Cloudy Futures
There are plenty of high-ranking, highly-respected scientists in the world today who agree that the reality of global warming is not to be questioned. But they appear to believe that this is a cyclical phenomenon of nature, not a human-derived disaster-in-the-making. Which, if true, means that there isn't much mankind can do to counteract the effects of increasing global warming, or even give it pause, slow it down. Can we believe that if we are the cause we can also be the cure?On the other hand, if we're not the cause, or even partially the cause, as many other scientists believe, nothing we can do will serve to the ameliorate this dire situation. That global changes in weather patterns affecting our immediate and far-flung environments will proceed at nature's schedule, whatever that happens to be appears guaranteed. At the moment, a singularly accelerated schedule, by environmental reckoning.
No one, wherever they're living on this globe, is oblivious to the obvious: our weather does appear to be altering, irrecoverably altering its familiar, sometimes-benevolent, occasionally threatening face to one still recognizable, but puzzlingly different. There is more of everything; greater frequency of storms, more damage caused by storms by their increasingly violent nature. Patterns of the seasons are becoming altered. We can recognize the differences in temperatures around us.
Plant and bird species have been extending their range in lock-step with the warming temperatures. Insect infestations are proving more deadly to the forests they invest themselves within because harsher winters that used to kill many of them no longer do, and they remain free to increase their numbers exponentially, further devastating immense tracts of forest. Aquatic animals are venturing further than their traditional oceanic haunts.
Icecaps are melting, and so are immense glaciers, and ancient snow-and-ice coverings, raising sea levels at as yet hardly discernible levels, but with a surety to increase as time wears on. Desertification is on the rise in some areas of the world, creating immense dust storms that waft over the oceans, coming to rest on other continents, bringing with them infected particles containing the potential for disease.
As habitat becomes increasingly threatened by environmental changes that seem inexorable in nature, plant, fish and animal species are increasingly under threat, some becoming extinct at a fast-moving pace, certain to pick up pace, if the worst-case scenario does occur, according to the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel in Climate Change. Greater numbers of human habitats around the equator are increasingly threatened.
The shortage of clean, potable water is predicted to cause catastrophic after-effects with less available for human use, and a dearth for irritation in crops-growing, leading to the collapse of agriculture in some parts of the world. Drought will further complicate matters, and so will floods. Over 200 million people could be forced from their ancestral lands by rising sea levels, floods and droughts; great numbers facing death from starvation and heat stress.
Oceans are being acidified as a result of the billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide flooding the atmosphere yearly, destroying ageless coral reefs, and plankton on which many aquatic species depend, and with them a variety of commercial fish species. The disappearance of arable land, the disappearance of coastal land masses, will create hundreds of millions of refugees and cause mass malnutrition, leading to early deaths.
Of course, none of this may happen at all. Humans are not all that great at their prognostications, and nature has her inimitable way of surprising us, time and again. The globe has undergone numerous instances of warming and cooling, part of its cyclical love affair with the state of being. We understand, scientifically, far less of what is occurring on an ongoing basis, than what does register with us.
This will not be the first time, nor the last, that the interpretation science brings forward in explanation of environmental concerns has caused us to throw up our hands in helpless despair, waiting for mass destruction to fall upon us. Events which have somehow been ameliorated by the course of nature, or by mankind's scientific interventions to allay the worst effects of a given, little-understood situation sometimes 'rescue' situations.
That we are wasteful of nature's bounty, ignorant of our excesses, care little how much we impinge on the resources available to us is beyond dispute. This entire affair may lead us toward a better understanding, if not of nature herself and the many tricks up her bounteous sleeve, then of our place in her sphere of influence.
We may learn to temper our brash enthusiasms and lack of responsibility to a finer degree, more in tandem with what nature expects of us. There's an outcome to fill the balloon of hope with.
Labels: Environment
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, April 01, 2007
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