Climate change deniers have been spouting like a pod of conservative whales during the recent cold snap here on the east coast of the US." Al Gore was full of balony!"" It doesn't feel like global warming now " We all heard the bloviators chortle and snort with glee. Meanwhile in more southerly regions of the hemisphere elderly people were dying from intolerable heat,
It's easy to minimize the dangers from something we aren't fully experiencing. Humans have a tendency to go with the flow, as long as things change gradually we tend to accept the changes as normal. But like the proverbial frog in a pot of water we may live to regret our casual complacency.
One of the arguments that deniers toss out is that Earth isn't heating up as fast as predicted by the amount of carbon dioxide we are pumping into the atmosphere. Most people don't consider or realize that two thirds of the planet is covered with water. In fact much the waste CO2 has been absorbed by the oceans. This mitigates the heat but comes at a terrible cost. CO2 and water form a mild acid called carbonic acid. The acidification of the oceans is setting us up for extinctions at a cataclysmic scale. Look at a map of human population centers. Most all of the major settlement areas are on the coastlines. They depend in large part on seafood for sustenance. What will happen when the oceans become deserts and the food disappears?
No comments:
Post a Comment