On Sunday evening, as much of the nation was contemplating the prospect of six months without any NFL football, I found a different reason to ponder the near future.
The subject of my deliberation?
It’s certainly not a half year without 300-pound men in tight pants tackling each other.
Instead, I fear something which seems to escape the psyche of many Americans today: global warming.
On Sunday night, the National Geographic channel aired an episode of “Naked Science” called “Glacier Meltdown.” The program centered on the new scientific evidence that shows an increase in greenhouse gases and the impending consequences that are becoming less “possible” and more “probable” with every passing day.
I know, it sounds clichCB). The young college liberal bleeding his heart out to save the environment. But before you think global warming is a bi-partisan issue subject to debate, consider this: the stadium in Miami which the nation set its sights on for Sunday’s game might very well be under water in just 20 years.
Yet this point likely falls on deaf ears. Many students on campus seem too caught up in the tunnel vision of college life to pay attention to the greater world around them.
Sure, midterm tests and papers are important, but we must realize that the end of human civilization as we know it may very well be just around the corner. It is becoming painfully clear that the problems concerning global warming will, in fact, affect us in our lifetime, not just in the lives of our children or further posterity as we might think.
In about 40 years-or around the time most of us are likely to retire and head to warmer climates like Arizona or Florida-the world’s average temperature will be 10 degrees warmer at the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions.
Does that register with you? It should.
Those coveted sunny destinations will, in 40 years, be too hot to stand even in the winter or-pay attention to this-be entirely under water. South Florida, from Miami to Daytona Beach to Ft. Lauderdale and beyond, will be almost completely covered with the rising ocean by then. In fact, this could be the case in just 20 years.
This is not science fiction. It is science fact. Let me show you.
Some 140,000 years ago, the global sea level was 25 feet higher than it is today. That water mark was the result of an average global temperature-which melted the ice caps and increased the volume of the world’s oceans-that was only five to seven degrees higher than today’s temperatures. While some say that a higher sea level is just a periodic return to the warm end of a global warming and cooling cycle, the difference today is that we are warming too much, too fast.
It took hundreds of years of gradual warming to produce the high sea level 140,000 years ago, but this time around, it has taken only decades. Furthermore, that ancient increase was caused mainly by a slight wobble in the earth’s axis while today’s increase is the product of an industrialized civilization’s carbon dioxide emissions, among other greenhouse gases, which traps the reflected heat from the earth’s surface.
And worse, scientists predict that at this advanced rate of warming, the problem may soon spiral out of our control. The ice shelves which sit on Greenland and Antarctica reflect the sun’s rays 80 percent better than the ocean’s water, and those ice shelves are decaying at the same rate, spilling into the sea at levels not seen in this planet’s history.
In a matter of years, that decay will become relatively independent of the greenhouse effect, and even if we curb destructive gas emissions the shelves will continue to deteriorate and fill the ocean’s waters. In other words, the greenhouse effect will serve as the catalyst that will tip earth’s delicate climate into uncontrollable chaos.
Radical, immediate changes in the way we live our lives are the only way to save our climate and our costal cities. In an instance where our greatest enemy is our own advancing, consuming society, the most important, difficult step to take is the first one, and that step is to get educated and realize the mess we’re in. The fate of our civilization-our planet-is in our own hands.
While you may not want to hear this message now, I beg you not to dismiss it like so many others have.
It will be much tougher to hear it when your ears are under water.
