a flaw polynya. If it recurs in the same position every year, it is called a recurring polynya.
Polynyas range in size from relatively small to enormous. The largest polynya observed in the Antarctic was the Weddell Polynya of 1975-77, covering an area of 2×105 km2. The two main categories of polynya are sensible heat and latent heat, depending on the mechanism responsible for maintaining their presence. Latent heat polynyas are maintained by persistent katabatic winds that drain off the continent. Newly formed ice is advected away by the wind, leaving the surface ice-free and open to more ice formation. In this manner latent heat polynyas can be major sources of new ice production. Coastal polynyas are primarily of this type. Sensible heat polynyas are maintained by upwelling warm water that supplies a sufficiently large oceanic heat flux to the base of the ice to reduce its thickness, or melt it completely. These polynyas are not responsible for large quantities of new ice production. A polynya may also form by a combination of the sensible and latent heat processes.
So why do we never get any of the real science reported? You won’t find any of this in the IPCC reports, they know about it but it doesn’t fit the theory, so they ignore it. The newspapers report the instances above one day and then report the sky is falling in the next day. When you hear the term, “scientists say”, it should be “some scientists say, but lots more disagree”. Remember that all the current claims are based on extremely short term data of 30-40 years, climate satellites were not around before 1978, yet we have far reaching and damaging policies based on the ideology of a few self-serving scientists and politicians.
Dennis, thank you very much for informing us, although to be quite honest, some of it was not easy to follow. I think back to my struggles with the study of science.
Obviously,I am not a scientist, and am not well informed on Global Warming, even though I’m trying to learn what I can. I am sure that there are scientists out there, and scientific evidence as well, which lean toward a more moderate view of our fate as a species. Some may argue against Global Warming altogether, while others may argue that Global Warming is a natural phenomenon which has occured previously in history.
To the second group, those who advocate that Global Warming is a natural phenomenon, I would say that we have to fix it, whether it’s natural or not. What other choice do we have? If the earth is getting warming, and if this process will be very destructive to our survival, then we have no reason not to try to mitigate its effects.
But I suspect that there is quite a lot of evidence out there that human activity, like burning fossil fuels, is helping the process along. One scientist made the point that if the earth, millions of years ago, found a way to store oil deep inside the earth, doesn’t it make sense that burning it into the atmosphere may not be the best idea, even if we don’t really understand all the processes involved? I mean, if you could choose a place to live, would you choose to live in a garage full of trucks, with their fragrant emissions permeating the air?
I understand what you say when you talk about ice being naturally scattered in the poles, even before the Industrial Revolution. And maybe such scattering naturally occurs due to expansion and contraction. But isn’t it true that the surface area of the ice has shrunk significanty in recent years? That, at least, is what National Geographic is saying.
Climate is complicated, there is no doubt. And with such complication, there will inevitably be evidence which could be used to support both sides of any given position. And it is also possible, that changes in climate which are occuring today due to human activity, may have also occured long ago due to natural causes. And this complicates things even further.
But what I tried to say, Dennis, is not that “…there is enough scientific evidence of Global Warming…” but that there is enough scientific evidence of Global Warming such that the threat of not doing anything is greater than the threat of addressing it, and later discovering that we didn’t have to.
My approach on this issue is not unlike what McCain is saying. He says that if we end up addressing Global Warming, and thereby leave a cleaner world for our children, then we will have done the right thing, even if it later turns out that Global Warming was not the threat we perceived it to be.
I guess to sum up, you could say that: The greater the threat of non-action, the greater the reason to act, even if the action taken is later proved not to have been necessary.
I would also point out that Al Gore shared the Nobel Prize with a group of distinguished scientists who concluded that Global Warming is a reality to be reckoned with. I would like to believe that they actually believe in what they’re saying, and that such belief is based, at least in part, on credible scientific evidence.
We welcome your continued contribution in this regard. We all want to be better informed, and more importantly, to do the right thing when the time comes.
I live in a small township in South Africa were issues like Global Warming is not of concern especially to our elders & youth.My question what can we do to encourage and teach our society about this issue?because many peole choose to ignore rather than deal with it!
Basetsana, yours is not the only community that ignores global warming. For the most part, the Western World, which created the problem in the first place, with the Industrial Revolution, has ignored it from the beginning, and continues to ignore it even as we speak. There are only now the stirrings of some level of concern, but it is an issue that is easy and convenient to ignore, especially when we face such economic upheavals.
There are reasons why the whole world has to come to grips with this issue. In the first place, if some of the dire predictions come true, then the effects on the climate could undo civilization as we know it. We will literally not be able to live the lives we have grown so accustomed to. Just imagine Capetown if sea levels go up 20 feet. And it will not be possible to protect the global environment without coming together and bringing about global cooperation.
The second reason why we must come to terms with this issue is economic. It is precisely now, at a time when the economy is in the tanks, that we need to find new economic frontiers. We need to find new ways of making money, and new customers for our goods and services. If you ask me, the new economic frontiers of the 21st century will be: Africa, the Middle East, and Green. If we can somehow use research to create green jobs, and to open up new markets in developing parts of the world, then to a great extent this will turbo-charge our efforts to energize our economies.
So my answer to you would be to speak to one another, gain some momentum on the grass roots level, and with enough awareness, you may be able to get people to listen, who have the power and the wealth to do something about it. You may get their interest by growing your numbers, and by suggesting that going green could be the answer to a lot of our economic woes. Money talks. Good luck with all of that.