Climate Change or Global Warming – Either Way It Spells Big Trouble
I get the newspaper every day, and usually like to do the sudoku and word puzzles before I even delve into the sports pages. Recently, I solved a cryptoquote that I thought would fit well with one of my blogs; it read, “When we see the land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” The quote was attributed to Aldo Leopold (1887 -1948), an American author, scientist, ecologist and environmentalist who was profoundly influential in the development of the environmental movement in this country long before Earth Day became an annual reminder of our need to preserve the planet upon which we live, or global warming began to pose a pervasive threat to our very existence.
As the 2014 Climate Summit was taking place at the United Nations last month, preceded by the People’s Climate March in New York City, which drew over 300,000 participants (similar events were also held in nearly 2700 other locations in 150 countries throughout the world), it was reported by the Associated Press that scientists studying 16 incidents of what they termed “wild weather” last year have determined that over half of them are connected to global warming caused by man’s unabated use of fossil fuels. Heat waves that occurred in Australia, China, Europe, Japan and Korea bore the fingerprints of made-made climate change, as did extreme amounts of rain in parts of India and the United States, and severe drought conditions in New Zealand and in California.
The studies, organized by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, utilized computer models to reveal the ways in which the odds of particular weather events can increase due to climate change caused by greenhouse gases, while cautioning that global warming is never the sole reason for aberrant weather events. “It’s not ever a single factor that is responsible for the extremes we see,” according to NOAA National Climatic Data Center director Tom Karl. “Natural variability is always part of any extreme climate event.” Meanwhile, the journals Nature Climate Change and Nature Geoscience have published the results of studies conducted by the Global Carbon Project which determined that, in 2013, the world spewed more carbon pollution into the atmosphere than at any time ever before. The leading polluters were China, India and the United States, increasing their emissions by 4.2 percent, 5.1 percent and 2.9 percent, respectively. While China is known to be the world’s worst carbon polluter, the United States had actually reduced its carbon emissions in four of the five years immediately preceding the study, but increased its use of coal in 2013 due to the “recovering economy. “
Aldo Leopold is no doubt rolling over in his grave.