Introduction to Climate Change 

We really don’t need an introduction, do we? We are becoming quite intimately acquainted with climate change.

The number of climate skeptics is getting smaller and smaller as we experience these monster storms and changes in weather patterns. Beyond weather issues, the science is solid that the earth is warming, largely because of human use of fossil fuels. All the international academies of science are in agreement. Every year the levels of airborne CO2 go up 2 parts per million in our atmosphere. They are higher now than at any time in the last million years, which is as far back as we can study.

In The Week publication for Dec. 28, 2012-January 4, 2013, this statement was made: “At the rate the ice is disappearing, the Arctic Ocean could be completely ice-free during the summer within just a few decades – almost a half century sooner than climate models predicted only five years ago… And since the Arctic ice cools polar regions and influences climate patterns for the rest of the planet, its decline could rapidly accelerate the rise of global temperatures.”

Recently we received news that the Antarctic ice shelf is beyond the point of no return. It will melt, and seawater levels will rise 3′ just from that.

View this spectacular and terrible video: http://www.youtube.com/embed/hC3VTgIPoGU?rel=0

To repeat a paragraph from the tab above, Don Brown is the author of several books on the ethics of climate change and also happens to be a member of a philosophy and literature book discussion group I attend. In a conversation of April 14, 2013, he used this phrase about climate change: “a civilization challenge of the highest urgency.”

A civilization challenge – how many of us can wrap our minds around that one? …a challenge to our very civilization on earth. A few years ago Don said that he felt like standing on the state capital steps in sackcloth and ashes, trying to get attention for this issue.

Let’s do what we can as individuals and families to pressure our representatives to help reduce our carbon footprints, protect Mother Earth for the seventh generation after us, and at the same time save money by moving to sustainable energy. These issues are taken a lot more seriously in many other countries than in the U.S., which Don says is viewed as a rogue nation in this regard. Our congress continues at cross-purposes, and our president continues to meet with much resistance in Congress. This is an issue we all need to be pulling together on.

One client long ago said, “We need a scientist in the White House, not a politician” or maybe a Teddy Roosevelt.

Websites to keep up to speed:

www.350.org
www.climateethics.org
www.realclimate.org
www.skepticalscience.com

Hopefully we all get active politically, because any efforts we put toward saving the earth and its creatures, we’ll also be doing for our children and grandchildren and the generations following them. No matter who is sitting in the oval office, there is always the 500-lb gorilla of Climate Change sitting in there, too.

Now the international debate is not whether Climate Change is upon us due to fossil fuels, but whether it is already too late to stop catastrophe from happening. As An Inconvenient Truth pointed out, if there is a 20-foot rise in sea level, there will be 300,000,000 refugees.

Let’s meet on the Resources for Climate Change page.