In a recent article from the Huffington
Post, it was revealed that the effects of Climate Change may be far
worse, by a long shot, than what Climate Scientists originally
thought.
For many years Scientists studying
Climate Change and its affects said that global warming would warm the globe by about 2
degrees in the next hundred years or so. It seems that prediction
has changed. Now they are looking at a number that doubles the
originally perceived rise to about 4 degrees Celsius, or 7.2 degrees
Fahrenheit, by 2100. Many governments agree that the original belief
that the prior estimate of 2 degrees Celsius was the absolute maximum
comfortable threshold our planet could permanently warm by before
problems we already face would be drastically aggravated.
2C would be a bad enough problem, but
according to lead Researcher Steven Sherwood, a 4C rise would be
catastrophic! Examples he specifically sited were “making life
difficult if not impossible in much of the tropics, and would
guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of
the Antarctic ice sheet” All three events would of course change
the face of the inhabitable planet as we know it.
Why the sharp temperature increase? As
the globe warms its been found that the amount of cloud cover
decreases. Clouds are kind of a natural shield against the suns
rays, preventing the sun from heating the earth too quickly and
unabated. The less the cloud cover the faster the rise and the worse
the problem.
The article finished up by stating a
second report that stated that “we should be concerned about caused
by rapid warming” or a cause of concern as Huff reported. “many
of the biggest threats that climate change presents to are are ones
we are not ready for”
Well why not? Why aren’t we ready
for it? The answer is simple: Its because, where there is no real
argument as to whats going on in the part of the science community
about whats going on and what its cause is, there is a chasm that
splits the rest of the world, especially politics, between people who
live in reality and the people who fight against the change that’s
needed to fight climate change and what now looks to be the
catastrophic consequences of sitting and doing nothing.
What needs to happen? We've been
saying it all the long. On a consumer level we need to shop smarter
and greener. No nothing extreme as vegetarianism needs to be adopted
by all. We're talking about all the little things that add up to
something much bigger. CFL bulbs, using less damaging products in
our homes, decreasing the amount of garbage we produce as a household
and so on.
On a larger more industrial scale, we
need to start developing practices less harsh to our environment.
Develop new technologies that will get the job we need done, even
jobs as simple as getting us from point A to point B.
Whats the reality as it stands now?
This new information is going to be fought over, people will attempt
to dismantle it. I don’t know about other countries, but here in
the US this new information will be locked up in politics, and any
governmental action, which since the world runs on politics these
days, is a frightening notion! Those on the Liberal side ( real
liberals mind you) will try and draft bills that will address the
problem, and good from brilliant them, they are the ones I vote for,
and gridlock will happen because those bills aren’t something that
career Republicans want passed...because that affects their pockets
and they might get a little less in funding from their lobbyist
friends. What a horrifying notion for them.
This all goes to show two things: 1: We
need to deal with this problem and not keep sweeping it under the
carpet like we have been because 2: We desperately need to get money
out of politics. Much of the gridlock is not because people don’t
know that the problem is very real and very dangerous and needs to
dealt with. Its more the money thrown at politicians by corporate
entities and their lobbyists that stand to gain more money for
themselves by preventing any kind of change from happening.
Can it be stopped, or even slowed? Of
course it can. When humans stop abusing the world around us it has
an amazing ability to heal itself...but it cant do that if we
continue the way we're going now-
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