Is Global Warming really happening? Should you care? Can you do anything about it anyway?

The short answer is a big yes to all three. The vast majority of scientists have agreed for the past decade that global warming is happening. Why you should care is that even small changes to average temperatures on the earth trigger tremendous, sometimes irreversible changes to our weather and sea levels. We have a short memory of the earth’s history, but science has learned that the earth goes through vast cycles from ice ages to periods of tremendous inland flooding that last tens of thousands of years or more. The trigger for these events have been natural in the past, but global warming is triggering a major change on its own. If the current warming cycle continues, erratic weather, droughts, changes in climate, destruction of habitat, more frequent and more powerful hurricanes and the flooding of coastal cities will just be the beginning. I kid you not. Can you personally do anything to stop it? Right now even as you sit reading this, you are unknowingly contributing to the problem – become a part of the solution instead.

How are we creating Global Warming?

Mostly by using energy. Most of the energy we use come from fossil fuels like gasoline, diesel, home heating oil, coal. They all release carbon dioxide, a clear, mostly odorless gas, as a waste product as they burn. Carbon dioxide is naturally in the environment, there are over a thousand trillion pounds of it present in our atmosphere. We contribute approximately thirteen trillion pounds to the atmosphere every year from burning fossil fuels, burning forests to clear land and natural wildfires. Our contribution is relatively small but constant. Every year earth’s carbon dioxide (CO2) levels get higher. Carbon dioxide is called a greenhouse gas because it allows sunlight to pass through it, but traps the heat from the sun in the atmosphere. The end result is that the earth’s atmosphere is getting a little warmer on average over time. Just small shifts in temperature trigger greater melting of the ice caps. The more the ice caps melt, the less they reflect sunlight back out into the atmosphere and the more heat is absorbed. It becomes a viscous cycle that eventually can result in all the ice caps melting and large portions of our landmasses submerged under water. To learn what science knows about global warming visit www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/crosscutting and click on Climate & Society.

If Global Warming continues what can we expect?

Researchers are already associating global warming with bleaching of the world’s coral reefs, retreat of mountain glaciers and reduction of the planet’s ice caps, record high temperatures being set and unusual droughts and floods being triggered by small increases in average global temperatures. More severe hurricanes are expected since they are powered by warm water. The large scale circulation of water between the oceans could also be disrupted as the oceans warm. This could further alter climate by shifting warm currents. This could both heat up or cool down areas depending on where the currents shift to. Northern Europe could experience a small ice age due to the loss of warm currents even as large areas of the planet heat up, when you muck with mother nature the consequences are complex and hard to predict. As the ice caps melt and the oceans expand from being heated, first the coastal cities, then much of middle America and low lying lands like the middle east will be threatened by flood. Geologic history records that over half of the land mass of the current United States has spent as much time under water as above water when natural triggers caused ice caps to melt.

Does Al Gore know what he is talking about?

The information Al Gore provides in the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” is accurate though not always presented in a completely unbiased fashion. Al Gore does not present much evidence to contradict his message but then there is not very much substantial contradictory information out there. Most of the critics point out that the earth has always gone through these changes naturally without our help and question whether our small inputs can make a difference one way or the other. These skeptics are just making comments none of them have significant scientific research behind them to make their opinions supportable. Many critics of global warming are supported by the oil industry to give the general public the impression that the issue was still in dispute by science. Since the release of Al Gore’s movie, the view of the general public across the world seem to have moved closer to the general scientific consensus that warming is occurring.