Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic EvolutionSM
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Climate Change and Global Warming. In preparation for their April 3, 2006 cover story (left), www.Time.com said, "Global warming is already disrupting the biological world, pushing many species to the brink of extinction and turning others into runaway pests. But the worst is yet to come..." |
"Fueled by raw sunlight, plants broke the chemical bonds of water and carbon dioxide, spinning together sugars and other hydrocarbons from the hydrogen and carbon and venting oxygen into the air. Sunlight scattering off all those airborne oxygen molecules made the sky appear blue. Animals breathed the oxygen and nourished their bodies with the hydrocarbons, utterly dependent upon those photosynthetic gifts from plants. In death, plants and animals alike gave their Sun-spun carbon back to the Earth, where tremendous heat, pressure, and time transformed it into coal, oil, and natural gas. Mechanically extracted from the planet's crust and burned in engines, generators, and furnaces, the fossilized energy powered most humanity's technological dominion over the glove. Built up and locked away for hundreds of millions of years, the carbon stockpile was gushing back into the planet's atmosphere in a geological instant."
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:
June, April to June, and Year-to-Date Global Temperatures are Warmest on Record
July 15, 2010
Last month's combined global land and ocean surface temperature made it the warmest June on record and the warmest on record averaged for any April-June and January-June periods, according to NOAA. Worldwide average land surface temperature was the warmest on record for June and the April-June period, and the second warmest on record for the year-to-date (January-June) period, behind 2007.
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On October 12, 2007 it was announced that Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their work on global warming. This, to me, is great news but underscores the seriousness of human-induced climate change.
Mr. Gore, in a statement that day, said he was "deeply honored ... We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."
- Roger J. Wendell |
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"The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts." - James Lovelock, Gaia Hypothesis |
Carbon [kahr-buhn] n.
1. an element that occurs in all organic and many inorganic compounds and has an ability to form biologically and chemically important complex molecules. Carbon is the elemental building block of all life on Earth. It is also crucial to photosynthesis, which transforms energy from the sun into the energy that sustains animals and other life forms.
But carbon level now pose a threat to life on Earth, as heat-trapping carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere. Carbon that had long been locked up in Earth's crust as fossilized plants and animals has been released in vast quantities in the past century, setting the stage for serious disruptions to Earth's climate.
- Nature Conservancy, Autumn 2008, p. 14
"A major international analysis of climate change due Friday will conclude that humankind's reliance on fossil fuels - coal, fuel oil and natural gas - is to blame for global warming, according to three scientists familiar with the research on which it is based. The gold-standard Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report represents 'a real convergence happening here, a consensus that this is a total global no-brainer' says U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, former directo of the federal government's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey." "'The big message that will come out is the strength of the attribution of the warming to human activities,' say researcher Claudia Tebaldi of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo." - USA Today, Wednesday, January 31st, 2007, front page
BusinessWeek, in their March 27, 2006 edition, reviewed two books on climate change in a piece titled, "No climate for Inaction." One of the books, by Tim Flannery (The Weather Makers), said, "If Humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this centruy...the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable." The BusinessWeek piece, by Adam Aston, ended with, "Don't be paralyzed by indifference or fear. Do begin to act personally and politically. Now."
The Economist
The heat is on...
"The uncertainty surrounding climate change argues for action, not inaction. America should lead the way... "Global warming is for real..." - The Economist September 9th-15th 2006, p. 5. "...10,000 years ago, the wild fluctuations stopped, and the climate settled down to the balmy, stable state that the world has enjoyed since then. At about that time, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, mankind started to progress."
"Man-made greenhouse gases now threaten this stability. Climate change is complicated and uncertain, but, as our survey this week explains, the underlying calculation is fairly straightforward. The global average temperature is expected to increase by between 1.4°C and 5.8°C this century. The bottom end of the range would make life a little more comfortable for northern areas and a little less pleasant for sourthern ones [but still unacceptably devastating for the natural world - Roger J. Wendell]. Anything much higher than that could lead to catastrophic hurricanes, flooding and drought, falling agricultural production and, perhaps, famine and mass population movement." - ibidem p. 11.
Jet contrails over Colorado"Global warming exists and will get worse, an international panel of scientists concludes in a report released Friday. Man-made emissions of greenhouse gases can already be blamed for killer heat waves, floods, devastating droughts, and an increase in hurricane strength, the report says." - CNN.com main page, Friday, January 2nd, 2007 BusinessWeek, in their March 27, 2006 edition, reviewed two books on climate change in a piece titled, "No climate for Inaction." One of the books, by Tim Flannery (The Weather Makers), said, "If Humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this centruy...the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable." The BusinessWeek piece, by Adam Aston, ended with, "Don't be paralyzed by indifference or fear. Do begin to act personally and politically. Now."
George Bush Fails the G8 Summit on Global Warming:
According to the July 9, 2005 Detroit Free Press;"...Bush administration officials moved the other G8 leaders to accept soft language in the communique that avoids prolonged discussion of the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. Every G8 nation except the United States has signed the document."
Shuttle Commander Sees Wide Environmental Damage
by Jeff Franks - NASA/Reuters August 2, 2005;
"The atmosphere almost looks like an eggshell on an egg, it's so very thin," she said. "We know that we don't have much air, we need to protect what we have." - Commander Eileen Collins from the International Space Station and STS 114
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"So, I would suggest that it's in every aspect of your life that you think about the carbon emmissions, you think about the energy impact of your life. Every airplane ride, every car trip, every refrigerator door open, there are just a million little things..."
in a recorded interview with me at KGNU on 05-27-2005 |
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Click Here to download the entire 29 minute interview with Dr. Cannan! |
What's Happening and What We Should Do:
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 Near the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro |
In 2003 I had the good fortune to climb Mt. Kilmanjaro in Africa. I am sad to report that the glaciers ARE melting - I've seen 'em with my own eyes! At the time of my climb it was estimated that all of Mt. Kenya and Kilimanjaro's glaciers will be gone by 2012. Prior to my climb I heard with my own ears Rush Limbaugh, and a host of other blowhards, say global warming was a lie. I challenge them to hike up to these melting glaciers and say the same thing... - Roger J. Wendell |
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In 2004 I also had the good fortune to interview Paul Roberts about his then new book, The End of Oil (On the Edge of a Perilous New World). On page 119 Mr. Roberts had this to say about climate: |
"Although the causes of climate change are complex, most evidence points to a buildup in the atmosphere of 'anthropogenic,' or man-made, industrial pollutants, especially carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, or CO2. Any activity that burns fossil fuel produces carbon, in surprising quantities. Burning a single gallon of gasoline, for example, relases five pounds of carbon - the equivalent of a small bag of charcoal briquettes. This means that most Americans generate a ton of carbon a year, simply by driving their cars." |
 An Inconvenient Truth |
Did you know? Each year humans dump eight billion metric tons of carbon into the Earth's atmosphere. Source: National Geographic - February, 2004 page 89. |
A History of Concern:
Despite Rush Limbaugh, religious leaders, conservative politicians
and a host of other blowhards mocking concerns about climate change
there have been some brave souls willing to speak to power about
this issue for a very long time:
DR. E. O. HULBURT, physicist of the naval research laboratory, Washington, has found conclusive mathematical evidence that the earth's temperature is being warmed by the increased amount of carbon dioxide present in the air. Smoke stacks emit huge volumes of this gas, which is also found in the breath and waste products of humans and animals.
Earth's ground temperature is rising 1-1/2 degrees a century as a result of carbon dioxide discharged from the burning of about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal and oil yearly. According to Dr. Gilbert N. Plass of the Johns Hopkins University, this discharge augments a blanket of gas around the world which is raising the temperature in the same manner glass heats a greenhouse. By 2080, he predicts the air's carbon-dioxide content will double, resulting in an average temperature rise of at least four percent. If most of man's industrial growth were over a period of several thousand years, instead of being crowded within the last century, oceans would have absorbed most of the excess carbon dioxide. But because of the slow circulation of the seas, they have had little effect in reducing the amount of the gas as man's smoke-making abilities have multiplied over the past hundred years.
Personal Observations:
Okay, I'm not a scientist but sometimes the effects of climate change seem very obvious to me. From seeing insects in January, in the mountains of my home state here in Colorado, to the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, it's obvious something's going on. When time permits I'll add photos and info about things I've experienced firsthand that I believe relate to climate change. I'm doing this because despite the huge amount of scientific evidence there are still influential Bad Guys like Hannity, Limbaugh, Palin, and a host of others who insist it's not happening as I make this entry in June 2010...
In June, 2010 the Colorado River was overflowing due to unusually warm weather. I stopped by the Bair Ranch rest area (Interstate 70
mile marker 128 near Dotsero, about 240 kilometres west of Denver in the east end of Glenwood Canyon) and witnessed, firsthand, the
Colorado River overflowing it's banks.
June 06, 2010
At the time of my photographs The U.S. Geological Survey's Water Information System said that the rate of discharge at Dotsero, 8 km
(5 miles) to the east of the rest area, was 11,500 cubic feet per second. The long-term mean and median flows at Dotsero are 6,700 and
6,400 cfs, respectively. Pictures 1 through 5 were taken on June 6th.
June 08, 2010
On June 8th I stopped at the Bair Ranch exit, again, but this time the rate of discharge at Dotesero was 3,000 more cubic feet per second,
or about 14,500 at the time of my photograph. I believe this was the peak flow for the season and nearing an all time high of something like
17,500 cfs sometime back in the 50s. You can see the water is a bit higher in photographs 6 through 15...
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Click Here for my YouTube video of the Colorado River overflowing on June 6th, 2010... |
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Click Here for my YouTube video of the Colorado River at peak overflow on June 8th, 2010... |
An Ice Age Comparison:
The Crowded Greenhouse (Population, Climate Change, and Creating
a Sustainable World) by John Firor and Judith E. Jacobsen
"Many of the projected changes will have their first impact on features of the biosphere. Forest damage, in particular, has received much attention. There is evidence of forest response to long periods of slowly increasing temperatures 16,000 years before the present (BP) to 9,000 BP, when North America and other regions were emerging from the most recent glaciation. Pollen grains deposited in the bottom of lakes and elsewhere that have been retrieved, attributed to a particular time, and identified as to species show that, as the climate warmed, forests migrated northward to remain in a climatic region most favorable to their reproduction and growth. In comparison to the projected rate of temperature change for the twenty-first century, however, the global warming at the end of the ice age was quite slow. It is doubtful that today's forests can migrate at a sufficiently rapid rate to avoid major damage, especially since there are now many human-made obstructions to forest migration such as highways, cities, and cultivated fields." p. 128
Creating a Stable Atmosphere:
ibid
"How does the world start reducing greenhouse gas emissions? By using energy much than it does today. How do we accomplish that transformation? By getting economic signals to tell the environmental truth. And how do we do that? That question takes longer to answer."Avoiding the worst effects of climate heating requires ceasing the annual increase in the atmospheric greenhouse gases and the accompanying increase in the force toward larger climate changes. Stabilizing the composition of the atmosphere requires bringing annual global emissions of each greenhouse gas down to the amount that natural processes can absorb each year. That means, for CO2, reductions to at least half the present rate of emission; some experts see a reduction of 60 to 80 percent required. Other greenhouse gases will need to be limited by various amounts; a small percentage decrease in methane emissions will serve, whereas nitrous oxide will need to go below half its current emissions. Some newly produced, CFC-like compounds (SF6, CF4, C2F6) have estimated lifetimes in the atmosphere of thousands or tens of thousands of years; they will continue to accumulate until their production ceases almost entirely." p. 166
The Story of Life in 25 Fossils
(Tales of Intrepid Fossil Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution)
by Donald R. Prothero, p. 78.
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"This enormous volume of organic matter locked into the coal in the crust then transformed Earth's atmosphere and climate. As the coal accumulated, it pulled carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sealed it inside the planet's crust. Soon, the 'greenhouse' climate of the Early Carboniferous (with ice-free poles, high carbon dioxide, and high sea levels that drowned most of the continents) was transformed into an 'icehouse' climate by the Late Carboniferous (with ice caps on the South Pole, lower carbon dioxide, and much lower sea levels as all the polar ice pulled water out of the ocean basins). Earth remained in the grip of these 'icehouse' conditions for almost 200 million years longer, until the Middle Jurassic (middle part of the Age of Dinosaurs), when it flipped back from 'icehouse' to 'greenhouse' due to huge changes in the mantle and in the ocean basins."
"The cycle from 'greenhouse' to 'icehouse' climate and back again has happened several times over the past billion years of the planet's history. In fact, the existence of plants and animals is why Earth is habitable, and not a runaway 'greenhouse' like Venus or a frozen 'icehouse' like Mars. Earth's living systems produce carbon reservoirs in the form of limestones (mostly by animals) and coals (by plants) that lock up carbon dioxide in the crust. This acts as a thermostat, preventing the planet from becoming a runaway 'greenhouse" or a runaway 'icehouse." "Sadly, we have been unintentionally changing the planet by undoing this natural cycle. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we have burned many millions of tons of coal and released the carbon dioxide once locked in it. Now that carbon dioxide is out of control, driving our human-induced 'super-greenhouse' at rates never seen in the geological past. Without knowing it, we have upset the delicate balance of carbon in Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and crust. Our planet is already showing the extreme weather events that come from climate change, and our children and grandchildren will be paying the price for the dangerous experiment we performed when we broke the planetary thermostat." |
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