Your Oct. 22 Opinion/Open Forum section carried a piece by Mischa Popoff. Mr. Popoff’s statement that the carbon dioxide now stored in fossil fuels once floated harmlessly in the air is technically true but essentially misleading.
Sure, our fossil carbon was originally withdrawn from the atmosphere and stored as coal, oil or natural gas, but that fact is not the issue. The problem we now face is that we have released much of that 100-million-year legacy in less than 200 years, seriously outstripping the earth’s capacity to incorporate the newly released carbon into the biosphere.
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There is no doubt we have bumped up the carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere and are closing in on doubling the natural levels. Any number of reputable publications have documented that fact.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) website provides access to the most up-to-date scientific information on this critical issue. Mojib Latif, in Climate Change: the point of no return, provides some good summary graphs that show carbon dioxide levels up 35 percent over the last 200 years and methane levels doubling over the same two centuries
The bulk of these increases have occurred over the last 50 years and the rate of increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases is still accelerating.
The overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming is occurring. The only quarter in which the issue of the reality of climate change is still debated seems to be the popular press or certain political parties.
Believe me, I do wish Mr. Popoff was right about the ocean absorbing all of this excess carbon but he is, in fact, dead wrong. The levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere continue to soar.
This is not some kind of commie plot to foil the economic growth reverie of one party or another. This is the grim fact that faces us all, Conservative, Liberal, NDP, Green – every one of us and all of our children and all children to come.
It’s time to check our political ideologies at the door and go to a war-time footing on this issue. Climate change threatens all of us: rich and poor, conservative and liberal, working class and millionaire. We can ill-afford misinformation or superficial analysis on this issue.
If some choose to fuss about the colour scheme of the ship as it’s going down, so be it. But until those folks get their facts straight, they should be given little column space.
For those interested in informing themselves on this issue, a good start is Dianne Dumanoski’s The End of the Long Summer. As a long-time student of the issue of climate warming and the implications of these changes for natural resources in Canada, I recognize that Ms. Dumanoski does a good job of making the sometimes complex implications of climate change more accessible to all of us.
Al Gore’s book Our Choice: a plan to solve the climate crisis, is worthwhile because it proposes some timely action items for dealing with the challenges we face.
David Orr, an American environmental scientist, also does a fine job of grappling with this problem, and its potential solutions, in his book Down to the Wire: confronting climate collapse. Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist with the NASA Goddard Institute, and photographer Joshua Wolf, have teamed up to write a readable and visually impressive book titled Climate Change: picturing the science.
Mr. Popoff’s comment that people buying smaller hybrid vehicles have been “vastly inconveniencing themselves in the hope the rest of us, overwrought with guilt, would follow suit,” sheds light on the author’s failure to comprehend the magnitude of our current predicament.
Climate warming will bring changes to our planet, our civilization, our agriculture and our children, that will dwarf trivialities such as luggage space in personal vehicles.
It’s time to get serious about this looming challenge and to put behind us the superficial arguments that some would muster to delude themselves, and others, about the work ahead. We will all need to put our differences aside and pull together to solve this one.
Like the stark challenges we faced in the world wars of the 20th century, climate change will demand more of us than we can yet comprehend. It is best we all start getting ready to face the great work of this generation: how to find ways to live on our home planet without irreparably fouling the nest.
It is not too late, but we don’t have much time and our windows of opportunity are narrowing.
