Nicely said Tony! Yep. It's a fact. And it’s being caused by six billion hairless apes running around eating, breathing, CONSUMING, reproducing and destroying ecological systems left right and centre. In high school science class I'm sure some of you have seen under a microscope that bacteria in a dish will keep multiplying until they all die. Humans aren’t any different it seems - there's twice as many people munching off the earth today as there was in 1960, when many of you were already walking and talking. It's time to adjust to this new reality - things are very different than they used to be.
For those that want "proof", you'll never have it in time because proof can only come through the scientific method. The scientific method relies on running experiments. Experiments in turn depend on the ability to compare at least two sample subjects for cause and effect, with one of the samples being held as a control where nothing changes (i.e. placebo). The problem is, we only have ONE planet earth (and one atmosphere etc.) on which to run our experiment and we can't hold it still for a second in order to PROVE definitively whether humans are the primary cause or not.
Instead we have to rely on the comprehensive historical research, smaller scale experimentation and future modeling that has been conducted by the world's top scientists for the last 50 years. No space to go into it here, the particulars are easy enough to find on the web.
So what it will come down to is a test of faith, of how much we're willing to gamble. On one hand, we can keep going as before with our polluting lifestyles, deluded into believing that the earth is not warming just like getting off our dependence on Middle East oil has nothing to do with stopping terrorism. If we're right, we won't have had to make any sacrifices and we can continue on with our ultra-consumerist lifestyle that is, by the way, also rapidly depleting the world’s finite oil supply (the basis of industrial civilization) while not making us any happier (according to surveys, the happiness of the average person in the Western world peaked in the 1960s).
If we're wrong, it will literally mean the end of the earth as we know it. And this is key to determining where you stand on this issue - Al Gore for all his pontificating did not reveal the ultimate consequences of global warming. To do that, you need to read a book like "Under a Green Sky" by Peter Ward, a NASA scientist.
Because if you’ve been to a casino, you know that how much you're willing to gamble depends on what you judge the stakes to be. If you don't know the likely consequences, you can't make an informed decision.
Basically, in the short term (say from now to 40 years out) higher temperatures will likely "only" mean more super storms and forest fires. The extinction of millions of species worldwide. The spread of infectious diseases like malaria into nothern latitudes. Water shortages due to the drying up of glaciers. Rising sea levels submerging island nations and some coastal cities. This is where Al Gore stopped.
In the medium term (40-120 years out), the climate conditions that humans have enjoyed since the start of the agricultural revolution come to an end leading to the failure of the world's food crops and mass starvation. Drinking water shortages everywhere. Mass migration of refugees. Wars over resources. The breakdown of global order and nation states. Mass dieoff of people and animals.
Yet while half of the people on earth may be dead, the end of planet earth as we know it doesn't happen until the long term (120 years and further out). Then we get things like mass oceanic dieoff coming to a head which leads to the formation of hydrogen-sulfide gas in the ocean. This begins to rise to the surface. It turns the sky green. And great clouds of this deadly gas spread out across the land, killing everything they come in contact with. There will be nowhere for our children to hide. The planet earth that you wake up to every day will be irrevocably changed and it is doutbful whether the human race will be a part of its future.
This is exactly what scientists theorized happened in the Jurassic mass extinction (as well as most other extinctions when a comet wasn't involved). As the great supercontinent Pangaea broke up and continents shifted, extreme volcanic activity created greenhouse gas emissions that led to the aforementioned hydrogen sulfide clouds covering the landscape. So many billions of oceanic organisms died at one place and time that they didn't have time to decompose normally. Instead they became fossilized. And this is why we have oil deposits in Saudi Arabia - the Ghawar field was the site of an ocean shelf in Jurassic times.
See, for the longest time we weren't sure how or why oil was formed - now we're beginning to realize that fossil fuels and global warming are intrinsically linked. Global warming creates the mass oceanic dieoff necessary to create fossil fuels which trap carbon underground. Then something comes along and releases the carbon (like us) and that creates global warming. What cools the earth down? When enough plant life re-emerges on earth again after millions of years to reabsorb the carbon. In this way the planet's temperature and climate have passed through cycles depending on whether the carbon is in the ground, or the air. That's how the machine works. Ironically, by burning fossil fuel and unleashing the trapped carbon we are creating the conditions for the formation of oil all over again. Unfortunately, we are unlikely to survive as a civilization long enough to enjoy it. Perhaps the carbon in the oil of the future will come from you and me!
Of course, like I started off by saying, this is all theory based on the best science in the world. If we continue emitting carbon we honestly don't really know what will happen. But we know some of what
could happen, based on upheavels and extinctions that have shaken our planet before. Some of these events may happen sooner and some later, and so will many events we haven't even forseen yet.
If you want almost irrefutable evidence (not proof) that global warming is occurring, just check out what is happening in the Arctic and Antarctic (it's what convinced me). They are warmer than they have ever been in recorded human history and great chunks are melting into the ocean as we speak. Our governments are in a frantic rush to claim the newly revealed mineral deposits up there, as well as the northwest passage. Yes indeed, something is afoot. But it seems it’s easier for us to just glide with the times than think about why it's suddenly happening so quickly (when there just so happens to be a doubling of the human population on earth within a 40 year period).
Again, it ultimately comes down to, how much are you willing to risk, to gamble? We won’t have the definitive answer to our little experiment until global warming has progressed so far that it is impossible to stop. Is keeping our wasteful lifestyle today worth the end of the world as we know it for ALL our children to come? If this was a war, we wouldn’t be having this discussion – the enemy would be plain to see and we would be readily willing to sacrifice whatever was necessary to achieve ultimate victory. Well preventing the future that I described above IS the war of the 21st century, and what makes it nice is that for once in human history, we’re all on the same side, whether we acknowledge it or not.
