Environmental Crisis and Natural HazardsEnvironmental Crisis and Natural HazardsEnvironmental Crisis and natural HazardsIs there an environmental crisis? Is global warming a reality or something made up by alarmists? How safe is the Nations water supply? In this world it depends on who you talk to and where they live, as to whether we are in an environmental crisis, or not. In America we set the standard for easy living. We drive our cars everywhere consuming more oil than many countries put together. Televisions, stereos, air conditioning and many more devices require endless amounts of electricity. Most people don’t care that much of this electricity comes from burning coal. As long as every thing works, we have grown accustomed to the skies being a little dirty. No big deal it’s not hurting anyone, right? We don’t see any major changes to our lives. All the coal burning and autos are sending too much carbon monoxide in the air. Drilling for oil and mining for valuable metals, they have serious effects on us and our environment. But we don’t see any major problems around us. It’s like everyone is wearing blinders we are not fully affected by problems such as Global warming so just go on and pretend it will get better on its own.
If you talk to Tulsi Khara she knows and lives the effects of Global warming. Tulsi has lived for seventy years on the worlds largest Delta, at the meeting of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers at the Bay of Bengal. Tulsi had to move recently because the river has swallowed up the island and farmland that her family cultivated for generations. Even the new island in which she moved will soon fall to the sea as well. “I couldn’t believe my eyes-the land that I had tilled for years, that fed me and my family for generations, has vanished. It is very distressing.” (WWF, 2006). Tusli also contends that the storms have gotten much more intense, their belongings and cattle swept away by cyclones. She says she can sense bad things happening around them and asks why nature has turned so violent? “Things have changed on these islands. We are losing vegetation, and the weather and currents have become unpredictable says Tulsi” (WWF, 2006). Tulsi is not alone, People across the globe, People in poorer counties, simple farmers and herders who still live off the land, see many changes for the worse Drought, violent storms, polluted drinking water. They are trying to live in an environment growing harsher and harsher while Americans and the other Industrialized or “civilized nations” continue to live like these problems don’t exist. The environmental problems are swept under the rug. It doesn’t affect them directly now, so unfortunately millions of people are forced to try to live with the decisions others made.
A Republican tied to oil, (Senator James Inhof of Oklahoma), was asked if global warming exists? He said flat out “Global Warming is a Hoax” (NPR, 2004). Our leading scientists can’t even agree on global warming although more and more are seeing the effects and are beginning to believe. There are still those nay Sayers out there that politicians or lobbyists cling to, to fight change. John Christy is a University of Alabama, Climatologist whose work led to Inhof’s statement. “Christy’s major contribution has been to analyze millions of measurements from weather satellites, looking for a global temperature trend. He’s found almost no sign of global warming in the satellite data ,and is confident that forecasts of warming up to 10 degrees in the next century are wrong” (NPR, 2004). Another scientist Richard Alley, a Glaciologist from Penn State University sees things differently. Ten years ago Dr. Alley was investigating a 2 mile long ice core pulled up from the Center of Greenland. “It
lays out several other evidence about the recent warming, but the Ice Age is the second oldest thing ever discovered around the world and the record in most of the world is long past. And his most recent paper shows that, despite the warming in the past century, it has been a good trend since then. All of that shows that a global warming of up to 4 degrees in the next century has been going on since the ice ages and a record high trend is likely at least a couple hundred million years. Climate alarmists say that this is not true‡ they believe it is actually a hoax, but they worry that a new one is coming and no one will take his concerns seriously because this new one is going to be made with scientific rigor.
It is interesting to note that Dr. Alley’s previous work was on glaciers, ice shelves, surface water.
In fact Dr. Alley was studying the ice shelves of the Tromsø Island ice shelf until a paper he written for a German scientist led a lot of people to believe that there were other places the ice shelves were built. This paper led to a lot of skeptical opinion. Then Dr. Alley was one of those few that didn‡ read the paper‡ and went to the press to refute Dr. Alley‡s arguments. His work really caught the eye of many at the time. He published a new paper from 2008.
Dr. Alley’s study is one of the first such experiments and the first scientifically valid measurements to be made using sea level data. His findings have led to a new study from the U.K. Environment Agency (EWA) in which they used data from Antarctica to determine whether rising sea level is an inevitable result of human activity‡ and to assess whether the rise in sea level is linked to human activity. ‡The study‡ showed that human activities were responsible for about 1 percent of the increase in sea level.
“However, to find out if sea level should rise, the WAGE team relied on surface water, rather than ice sheet cover. These are usually considered to have been caused by human activities due to their effect on the circulation of air. The new study shows that a very small fraction of this is responsible for the rise of sea level, but this is not the case in land areas. It could be that some of it stems from human activities (more on that later), but to get a significant number of surface water ice sheets, you have to rely on the ocean to hold these. ‡More specifically, it is estimated that the ice sheet volume of the Antarctic and Western Antarctic ice sheets is somewhere between 1 and 2 cubic kilometers (1.6 to 11 cubic miles). That is 1.34 billion cubic kilometers. A large reservoir of water is responsible for around 1 cubic kilometer (6.4 billion cubic miles) of volume.
“Dr. Alley looked at these ice sheets using the methods he did from the 1990s to 2012. He found that the average sea level rise rate‡ from 1961 to 2012 in these areas had increased from 9 to 20 percent, which has doubled to 18 percent annually since that time, he states.
‡He also found that the average sea water level drop rate was much worse than the same rate from 1961 to 2012. These recent trends have a bearing on whether we continue to live in periods of high sea level.
‡There has been so much confusion about the cause of sea level rise and the need for new research in oceanography and human activity.
We can ask the following question: What are our responsibilities? Can we create more research using science and other tools of our imagination ? Let us be certain that in the near future we will create sufficient technology to predict the future sea level rise.
Now for