An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis Global Warming

An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis Global Warming
Preface:
Al Gore commented, "There is no doubt that young people today are more ware of environmental problems than my generation ever was. As
his new generation comes of age, it faces the enormous challenge of solving global warming. That's why I felt it was so important to adapt An Inconvenient Truth for them. In order to fix this crisis, everyone needs to be involved. I have faith that young people have both the ability and the enthusiasm to put a stop to global warming." Whiteman commented on the importance of bringing Gore's message to this new audience, "As I sat in a theater watching Vice President Gore deliver his message on film, it struck me that if we are to make an impact on the problem of global warming in the near future, we must find a way to bring the message to a younger audience; to the generation that has the opportunity to effect real change. How better to protect the future of our planet than to arm our youth with the science, the knowledge, and the wisdom in books like An Inconvenient Truth?" Human beings are the cause of global warming, and if we don't take on the responsibility of solving it, our environment will change drastically. Some of those changes could include: polar bears becoming extinct as a result of the shrinking ice cap, forty percent of the people in the world confronting a shortage of drinking water, and hundreds of millions of people being forced from their homes because of rising water levels. Speaking clearly and directly, using indisputable facts and visual examples to illuminate the subject for his audience, Gore explains that the crisis is happening right before our eyes. While human beings are the cause of this worldwide problem, we also have the technology and knowledge to solve it. Gore declares that the choice is ours: we can watch silently as the Earth changes forever, or we can take action and stop global warming.Gore encouraged other businesses to also think beyond quarterly earnings and consider the long term value of environmental stewardship. He said most businesses now "treat the environment as an externality," which results in decisions that "ignore or are actively harmful to the planet." I. Al Gore in bid to 'freeze' carbon emissions ."I think we need a carbon freeze," Gore told policy and business leaders at a conference organised by a venture capital firm."I intend to launch an ongoing campaign of mass persuasion at the beginning of 2007." Gore said the grass-roots campaign would put heat on leaders in Washington to come up with more sophisticated policies to address global climate change. "I think we need a mass movement in the United States. I think it ought to start at the grass roots," said Gore, author of the book, An Inconvenient Truth, which was made into a hit documentary film on global warming.Gore said the power of the freeze demand is that it can operate at every level of society - individuals can take steps to cut their use of nonrenewable energies, and so can businesses and local and state governments.II. The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It 1.Animals are on the run. Plants are migrating too. The Earth's creatures, save for one species, do not have thermostats in their living rooms that they can adjust for an optimum environment. Animals and plants are adapted to specific climate zones, and they can survive only when they are in those zones. Indeed, scientists often define climate zones by the vegetation and animal life that they support. Gardeners and bird watchers are well aware of this, and their handbooks contain maps of the zones in which a tree or flower can survive and the range of each bird species.Animals have no choice, since their survival is at stake. Recently after appearing on television to discuss climate change, I received an e-mail from a man in northeast Arkansas: "I enjoyed your report on Sixty Minutes and commend your strength. I would like to tell you of an observation I have made. It is the armadillo. I had not seen one of these animals my entire life, until the last ten years. I drive the same forty-mile trip on the same road every day and have slowly watched these critters advance further north every year and they are not stopping. Every year they move several miles."Studies of more than one thousand species of plants, animals, and insects, including butterfly ranges charted by members of the public, found an average migration rate toward the North and South Poles of about four miles per decade in the second half of the twentieth century. That is not fast enough. During the past thirty years the lines marking the regions in which a given average temperature prevails ("isotherms") have been moving poleward at a rate of about thirty-five miles per decade. That is the size of a county in Iowa. Each decade the range of a given species is moving one row of counties northward.If human beings follow a business-as-usual course, continuing to exploit fossil fuel resources without reducing carbon emissions or capturing and sequestering them before they warm the atmosphere, the eventual effects on climate and life may be comparable to those at the time of mass extinctions. Life will survive, but it will do so on a transformed planet. For all foreseeable human generations, it will be a far more desolate world than the one in which civilization developed and flourished during the past several thousand years.2.The greatest threat of climate change for human beings, I believe, lies in the potential destabilization of the massive ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. As with the extinction of species, the disintegration of ice sheets is irreversible for practical purposes. Our children, grandchildren, and many more generations will bear the consequences of choices that we make in the next few years.The level of the sea throughout the globe is a reflection primarily of changes in the volume of ice sheets and thus of changes of global temperature. When the planet cools, ice sheets grow on continents and the sea level falls. Conversely, when the Earth warms, ice melts and the sea level rises. In Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Elizabeth Kolbert reports on the work of researchers trying to understand the acceleration of melting, and in his new book and film An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore graphically illustrates possible effects of a rising sea level on Florida and other locations.In order to arrive at an effective policy we can project two different scenarios concerning climate change. In the business-as-usual scenario, annual emissions of CO2 continue to increase at the current rate for at least fifty years, as do non-CO2 warming agents including methane, ozone, and black soot. In the alternative scenario, CO2 emissions level off this decade, slowly decline for a few decades, and by mid-century decrease rapidly, aided by new technologies.The effect of this loss of ice on the global sea level is small, so far, but it is accelerating. The likelihood of the sudden collapse of ice sheets increases as global warming continues. For example, wet ice is darker, absorbing more sunlight, which increases the melting rate of the ice. Also, the warming ocean melts the offshore accumulations of ice—"ice shelves"— that form a barrier between the ice sheets and the ocean. As the ice shelves melt, more icebergs are discharged from the ice sheets into the ocean. And as the ice sheet discharges more icebergs into the ocean and loses mass, its surface sinks to a lower level where the temperature is warmer, causing it to melt faster.3.Both the Department of Energy and some fossil fuel companies insist that continued growth of fossil fuel use and of CO2 emissions are facts that cannot be altered to any great extent. Their prophecies become self-fulfilling, with the help of government subsidies and intensive efforts by special interest groups to prevent the public from becoming well-informed.