OP Spotlight : Changes

"When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves."

David Orr, Environmental Educator

Global Warming :
Changes Have Begun

From the Artic to Antarctica, the world's glaciers are slowly disappearing. Over the past 30 years, the sea-ice of the Arctic has decreased 386,100 square miles; the combined areas of Texas and Arizona. Major ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula, some of which are at least four centuries old, are crumbling faster than anyone had predicted. Substantial melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet has also been recorded.

Although our Earth's system is constantly changing, greenhouse gases are the largest human influence on global climate. The principal reason for the mounting thermometer? A century and a half of industrialization. The burning of ever-greater quantities of oil, gasoline and coal, the cutting of forests and certain farming methods.

Industrial emissions have been the dominant influence on climate change for the past 50 years, overwhelming natural forces. Levels of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas that traps solar radiation and warms the planet, have risen by 31 percent since pre-industrial times. The magnitude of change on our planet be considerable.

Changes Have Already Begun

We have all heard the cause and effect stories. While some believe drastic climactic changes are not the influences of human activity many scientists believe that over the next 100 years climate change is expected to accelerate, contributing to major physical, ecological, social and economic changes, regardless of any action we may take today.

Many of changes have already begun. An eight-nation report released in November, 2004 revealed the Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. The North Pole could be ice-free in summertime by the end of the century.

Around the Arctic , salmon are moving up into more northerly waters, hornets are beginning to buzz and barn owls are appearing in regions where indigenous people have never seen a barn. GPS (global positioning system) stations in the coastal mountains of southern Alaska reveal the weight of glaciers free-up seismic stresses that build up in mountainous regions. Essentially when ice is thicker there were fewer quakes. When it was thinner, the tremors increased. Geologists believe the same thing is happening in other seismically troubled glacial regions around the world.

Rapidly disintegrating ice shelves are threatening land and marine ecosystems which are highly susceptible to climate change. Unprecedented rainfall is being witnessed on Greenland 's Ice Sheet by the local Inuit inhabitants. Many indigenous languages have no vocabulary for the legions of animals, insects and plants that have advanced north as Global Warming melts the polar ice and invites forest to creep over the thawed tundra.

The rising Arctic temperatures are permitting the invasion of destructive insects such as the spruce beetle which has already decimated 1.6 million hectares of white spruce and Sitka/Lutz spruce on Alaska 's Kenai Peninsula. In Sweden, invading moths have destroyed entire forests of birch trees. Australia's Great Barrier Reef will lose most of its coral cover by 2050.

New species of birds entering the warmer Arctic tundra regions are bringing with them a new disease - West Nile Virus, which threatens both humans and animals. Increased exposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun is already increasing health problems such as cancer and cataracts.

Within The Next Century...

The Race to Claim the North Pole...

Who Signed Koyoto and Who Didn't...

Glacier Data...

The Power of One...

 

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