Dave Couture wrote:In the 4 billion years of planetary history, do ppl sincerely believe that this is the first time our planet is going through a climate change????
The only difference, is humans are there to witness them, now.
It happened way before man walked the earth and it will continue to happen, after man is extinct from the earth.....PERIOD!!!!
No one (except maybe Christians who believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old to begin with) will reasonably debate the existence of previous climate changes.
But here's the thing - climate change doesn't happen
without a reason. There has to be some reason the climate change; and that affects everything else. Just as water in a pot will remain water forever, it will also change as soon as you apply a change in temperature to it . Make it too cold, it will freeze. Warm it, it will slowly evaporate over time. Heat it, and it will boil off into the atmosphere.
The Earth has gone through some pretty dramatic climactic events in its past. They were the result of some set of forces on our environment. I, personally, wouldn't want to live through another ice age because of some catastrophic global event.
The thing to understand is that in ANY ecosystem, there are literally a billion factors that affect it. Remember those complex equations from advanced algebra class? The ones with multiple variables, and you had to solve for X? Well, imagine about a billion variables...
Every single change of a single variable has SOME affect on the equation.
A coworker sent me a slide show of pictures that astronaut Sunita Williams took from space. Go spend a minute and look through these:
http://www.slideshare.net/LawrenceCarso ... s-of-earth
The first thing that I found absolutely awe inspiring is the sheer scope of man's impact on the Earth. Looking down at night I find it just incredible to fathom the amount of light we are actively generating - EVERY NIGHT!
We are lighting up the planet in a big way, and the vast majority of our light comes from coal - a fossil fuel. Imagine the impact of that. And that's just from the light you can see; that's not even talking about the billions of cars we're running, or the airplanes we're flying, or all of the other things we're doing to generate greenhouse gases.
The point I'm trying to make is this: we may feel small because we are small. One human being on this planet isn't much of a speck. We're insignificant. And we might like to use that insignificant feeling to shrug off our responsibilities as a species.
But when you look at what we've done from space with just a nighttime power grid you begin to realize very quickly - we, as a species, are capable of some pretty amazing engineering feats. And to think that our COLLECTIVE accomplishments in energy and fossil fuels have no effect on our environment, and that Global Climate Change is just something that "happens" every few million years - well, that's absurd. That's not paying attention.
We're here, on this planet. And we're doing some pretty amazing stuff for a little bug that we are. But it does have an impact. And we need to be mindful of that impact.
