Climate may be changing ‘abruptly’

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Posted on June 27, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

I try, I try to focus on ecological hope.  I know this blog offers a lot of bad news, but the hope is that it contributes to an awakening about our predicament.

This quote from an article in today’s Washington Post: 

“There are thresholds in the system, there is the risk of changing the world as we know it to some form in which a lot of people on the planet will be put at risk.

“I think the temperature will continue to rise, the glaciers will continue to melt.  Sea levels will continue to rise.  I think there is a good indication now that the magnitude of severe storms will rise.”

The source: Lonnie Thompson, a scientist who has studied ancient glacier ice for more than two decades.  Thompson says the warming evidenced by the scale and rate of glacier melt around the world is unprecedented for more than 2,000 years.  He concludes that this melt “signals a recent and abrupt change in the Earth’s climate system.”

Does that put a chill down your spine — on this morning when the DC area again tries to clean up from rain-deluge disasters, with more to come later today?

Thompson believes that a sudden cooling 5,200 years ago is connected to abrupt changes in civilizations — and that we are rapidly approaching such an era — one where global warming will alter the earth’s atmosphere very quickly, bringing about an abrupt, and undoubtedly devastating shift in human life as we know it.  Actually, the quote does not put this in the future — Thompson says the glacier melt signals that the atmosphere is already altered.

Climate change may be happening faster than any of us want to acknowledge.  That’s what the science says.  We need to decide sooner than we may wish how we are going to live through this, and what kind of human beings we are going to be as the world changes all around us.  Hope is going to rest in how we rise to this unprecedented occasion — with dread, fear, violence, selfishness — or with a rising solidarity among human beings as we realize we are all in this together, and can only get through it with our humanity intact if we go through it together, with compassion, a profound sense of the common good, and a new spiritualtiy rooted in our respect for this beautiful planet that our own behavior has put in such jeopardy.

Ecological Hope is a project of the Center for New Creation.  Donations are tax deductible and deeply appreciated.  You can send your check or money order, made out to the Center for New Creation, and earmarked Eco-Hope, to the address in the contact box on this blog.  Your gifts will support development of workshops for local communities, grassroots resources, and a new interactive web site to be launched in the fall.  The project is focused on creating a culture of Ecological Hope within US society

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