Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

By now you’ve probably heard it from a variety of sources — 2006 was the hottest year ever recorded.  I link to the Chicago Sun-Times article because my niece sent it to me with a note saying that it was emblazoned across the front page yesterday.  Good.  That is where it belongs.

The other day, I reported that Brian Williams did a story on our ‘wacky winter weather’ interviewing someone from NOAA who insisted that this year’s warm winter in the east and wild storms across the west and the plains had nothing to do with global warming, that it was a result solely of the El Nino effect.  Of course, everyone else was reporting that global warming was combining with El Nino to create this record weather across the country.

Anyway, I noticed that a couple of days later, NBC changed its tune, actually corrected itself.  Hard to be the only one putting the spin of denial over this story.

And, as I noted in this post, British scientists believe 2007 could be the warmest yet.

Finally, two facts from the Sun-Times story that I want to note: one, that the world’s six warmest years since the 1890s occurred since 1998; the other, truly interesting — that total warming in the past 100 years was about 1.4 degrees, while the total warming since 1970 is 1 degree.  You see the significance of that.  Of that 1.4 degrees, a full degree is just in the past 36 years. 

Warming is increasing and accelerating.  And this has occurred in conjunction with the industrial revolution, its spread across the world, along with the rising population that it has made possible.

These are the trends that we must reverse, and quickly, to keep the warming from reaching the 2-5 degrees by the end of the century that scientists concur would be catastrophic.