Waking Up to Global Warming
Exit Glacier or Exit: Glacier?
By Joan Opyr, 10-21-07
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I cheered when Al Gore won an Oscar for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. I was ecstatic when he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, sharing it with the United Nations’ the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What I didn’t expect, but in hindsight should have anticipated, was the far-right, ill-informed, full-throttle, conspiracy theory, total nutjob, We-Hate-Gore reaction.
It’s been seven years since Al Gore won the popular vote and George Bush took the election, but you know who’s still sore about it? The winners. The folks who snatched the U. S. Presidency, tucked it under the 14th Amendment, and ran ninety yards for that career-making touchdown. They’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. In the immortal word of Homer Simpson, Doh!
I checked the New York Times online the morning of Gore’s Nobel win. The comments section was chock-a-block with anti-Gore posts. To be fair, there were also many lefties urging Gore to use the Nobel as a springboard into the 2008 presidential race, but the vitriol from the right overwhelmed the congratulations of the left, the center, and the sensible. Global warming? It’s a communist plot. Climate change? Forget about it. Your carbon footprint? I once saw a cast of Sasquatch’s footprint. For far too many, global warming is an elaborate hoax constructed by, uh, Al Gore, tree-huggers, Hillary Clinton, people who drive the Toyota Prius, and stinky, cheese-eating, freedom-hating Europeans. In other words, that damned Bush-hating Nobel Committee.
Is the scientific journey still out on global warming and the anthropogenic (i.e., human) causes of rapid climate change? No. If you’re in doubt, turn off Fox News and try reading this, and this, and this. When a review of 928 randomly selected articles published in respected, peer-reviewed, scientific journals all agree that the global warming we have experienced over the past fifty years has been accelerated by human activity, we have achieved scientific consensus. Only the willfully obtuse remain in doubt.
Two weeks ago, I paid my first visit to Alaska. I drove down the Turnagain Arm to visit Portage Glacier and Exit Glacier. What I saw there was majestic and sad. Within five years, Portage Glacier will no longer be visible from the nearby observation station. As for Exit Glacier near Seward, one need only follow the date markers on the hike to the top to see how much the glacier has receded and how quickly. It was an overwhelming experience, and so what did I do? Something silly. I licked Exit Glacier.
Why? I don’t know. Maybe I’ve watched A Christmas Story one too many times. What did it taste like? Ice. Very old ice. Not at all suitable for use in a gin and tonic.
I saw my first glacier this summer at Lake Moraine. It was inaccessible, but a like a seven-year old in a toy store, I really wanted to touch it. Not, perhaps, the typical reaction to a natural wonder, but then again, why do people climb Mount Everest? It’s been done. Many have died. If you want to see the top of the world, you could watch a video, read a book, or just Google the damned thing up. It’s not the same, is it? You want your feet on that summit. You want to taste the mountain.
You don’t have much time left. When I moved to North Idaho on October 1st, 1993, it was snowing. We couldn’t get a tomato to ripen in our garden to save our lives. This year, we grew jalopeno peppers. We’re still picking squash because we haven’t had our first frost. Climate change is upon us. What are you going to do about it?
I’m going to turn down my thermostat, start pricing gas-electric hybrids, and take my kids to see a glacier before it’s too late.
Author’s note: As if on cue, an article appeared in the Washington Post this morning, October 21st, concerning the melting of the polar ice caps. How long before my home in Idaho will be beach-front property?
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Comments
Now of course the global warmers. changers are predicting disaster enough years out that they won't have to face the jeers from those pointing out how wrong they were like those of us reminding them of the 70s warnings.
What will I do, just what I have always done, live as simply as possible, hang clothes on the line, wash in cold water, drive little cars, etc.
What I will not do is run around seeing how much consumption I can do in order to tell others to cut back. That does not seem sensible to me and it most assuredly does not look like those who do that, take the whole thing seriously.
I think every single person should live the way they want to force others to live, then it would be public opinion pushing the agenda. How often do you see a guy with a pipe in one pocket, a stogie in the other and chain smoking telling everyone else to quit smoking because it is wrong?
It is very unlikely that mankind will cut their greenhouse gas emissions so fast and drastically that abrupt climate change or runaway global warming will be avoided.
Even Dr James Hansen of NASA says any feasible planetary rescue plan must include a method of removing some of the CO2 from the air.
I suggest the low cost method of biosequestation. Seeding an extensively tested GMO into the ocean to remove vast amounts of carbon from air and put it into the ground where it came from.
For much more (sorry, this limited amount of space makes my argument sound spacious) read my blog at http://www.myspace.com/dobermanmacleod
crazy weather scares me - we're destroying our world and most people don't seem to care ...
I recently checked a "foliage" chart that the Arbor Day Foundation put out. Plants that used to grow only as far north as mid-Alabama (@1991) now grow in mid-Kentucky. So...what? Those plants hopped a bus to visit cousins? Nope. It's now warm enough long enough in mid-Kentucky to support plants that require super-long growing seasons. In just over 15 years, plants that couldn't grow in mid-Kentucky are now doing so.
Don't think people can affect environment? Look up "Love Canal" (yeah, sounds kinda kinky. Google "Love Canal New York" and see what comes up). Anybody remember the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969? When the river actually burst into flames from oil and contamination? That's right. Rivers did this a lot after the advent of the Industrial Revolution during the 19th and 20th centuries but the '69 fire, immortalized in a Randy Newman song, got people thinking about keeping water supplies clean. How did those rivers get so polluted? Hmmm. I wonder. Maybe...people? Factories dumping their waste products into them? Well, who built those factories? I'm gonna say "people." Or try this experiment. Jog in Los Angeles on a hot day. Mid-afternoon. You think those "air alerts" for people with breathing problems in heavily polluted cities are commie plots to keep people from working? Try that jog. How did all that pollution get there in Los Angeles? Well, it's carbon -based, so you have a few choices. Either Los Angelenos leave all their dead people and dead animals (and plant matter) out to rot (since we're carbon-based to an extent as well) and the gases of all those dead bodies is polluting the air over the city OR (and this might be a stretch for some) the emissions of millions of vehicles and industries could be clinging to the air around that city, causing some massive pollution problems. Climb the Hollywood hills (if you're able to after that jog) and see what the air is doing in the city. You should notice a heavy brown cloud settled over the city. You should also notice that in the Hollywood hills, it's probably a bit cooler than in the city. Why? Well, lack of asphalt and concrete, which tend to absorb sunlight during the day. Which is why cities tend to be a bit hotter at night than surrounding countrysides. Hmmm. A human-made construct that can affect a local climate. Interesting. I wonder if it's possible to extrapolate that model to a larger one...
Still don't think chemicals and crap like that can cause icky things to happen in a micro-environment? Try THIS experiment. Have someone come and paint a room in your house. Use your average paint like you'd buy at a hardware store. Keep the windows and the doors closed in that room and put some plants in there. See what happens to those plants after a few days. And maybe try being in that room with the doors and windows closed for a couple of hours. See how you feel.
As individuals, we have remarkable power to change our immediate surroundings through relatively simple means. For example, dumping our trash in a nearby irrigation ditch. You might think that's just one person doing that, so no big deal. Well, what if that one person did that for a year? Five years? Twenty? Once a week, one bag of trash. Think about it. What would shift in that micro-ecosystem as a result?
What I don't understand is why there is such resistance to the concept that we as a species--collectively/globally--can alter climates. It seems easy to see that we have done so on localized levels. And we are, after all, part of a larger system, in which everything is interwoven. When stress is put on parts of that system, other parts respond, through things like shifts in foliage belts, droughts in places that normally don't know what the word means, crazy storms, and receding glaciers. And for all you capitalists in the mix, there is some serious money to be made in green industry and green products. So, fine. Be a capitalist about it, if that's what it takes to think about the state of the planet and what we're leaving for future generations.
And I'll be the first to consider "natural" climatic shifts. Sure. Those have happened. Paleoclimatological models suggest such. However...those shifts happened over a much longer timespan and the spike in temperatures wasn't as pronounced in such a short period of time (about 150 years--coinciding with the Industrial Revolution) as it's been this recently. So if you want to disavow any connection between human activity and the current weirdness in the weather, and you want to just continue having dessert in your dinner jacket while the Titanic lists, and not at least consider the possibility that we as a species might be able to slow this shift or develop better practices to preserve our air, water, and food supplies, then there's not much the rest of us can do about your opinion, I suppose. However, I believe that we as as species, though remarkably destructive, also have the capacity to do great and wonderful things and I do like to hope that if we cannot reverse what's happening, perhaps we can arrest it for a while until we figure out better ways to live in a global system and still keep a clean house. After all, this is the only house we've got right now--Planet Earth. And I'd sure like to try to get it a little cleaner and reduce human impact on its air, water, and land. Why is that such a bad thing? And why is it such a bad thing to think that we might actually be screwing something up? Okay, so we're messing up. Let's put our heads together and figure something out. This isn't a right/left situation. It's a survival of us as a species situation and I would think that we can all agree that it's possible to clean things up and develop safer, cleaner industries (if that's the route you want to go) and keep chemicals out of our air, water, and land. Why is that a bad thing to want and why is it such a bad thing to say: "Okay, maybe we as a species are creating some problems. So let's try to stop exacerbating these problems and come up with some solutions." I mean, don't we ALL want clean air? Clean water? A healthy food chain? Less freaky weather? I'll admit that I sure do. Y'all?
May I recommend you read a most excellent article appearing along side of yours in this same issue of New West entitled "Guest Opinion: George Wuerthner's On the Range
Cows or Condos? Neither!" By George Wuerthner, 10-20-07?
I think you might possibly approve of his conclusions but his use of balanced reason, his absence of name calling, his use of facts that fit the subject is something I yearn for you to discover. Self-congratulation in an author on any side of an argument is so deliciously low and unconvincing, and unwittingly, those who support your positon are forced to bear the embarressment of your rhetoric for all your appeal to be the representive of science and intellectual superiority.
Bottom line: while your zeal is obvious any well prepared high school debator would clean your clock if she/he were assigned the job of negating your arguments (as you present them) in a fairly judged debate. And if you think how you communicate is subserviant to what you communicate I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you (to tear down for the good of the planet of course).
One of the things that I struggle to understand is why so many Westerners seem to hate Al Gore and others who have stood up to the establishment on issues of personal freedom and individual rights.
They do not get it !!!Why???
I understand the Easterners hatred of anything or anyone who doesn't walk on the sidewalks but through the sand or weeded pathways. (I spent 15 years on the east coast)
But I just can't understand how men and women of the west would ever vote for these guys who consistently support the status quo---who lock step behind Bush on this really, really wrong war!?!? Who blindly support the selling of our lands to foreign citizens and governments---who support billions of dollars in supplemental spending for this war---who agree with the administration that children ad seniors,our health care and schools all should not have their basic needs met!?!? Who agree with Bush that our food supply does not need to be safe!?!?Who think it is just fine for the government to spy on us!?!?Who think we all need to be born again!?!?
Al Gore is our best hope for anyone who cares about the natural world.My dream ticket for 2008 is Gore/Richardson.
Water is going to be our most urgent problem in my opinion, yet swimming pools are going in every day. Folks in the deserts of California and Arizona have to also have big green lawns to go with those pools. California in particular has lots of environmental types wanting to dictate how others should live, but not themselves. IF humans are to blame, those with the most consumptive life style are going to have to be the ones to cut the most, not just tell others to stay home and turn off the heat so they can have their ever bigger houses and fly around in private jets.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3310_sun.html
Global dimming offsetting global warming to an extent but global warming by itself a stronger force than is currently apparent.
I think it is estimated at alittle less than 1C. It is said that a new coal-fired power plant's CO2 emissions won't contribute to global warming for around 20 years because of the global dimming effect of it's emissions.
By the way, the climate sensativity to carbon is double what the IPCC was saying:
Climate sensitivity to greenhouse gas levels in the air is established as about 3 degrees centigrade (C) rise for a doubling from the pre-industrial level. This is known as the "Charney 3C."
Unfortunately, this doesn't include slower feedbacks such as ice sheet decay, permafrost melting and methane release, and carbon cycle feedbacks that amplify climate changes on time scales of decades to centuries.
If these slow feedbacks are considered, the climate sensativity to a doubling of greenhouse gas levels is 6C! If the longer term climate sensativity is considered, we have long ago past the threshold of dangerous warming.
I suggest a low cost method of removing CO2 from the air called "biosequestration."
Seed an extensively tested GMO into the ocean to remove tremendous amounts of carbon from the air, and put it back into the ground where it came from.
The high cost of rebuilding our energy infrastructure is creating political deadlock. We need to remove the excess carbon from the air as soon as possible, not wait for a damaged earth to remove it for us.
For more information, read my blog at http://www.myspace.com/dobermanmacleod
The problems of going green? Having to listen to Marion whine about how someone else is telling her how to live between her bouts of shouting at the imaginary kids on her lawn.
Actually, aside from that, there are problems with going green. There will probably be a point of moving backwards in terms of emissions while technologies are tried and abandoned. There will be higher costs for shipping unnecessary items long distances.
The direct benefits of going green now? For those alive today, probably not much. Cleaner air and the knowledge that the earth we pass on to our children and their children may still be inhabitable within the next 100 years.
People are losing their homes in Alaska because permafrost that has existed for thousands of years is melting. Aleutian Islands that provided breeding grounds for certain species are under water. Ice that hasn't seen sunlight for tens of thousands of years is suddenly gone, releasing tons of trapped methane and CO2. Rapid calving of massive ice sheets is creating dangers for southern hemisphere shipping lanes.
And all that needs to happen is a slight change to Atlantic water currents and much of the Western European lands become inhabitable.
So while science hasn't given us all the answers we demand, the evidence of massive change is too blatantly obvious. That is, if you aren't too busy telling those damned kids to get off your lawn to examine it.
I don't talk, I do and that is what most of you do NOT want to do, actually do what you say needs to be done. Practice what you preach and you will hear no complaint form me. I do not believe in man caused global warming, too many of the "models" have already been wrong, that does not mean I do not think we all need to cut back, but demanding others do what you won't do is not going to get us anywhere irregardless of who is right.
I have no idea why you are so hung up on kids on my lawn, but my "lawn" is actually the meadow grass that was here when I moved here and it can stand up to all of the grand and great grand kids that I can pile on it.
Gore buys all of his electricity from renewable sources. He uses that private jet rarely and only when the demand is there. He doesn't eat rare Chilean Sea Bass, despite those accusations by people just like yourself. He is a messenger, a mouthpiece for the scientists. He faces ignorant people such as yourself all the time, shouting that he's a hypocrite, that he's a liar, and yet he still attempts to educate all of us. He is a true believer in what he is doing, he believes in his message. He is charismatic, energetic and fervent. He has connections within all the realms of science and politics and he worries the bejebus out of people like yourself for reasons I just don't understand.
What I don't get, quite yet, is if you do this out of a religious stance, and anti-science stance or just an anti-anything-Gore stance. Maybe all 3?
The problem, Marion, is that daily temperatures DON"T MATTER. And trying to act like 1939 temperatures have some effect on a rising GLOBAL mean temperature? Thats limited thinking that only leads to misinformation for those that don't have time to get clarification. Just like Bryan "Village Idiot" Fischer, you try to imagine that daily temps are somehow indicative of something. But the daily temperature thing is just a clear indication of your inability to understand the issue, Marion.
And it isn't just you, you're just a convenient target here. You make wild speculative generalizations with no evidence or fact only because it is something you disparately need to believe for some reason that I don't understand. People just like yourself are a dime a dozen on sites like FreeRepublic, Pajamas Media, Don Surber's blog, or any other conservative echo chamber. And the problem with that? None of you are using the science or the facts, just vague conclusions based on nothing more than your own sense of righteousness.
Science doesn't need you, Marion. Scientific, factual discussions need even less from you.
I only walked a quarter of a mile uphill to the bus stop, downhill going back to the house OK? By the way during the terrible storm during the winter of '49, not only my Dad, but all of the Dads along the bus route helped pull the bus out of snow banks. Today that is an example of global climate change.
I will admit the hurricane predictions the last two years have not helped to change my mind about global warming.....unless you think all of those 3rd world countries have cut back further, and that is why there were none. On the other hand, maybe, just maybe God had the last word instead of the computers, you suppose?
Shut down petroleum and coal and you better PRAY for global warming or folks will die from the cold.
The hurricane data? The scientists admitted they were incorrect, that they didn't factor in the warmer ocean temperatures and how the wind shear velocity would reduce tropical storm buildup. Add to this the additional data of increased humidity due to warming air masses along with many other factors not totally understood and it is very easy to see how they could easily get it wrong.
There is a vast underground discussion of how to present scientific findings to the public so knee jerk reactions don't happen as often, as with the announcement that one scientist determined that hurricanes would be stronger and more frequent. They have to start filtering because people like you use failures of scientists to determine that all scientists are wrong (incorrect generalities).
And I'm not quite sure who is suggesting that we shut down coal and oil. The suggestions right now is that cleaner processing be implemented. In fact, that was the law until Bush took the stage and redacted it with the "Clean Skies Act".
And I'm glad the FSM has more leverage than your God. It makes me warmer at night so when the cold boogiemen steal all the coal and oil I'll be just fine.
Also, can you explain my "floundering" with actual quotes instead of insinuation? Of course, you might have a hard time doing that. It is called CTRL-C and CTRL-V, just to help you out.
You can act like a saint, but the next sinner (and there are all too many) will undo your good work plus.
No, individual conservation is a virtue, not a solution.
We have got to remove the excess carbon from the air ASAP, not wait for a damaged earth to do it for us. On the other hand, you can just continue to brag about your own smaller carbon footprint and see where it gets you (into heaven?).
So all of this talk about forcing the country to go to little twisty bulbs to save the universe, and turn down the heat for the same reason are just so much hot air (pun intended)?
What is FSM?
But I'll bite and attempt to slowly explain Global Average Mean temperatures and how they are the only sure method for detecting global climate change resultant warming.
Are these words too big for you? Your last post is making me thing I need to use monosyllabic verbiage, but I'll keep going anyway.
Global Mean Average Temperatures are generated through immense amounts of data generated by a few thousands of temperature sensors and satellite gathered data. As well, calculations of previous global mean average temperatures can be generated by various scientific methods of deduction, giving us a pretty good picture of the temperature extremes across the globe in the past.
Taking all of this data and generating a global mean average temperature shows that the lower atmosphere has been warming at a rate greater than at any previous time that we can determine. Taking how hot your backyard is in July? Not interesting. Taking the global mean average temperature across the globe and realizing that a 1 degree C increase has happened and is continuing upwards at what appears to be a very significant rate? Very scary, given that rising sea levels, rising extinction rates, rising skin cancer rates across multiple species all have been noticed before "global warming" was really all that much of a scientific fact.
And more data tends to agree with the rising Global Mean Average Temperature models and the continuation of the historical GMAT curve.
And if you think your "god" is greater than the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I've got a bridge to rent out.
I will stick to God and put my trust in Him. Neither can be proven until judgement day can it...if I were wrong, I'd lose nothing, if you are wrong....think about it.
Also, I'll be sure to have a good laugh at your inability to understand the usefulness of satellite gathered temperature data coupled with the data from ground based stations. Science based math, it isn't just for breakfast anymore.
In paragraph 4 of the original article, The writer asks, "Is the scientific journey still out on global warming and the human causes of rapid climate change?"
The proper phrase would ask if the "scientific JURY" was still out on global warming. The phrase comes from the expression, "the jury is still out," which suggests that there is still some deliberation and that a verdict has not been reached. The writer ends the paragraph stating that peer-reviewd scientific journals have all reached the concensus that global warming has been caused by human behavior. Concensus is the outcome of a jury, not a journey.