The photograph taken in 1928, above, shows how the Upsala Glacier, part of the South American Andes in Argentina, used to look. The ice on the Upsala Glacier today, shown in 2004 below, is retreating at least 180 ft. per year--from Time.com.
Source: Time
That, uh, well debated, often denied global warming thing...it's real, and signs of
a planet quickly changing are all around us.
More powerful, phenomenal storms are hitting different parts of the world at a record pace.
It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry--a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180 m.p.h.--exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast--when the emergency becomes commonplace--something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.
Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it. If there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.
But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse.
Certain things on this wonderful planet will change regardless of what we do.
Things like controlling CO2 admissions is something we all should be doing right now. In our own little ways, every time we take the car out for a spin, we are compounding a very serious problem.
Hopefully, the international community will get together and take steps. Not for the present generations but for those who are children now who will have to bear the cost of our environmental sins in the future.
Tags: [global warming], [new powerful storms], [glaciers are receding at alarming rates], [global warming is the real deal], [slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse], [remember Silent Spring?]
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