Climate change: it’s not so new after all
Lately in the news, there’s been quite a bit of news about “global warming.” The public has a tendency to dismiss such claims as fear mongering by groups with an agenda. I used to dismiss them out-of-hand as well. The fact of the matter, though, is that global warming is real: there is no debate among real scientists doing real work in the field. The earth is getting warmer.
What is up for debate is whether humans have always caused global warming. It seems that we have. We succeeded in altering the climate by setting large forest fires to clear land for settlements and farming. (Ash, of course, is excellent fertilizer.) The old fashioned global warming trend was discovered by analyzing methane found trapped in pockets of air in 2,000 year old arctic ice.
The chemical fingerprint of stable types, or isotopes, of carbon atoms gives a record of methane in the atmosphere over the course of history, and where it came from.
It appears that much of the gas came from the burning of biomass - the likes of wood and grass - rather than other known sources of methane, such as the burning of fossil fuels, or natural emissions of methane from swamps and wetlands.
So it seems that we humans have been altering the climate for a long time. It should be noted that global warming thousands of years ago, while present, wasn’t present to the degree as it is today, given the mass fossil fuel consumption fueling established economies like the West, and the up-and-comers like China. It is the emerging economies that tend to skimp on things like pollution controls. It would be interesting to find a comparison of the levels of emissions comparing China to the US or Europe. Whatever the outcome of that would be, the fact remains that we’re seeing unprecedented evidence of global warming, such that the ice caps are beginning to melt and break away. The amount of useable land for smaller island groups like Micronesia has also decreased as ocean levels rise. Eventually, these islands will be totally submerged, and in the meantime, higher ocean levels make them more vulnerable to tsunamis.
I would hate to see someone point to this research and use it as an excuse to abuse the environment some more, because comparing climate change today with the climate change of thousands of years ago is spurious and misleading.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos