Global Warning
Courtesy of Earth Share of Washington member Audubon
A decade ago a small crowd of politicians and environmentalists gathered on a steamy summer day outside the alabaster dome of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., and peered into a hole in the ground. The earthen cavity was cool and soothing, but the people were hot and bothered. The sapling they were supposed to plunk into the hollow to commemorate a new clean-air law was stuck on a truck in traffic. Turning to a bystander, one sweaty lawmaker compared the delay to the trouble he was having convincing colleagues to take seriously another emerging environmental threat. "At the rate we're going," he quipped, "that little tree will be a redwood by the time we do anything about the greenhouse effect."
Little did that observer, the late Representative George Brown, a feisty California Democrat, know how right he might be. In 1988, just a few years before the tree planting, a prominent NASA climate scientist named James Hansen had appeared before Congress during a record heat wave and sparked a political firestorm by announcing that the science was conclusive: People were warming the earth by pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) from tailpipes and smokestacks into the atmosphere, where the gases trapped heat like the glass in a greenhouse. Television newscasts and newspapers led with the story, moving an issue that had drifted in political backwaters squarely into the mainstream.
Since then researchers have nailed down the link between rising CO2 concentrations and temperatures. Recent records show that the 1990s, for instance, was the warmest decade in more than a century, and that 1998 boasted the highest average global temperatures ever recorded. And forecasters predict that average global temperatures could rise up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit during the next century if CO2 concentrations continue to increase. Among the possible consequences: rising sea levels that cause coastal communities to sink beneath the waves like a modern Atlantis, crop failures of biblical proportions, and once-rare killer storms that start to appear with alarming regularity.
Continue reading the entire story on the Audubon Magazine website:
Global Warning
