Global temperatures on steep rise
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Posted on April 17, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Today from Margaret Swedish:
The Bush administration doesn’t get it, or doesn’t want to get it, or doesn’t want you to get it. Take your pick. But his denial of the threat of global warming may the biggest moral failing of this government if we look at it on a scale of potential disaster for human beings and all life on this planet.
Every time I add a post to this blog, I have a choice of articles, citations, studies, from which to choose. At least the media is beginning to report on this. Last evening, the Easter Sunday NBC Nightly News (with undoubtedly a smaller-than-usual audience, so such scary stories are safer to air) had a report on the dying of coral reefs all over the world. (To view, go to http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619: Then look for the video, "Global warming damages coral reefs."). This has been observed, reported studied for years and years. Nothing new here, other than the appearance of the story itself.
Okay, here’s a short one to cite, because the source matters, and you can easily copy this or email it to your friends, loved ones, church leaders, politicians, local newspapers. “British Expert Warns of Global Warming.” The expert is Sir David King and he is the top science advisor to the British government.
King reports that global temperatures are likely to rise by 5.4 degrees by the end of the century. By comparison, last century as the industrial revolution really matured and global population took off, the temperature rose by less than one degree, more like 0.7.
Among the dire consequences: disastrous increases in drought and water shortages threatening the lives of up to 3 billion people (yes, that number is correct, amounting to nearly half the current population of the earth, some one third as we reach 9 billion by 2050) and failure of grain crops across large swaths of the earth.
It could actually be worse – some computer models show temperature rises as high as 10 or 11 degrees by 2100. And one of the hardest things for those of us who have cared about the threat of global warming for decades (mostly howling at the moon in regard to policy-makers), is that it is now too late to avoid enormous and difficult – well, let’s be clear, truly wrenching – changes in our lives and to life on this earth, which has been so generous to us until we succumbed to greed and comfort and pride and hubris and willful ignorance.
Bush tells you we cannot submit to mandatory limits on carbon emissions because it will hurt the economy. Given the disasters to come (failure of agriculture, hundreds of millions of environmental refugees, droughts and floods, more extreme weather events, more human disease spreading across the globe, dwindling supplies of energy and food, flooding of coastal cities that may have to be abandoned, and on and on), can someone explain rationally why doing nothing is a better option economically?
Okay, King does not say to give up. But his is one more in the long line of urgent messages. The urgency used to be about keeping terrible things from happening. Now it is about how to keep those terrible things from getting to a point where human survival is in jeopardy, salvaging something of the biodiversity needed to sustain life, while having the foresight to begin planning now (yesterday would have been better) for the needed adaptation. And that means changing fundamentally how we live our daily lives.
And that’s one direction I want to take this blog – looking at those changes and committing our lives to them – for the sake of our planet, for the sake of our children and their children’s children.
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