Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Here it is! The Title Says it All.

The Complete Guide To Modern Day Climate Change by Scott Mandia, guest poster at Climate Progress

Photos from A Shadow Falls by Nick Brandt “They’re my elegy to a world that is steadily, tragically vanishing.”


  1. catman here:

    Because you and I and your other friends are so connected to plight of our trees. we might have missed that our dying trees are just one of many ecosystems that are failing before our eyes. But like global warming, we haven't heard much about trees dying in the media.

    I was going to list all of our ecosystems that are in peril. Too many. Too depressing.

    But I haven't heard or read anywhere that the bacteria and the creatures (tube worms and such) that live on ocean volcanic vents are in any danger.

    Perhaps a writer with more talent and energy than I will someday list and explore the ecosystems of Mother Earth that are NOT threatened by the residue of our modern civilization. I hope it's not a short list.

  2. Hey catman...

    Since I am not a scientist I have approached the issue of climate change and dying trees from a sort of logical inference methodology, if I can call it that. Eliminating the explanations that don't adequately explain the empirical evidence as I can plainly see it, led me to believe that the composition of the atmosphere is killing trees and indeed, will ultimately kill just about any species that needs to photosynthesize. That's from the ozone, the "other' greenhouse gas emissions.

    Similarly I have looked at climate change from CO2 and early on when I first started considering it to be a serious issue, I asked the question within the framework of Darwinian evolution - if the uncounted species that exist today in a very complex - almost unknowable - degree of interwoven relationships between species of predators, and pollinators and temperature and precipitation patterns that has taken 65 million years to evolve, through climate change that happened much more slowly than we are now creating in the blink of a geologic eye, how can mass extinctions NOT result?

    i asked this question of many experts without much response until finally one day I received a terse email from a paleoclimatologist who said simply: "Climate change is always followed by mass extinction."

    And then I realized that the imponderable is true - the balance that took millions of years to evolve is such a complicated dance, you just can't expect to alter a major component of the surrounding climate without disrupting the entire edifice.


  3. Catman, case in point:

  4. more catman
    I think James Lovelock's point is that of your paleoclimatologist: We have changed the air, we are psychologically, emotionally, economically, and politically unable to stop altering the air and put it back the way it was, we're at, or have past, the tipping point, climate is going to permanently change worldwide, we and many other species may be unable to make a living in the new environment, and so long, it's been good to know you. I'm retired but still expect to see really rapid sea level rise when some major ice cap disintegrates and slurries into the ocean. I'm not sure there's going to be a livable environment for my wife's grandchildren. I'm sorry, too.


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