Environmental Talk

Golden retrievers try to escape the damage they’ve caused ….”

Ed. note: I’m on vacation in Colorado this week … thought I’d leave you a couple of excerpts from “The Sky is Falling: A Global Warming Survival Guide” to keep you going throughout the week ….

Has the average temperature of the planet risen over the past century? Yes, it has … by a whopping whole half a degree centigrade. Interestingly, nearly three-quarters of that rise took place prior to the 1940s–well before any major man-made emissions of fossil fuel. That fact doesn’t exactly jibe with the industrial-man-as-the-causeof-global-warming theory but, no matter; throw in some news footage of natural disasters and a deep, authoritative voice-over blaming it all on man’s violation of Gaia, and people will forget about actually checking to see if it all makes sense.

Are we saying humans haven’t contributed at all to the global rise in temperatures? Of course not; we probably have. But so have Golden Retrievers – there are more of them than ever and they throw off a lot of heat after a good run in the park. Oh, and by the way, trees, clouds, sun-spots, cyclical ocean currents and a ton of other things we can’t even begin to understand have also contributed. However, it’s just not as sexy as blaming big corporations, greedy politicians and SUV-driving junior executives.

But what about the future? Some folks say it’s too late to stop global warming – others believe we can delay the end of the world as we know it. How much hotter is it going to get over our lifetime?

The best estimates scientists can come up with range from two degrees to 15 degrees over the next 100 years. If you went to a fortune-teller and she told you you’d have from two to 15 kids or get married two to 15 times during your life, you’d walk out of her shop laughing about what a crock the whole crystal ball industry was. Of course, you wouldn’t be chuckling later that evening when you grew a tail, but that’s another story.

Suffice to say, two to 15 degrees is an incredibly wide range of guesstimates about how much global temperatures could change over the next five or six decades. (If it makes you feel any better, the most credible estimates are clustered at the low end of the range.)

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”

Although that sounds like a quote from an HBO special about global warming, it’s actually from a 1970 speech at Swarthmore College by ecologist Kenneth Watt. Mr. Watt went on to say, “The
world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years … If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Remember the Great Ice Age that occurred at the turn of the century? Neither do we. Somehow, despite warnings that “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war” as a risk to the planet,
we somehow made it through the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s and all the way to the present.

Turns out cable TV monopolies were a greater threat than climate change.

global warming, climate change, The Sky is Falling, A Global Warming Survival Guide