Is the World Worth Saving?

British scientist John Tyndall in 1859 identified the greenhouse effect. Greenhouse absorbs IR infrared radiation; then re-emits it. However, if the gas levels rise so does the earths surface temperature.

It is sometimes difficult to imagine what is happening on the other side of the world when you are so separated from their reality because the effects of climate change do happen to different areas differently. You will not notice the differences in sea rise if you live in the middle of Oklahoma but you might notice the increase in tornado activity.

And you won't know what is happening in an Alaskan village if you don't live there, but natives of that village will know what they took for granted before is not the same now. In an Alaskan village, Shishmaref on the island of Sarichef, which is located about 5 miles off the coast line of the Seward Peninsula in an Inupiat village back in the 1990s just before the new millennium the sea ice began to change.

The ice began to form later in the fall season and it would also break up earlier in the spring - and the island thus became much more vulnerable to storm surges. The natives of this village were alarmed and the entire village voted in 2002 to move their village to the mainland.

Other island communities, not just in the arctic, were also noticing sea rises above normal. Some islands were becoming unlivable.

Scientists have been aware of alarming changes in the greenhouse concentration around the earth for a long time. Governments started to notice it. President Johnson issued a statement about it. And the National Academy of Sciences began rigorous study of the problem of global warming in 1979. A study from The Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate, chaired by Jule Charney, concluded that if carbon dioxide emissions continued to increase, the climate changes would be severe.

Since that study little has been done to stem the tide of climate change and carbon dioxide emissions have not been reduced and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased to about 400 parts per million. Emissions have increased and the earths temperature has risen; now warmer than at any time in the last 200 years. The impact from burning of fossil fuels is no longer hypothetical and our behavior is the major contributor to this problem.

Every glacier in the world is melting. Not only are the oceans becoming warmer, sea levels are rising and the oceans and lakes are becoming more acidic. Whereas once there were large differences between day and nighttime temperatures, that difference is now diminishing and plant blooms are earlier than they once were. AND, the most dramatic changes are occurring right now in the Arctic which has been under-laid by permafrost for over a hundred thousand years, which is now melting and disappearing causing organic material which has been frozen for thousands of years to release more carbon dioxide and also releasing dangerous methane into the atmosphere, increasing the effects of global warming.

The loss of ice (ice-albedo) at the Arctic is a feedback effect causing the Arctic to warm even faster. And the Antarctic ice cores show carbon-dioxide levels today significantly higher than they have been in the last 420,000 years.

Some of the climate models Perovich of the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) assembled predict that perennial sea-ice in the Arctic will be gone entirely by the year 2080. Already sea-ice has significantly declined as a result of the green house effect.

Scientific "fingerprints" indicate the troposphere, that blanket of atmosphere closest to the earth, is warming and it is not natural climate change. It is anthropogenic, a consequence of human activity. The real question then must be, "Is the world worth saving?"

Hank Roth

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