Global Warming: Or Is It Cooling?
Posted on July 28, 2008 by Michael Paskel |
I was informed this past week that a study by a right wing group had shown that global warming has in fact, been greatly exaggerated. According to my dearest friend and closest confidant of nearly 25 years who also happens to view the politics of this world from a polar opposite perspective, there is irrefutable evidence that the world is in fact growing cooler not warmer.
Imagine that!
I am left with somewhat the same befuddlement at looking at the same data and arriving at such differing conclusions, as I was after watching the O.J. Simpson jury return it’s shocking verdict and realize that good honest people can sometimes see different images while starring at the same object.
Most scientists with a thorough understanding of the problem say we can “AFFORD” (a demonstrably flawed use of the word “afford” when you consider the context but that’s the word used so I’ll simply repeat it here) can afford to put another 400 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere before we reach a point of no return. According to a study published last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters this could happen within the next two decades.
The knowledge of this time line should hasten our switch from carbon-based fuels to clean renewable energy on a Manhattan Project scale.
However, with 700 billion tons of oil in the ground, another 500 billion in tar sands and natural gas, and coal making up the balance of nearly 3500 billion tons of carbon based fuel in reserve world wide, two things become abundantly clear. First, we have a sufficient supply of carbon-based fuels to cook our planet many times over. Second and perhaps more ominously, we show no inclination to move to carbon neutral energy while there is still a manageable window of opportunity to do so; not so long as that kind of fossil fuel supply is readily available.
It is more likely that we will rush headlong into consumption of all fossil fuels faster than we can adapt to non-carbon energy, tipping the balance of irreparable global warming, plunging the world into a cosmological catastrophe.
As a child, I was enthralled by the concept taught by my grammar school teachers, of plants and animals pirouetting in a delicate ecological ballet. Each time I exhaled into the air I put a small amount of CO 2 into the atmosphere. But that was OK, because outside on the playground there was a Maple tree that lived only because of the CO 2 it could absorb from the air around it. And guess what it expired as a waste product of its photosynthesis? Oxygen, the stuff I needed to sustain my life. Odd how all that worked out. So here we were, two distinct life forms -plants and animals- co-existing, each requiring from the other its necessary constituent breath of life. As long as we had trees and they had us, everything should work like…. milk and cookies.
But they also taught me that underground lay vast oceans of petroleum and continental shelves marbled with titanic veins of coal and tar sands, deposited there over unknowable eons of time. Enough that were it to be moved above the surface of the planet, it would ingest our atmosphere almost literally overnight and turn our beautiful blue planet into a global lake of hell fire, not that much different from the planet Venus.
No longer would the gentle face of mother Earth be splashed each night in moonlight during its passage beneath the great Terrene shadow. No longer could the oceans of liquid water and of turbulent gases of nitrogen and oxygen, wash and cleanse and heal our fragile eco-system. But, so long as that carbon were contained safely below ground, and with plants and animals sustaining each other above ground, our world could go on for millions of years as it had for billions before, with hardly a hiccup.
Yet for the last several centuries, our industrial revolution has been tearing earth inside out, disgorging ever larger and larger amounts of CO 2 into the thin envelope that is our atmosphere. The plants can no longer keep up with the amount of CO 2 that is filling the air. In fact, If we stopped polluting the atmosphere TODAY, if we didn’t put another single molecule of carbon into the air it would take plant life more than a thousand years to return the atmosphere to pre-industrialized levels.
I’m little concerned with the short-term benefits realized or the political imperative pursued by those interests that would drive the disinformation effort about global warming. It is what it is. But I am greatly concerned that a discerning public could look at the same peer reviewed scientific studies I’ve seen and which most scientists who’ve studied the issue have produced and yet still believe that switching to carbon-zero energy sources is an option that can be exercised after languid and interminable consideration.
Delay is a luxury the planet cannot AFFORD.
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2 Responses to “Global Warming: Or Is It Cooling?”
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Excellent article. Very eye-opening!
I believe it. The waters off Southern New Jersey have become colder than usual - it has only hit 70 degress a few days so far this year! Great article!