Poignant reflection on climate change
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Posted on February 11, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
In last week’s NT Times Science section, which comes out each Tuesday, the paper’s now-retired ‘lead reporter on climate change,’ William K. Stevens, wrote an essay in which he offers his own poignant reflections on the now-overwhelming scientific consensus that human-caused greenhouse gases are the main cause of global warming. That consensus was dramatically expressed in the release of the summary report of the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the other week.
Stevens followed this story over the course of a decade as the science moved from concern to probability to certainty — 90-99 percent certainty that human-caused greenhouse gases are heating the planet resulting in permanent climate change leading in turn to more catastrophic weather events.
He muses on what it might mean if we double, or, horrors beyond horrors, triple the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution. He refers to NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who has said that, however the climate change pans out, future generations ‘will be living on a different planet.’
We are ‘engaged in a titanic global experiment,’ he writes, and to those of us younger than his 71 years, and to the generations to come, well, he wishes us luck.
Graph credits:
Earth Policy Institute
United Nations Environment Program/GRID-Arendal
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