An Inconvenient Truth
Jul 25th, 2006 at 10:05 pm by Susie
Peter King from Sports Illustrated:
This should interest all of us.
In my town, Montclair, N.J., we had a once-in-a-generation wind, hail and rain storm last week, uprooting 120-year-old oaks all over our neighborhood. One of those monsters crushed the car of the pitcher on the summer softball team I coach. A neighbor told me it was the worst weather event he’s seen in 52 years in the town.
Wherever you are, have you noticed the weird weather patterns in the last few months? Unending, intense rain. High winds. It was in the midst of a 12th day of measurable rain in a 14-day period that I saw An Inconvenient Truth, the Al Gore movie about global warming.
This is the most apolitical piece of advice I could ever give you, because I realize Al Gore is not popular with all of you. And I really don’t care very much about Gore weaving details of his personal life into the global-warming lecture. But you should see this movie and judge the facts for yourself. What’s happening out here is no isolated occurrence. It’s going to keep happening and it’s going to get worse. Facts are facts. And we all need to do something about this phenomenon of the Earth heating up and the polar ice caps melting.
This is not exactly the venue to warn the world about global warming, but all you football junkies readying for your fantasy drafts should do one real-world thing in the next couple of weeks: take two hours to see this movie. I’m not saying you’ll be glad you did, because it’s going to slap you around mentally a bit. But it’s something you need to see. You don’t want to wake up in 15 years with the Earth permanently damaged and huge portions of the Earth’s surface under water, forever.
Sports writers actually tell the truth - it’s simply what they do when they write about a sporting event. It’s probably a little more complicated when the subject is not sports, but they seem to do a better job with politics than the general run of journalists. I suspect and hope that telling the truth is habit forming.
The problem with that statement is, we are not going to damage the Earth. Earth will do just fine. We’ll just make the planet slightly more uninhabitable for humans, more specifically: a lot less inhabitable for human civilization.
Birds&fish will do great, cockroaches will do great, and maybe some dinosaurs will come back in a million years or so.
Al Gores CO2 table only went back 800,000 years, but life on Earth has existed for hundreds of million years, albeit under different conditions.
We are currently (+/-200years) trying to put every bit of carbon back into the atmosphere that nature has buried for the past 500 million years. That timescale alone is equivalent to an explosion, and expecting no repercussions is foolish.
I think we should research what the climate was like 50 million years ago, because that’s the climate we’ll be getting in a 100 years.
The warming will only stop once there is enough cloudcover to reflect the sunlight, which means it’ll stop once we have hurricanes covering a quarter of the globe or so.
Wildlife can deal with that, but cities?