I wasn’t kidding about the Alps
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Posted on December 16, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
After last night’s post about what global warming is doing to the winter ski industry, I picked up this morning’s NY Times and found this article, aptly entitled “Global Warming Poses Threat to Ski Resorts in the Alps,” as if global warming is a real thing, actual news to be reported.
One study cited here indicates that Europe has not been this warm since the 8th century. Some Europeans want to deny that this is caused by global warming, saying it could just be a bad winter, but:
Climtologists…say the warming trend will become dramatic by 2020. The new studies are alarming, suggesting that the Alps are warming twice as fast as the average in the rest of the world. In 1980, 75 percent of Alpine glaciers were advancing; now, 90 percent are retreating.
Wow! In geological or climate terms, that is an astonishingly quick reversal. If things are happening so fast there, what will this mean all around our globe over these next decades.
Well, we have posted about the Alps before. It’s just another indication of the ecological changes, and losses (like the Alps without snow), that we are facing, begging once again the need for us to stop expending so much destructive and futile energy in the effort to try to keep life as we know it going, but rather to adapt and change and put our consumption and pollution habits on a downward course. We need our best skills and know-how devoted to addressing climate change, rather than the futile effort to ward off the inevitable.
Which brings to mind the storms of the northwest. What in the world is going on out there? I have a brother who lives just north of Seattle. He called me as this recent storm was getting underway, torrents and torrents of rain (a rate of 5 inches per hour, he said)that caused him to turn his car around and not go to the meeting he was planning to attend. He said the lightning was intense — and there is almost never lightning in that part of the world. Then he and his wife hunkered down as the big winds blew in. He said it was an incredible experience.
And this was just the lastest storm, and the fiercest so far.
So I found this article from 1999, reporting on what climatologists predict for the northwest with global warming, this after a previous period of record flooding. The debate around what is causing these more severe storms is active, but global warming is considered one of the possibilities.
Just more crazy weather to add to the long list of extreme weather events that seem to have become part of the daily news cycle.
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