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Here is an article by a
talented writer, who played college football at Northwestern, where they
make their players read and write to be on the team. He makes a good
point, when he says "don't kill the messenger." Some
people are still mad at Al Gore for getting more votes than George Bush
and they will not accept anything that he says, even though it is so
obvious. He didn't invent the Internet and never said that he did
(Although he helped millions use it, with teacher workshops etc.
You can thank Al Gore for giving me the skills to start a web page) He
didn't invent Global Warning, but he helped millions become aware of it.
Time to warm up to reality
It makes no difference if it's a cold day in January or a sizzler in July;
we'd better start paying attention to how we're destroying our planet
January 4, 2008
BY RICK TELANDER Sun-Times and Sports Illustrated Columnist
Let me start this column on global warming by saying I'm a guy who
believes in cleaning up after his dog.
So when I walked my little fur-ball on the sidewalk across the street from
my house late Wednesday night, I vowed to return and pick up the, uh,
stuff when it was daylight. Thursday morning, I'm walking the dog again
and I reach with a plastic baggie --the bag this very newspaper comes in
each day, to be honest -- and attempt to pick up the object. It won't
budge. I use a stick. Nothing. What we have here is a carbon-steel dog
turd welded to sheet ice.
So why talk about global warming on a day such as this, with snow drifts
everywhere in Chicago and a wind chill of minus-4?
Because it's happening, folks, and individual cold or hot days have almost
nothing to do with the overall warming of our planet. I know there are two
things some of you are going to say: Why bring up a political issue when
you, toy-department columnist, don't know a caucus from a cuticle?
And what in the hell does this have to do with sports? First of all,
global warming is no more political than a raindrop.
You may dislike Al Gore, think his Nobel
Peace Prize was given in error, but you no longer can shoot the messenger
to ignore the news he bore.
Our globe is a closed system that has been likened to a single complex
superorganism, one that responds to the things we humans do to it the way
a domed stadium responds to the games and hot-dog stands within.
We have been digging and building and burning on this planet for quite a
while, and simple logic tells one that the continually escalating
conversion of old things like oil and coal to new things like heat and
exhaust has to change the
environment of a system that is encapsuled by gravity and bounded by outer
space.
Scientists from everywhere have declared global warming unequivocal,
adding that our human carbon dioxide production must be harnessed and
reversed or big trouble awaits -- for Democrats and Republicans alike.
And sports?
Maybe you don't include hunting, fishing, sailing, surfing, swimming,
skiing, ice skating and snowball-throwing as sports.
But even a couch slug should understand how a rising sea, retreating snow
belt and mass dying off of species will affect everyone from soccer
players to snowshoers to scuba divers.
Nothing but the facts
As a United Nations panel of top scientists reported last fall, our
pollution is driving Earth toward ''abrupt or irreversible climate changes
and impacts.''
Here are some facts:
• • Glaciers and ice caps are melting at an unprecedented rate.
• • Mosquitoes that carry West Nile and dengue fever, which once could
not survive the cold above 3,300 feet, have been found at 5,600 feet.
• • The thawing around the North Pole never has occurred in modern
history.
• • Inuit hunters in Greenland are falling through the bizarrely thin
ice of their ancient hunting grounds and drowning.
• • The Inuit have no words in their Inuktitut language for the
strange southern animals they are now seeing: robins and finches and
dolphins.
• • The United States, India and China produce the majority of the
greenhouse gases that affect the nearly 200 other countries of the world.
• • The emperor penguin colony so beloved in the 2005 film ''March of
the Penguins'' has declined by more than 50 percent because of global
warming.
• • Montana trout rivers were closed from 2 p.m. to midnight many days
last summer because the water was so hot, it was becoming fatal to the
fish.
• • The ice mass in the Arctic might melt completely sometime between
2020 and 2040, causing Greenland to turn, well, green. ''If that
happens,'' says Larry J. Schweiger, president and CEO of the National
Wildlife Federation, ''sea levels
would eventually rise over 14 feet higher.'' That would flood millions of
people across the planet.
• • The sugar maples of the Northeast and upper Midwest, from which we
get maple syrup, are dying and relocating, if at all, across the border in
Canada as the climate warms. When those forests, which include birch and
beech trees,
disappear, so do the animals that frequent them, such as deer, moose and
snowshoe hares.
• • Man-made pollution has caused a 2.2 percent increase in global
humidity from 1973 to 1999.
• • Rising carbon levels might kill off the world's reefs by 2050.
• • Balmy weather has allowed the emerald ash borer to destroy
weakened ash trees, the staple for traditional wooden baseball bats.
• • The number of killer heat-wave days in the Midwest is expected to
increase by 70 percent by the end of the 21st century.
Let's address the problem Sure, there's more, but why go on?
The point is to recognize what is happening and address it.
And there are things we can do -- indeed, the economies of the world could
advance and profit once we embrace a new way of thinking.
For instance, a startup Seattle company called Imperium Renewables, funded
by $145 million in venture capital and private equity funding, is
beginning to make biofuel from carbon-dioxide-gobbling algae. That is,
slime.
Then there's me and my dog problem.
I finally did get the frozen stuff into my baggie, which I threw into a
larger garbage bag and put in the trash can.
It all will be landfilled -- waste inside plastic -- unchanged for decades
if not centuries.
A new way of thinking, anyone?
That was a good article, even though he fails to
mention the biggest threat to the planet. Methane gas is being
released from frozen organic material in Alaska and Greenland as it
melts at record rates. I saw them light a fire over a thawing river
that was fueled by methane. (Not to mention the Methane that creeps
out of the Duffer Locker room.)
Global warming started after the last ice age, but
there is no way to deny that we have accelerated the rate. Us old
guys don't have to worry, we just get lower heating bills that
might offset higher cooling bills. Our grand kids and their kids
will have to pay for the carbon and methane that is going up now.
Just tell them to stay away from Ocean front property.
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