Act now, for the sake of our Earth

In an op-ed column on March 29, Alan Boone, while admitting he’s not a scientist, dismisses the idea of manmade global warming, saying the Earth has warmed and cooled in natural cycles for eons. Doubters of human-induced climate change who have “excellent credentials” make up “quite a list,” he says (he doesn’t list them), but even if the scientific majority turns out to be right, he doesn’t think there’s anything much we can do, “even by ruining our economy” because of the “headlong industrialization” of China and India.

I’m not a scientist, either, but I had the good fortune to take a class on climate change offered by Penobscot Valley Senior College and taught by scientists at the University of Maine: Mark Anderson, senior instructor in the school of economics and coordinator of the ecology and environmental sciences program; Ivan Fernandez, professor of forest soils; George Jacobson, former director of the Quaternary Institute (now Climate Change Institute); and Leigh Stearns, postdoctoral researcher at the Climate Change Institute, who has measured the rapid retreat of glaciers in Greenland.

From that class I learned that studies of the Vostok ice core from Antarctica conducted by the Climate Change Institute have shown fluctuations of temperature over the past 400,000 years. These temperature fluctuations correlate almost exactly with fluctuations in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Both carbon dioxide and temperature levels started rising sharply around 1800 (the time of the Industrial Revolution) and are still rising steeply, far higher than at any previous time in the past 400,000 years, and with no sign of a downturn – going off the charts, in fact.

In a 2007 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (http://www.ipcc.ch), which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore last fall, states: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea levels.” As to causes of this change, the report says, “Global GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions due to human activities have grown since pre-industrial times, with an increase of 70 percent between 1970 and 2004.”

In 1800, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, there were about a billion people on the planet; now there are 6.5 billion. Overpopulation and overconsumption have led to deforestation, producing a quilt of greenhouse gases (including methane and nitrogen oxides as well as carbon dioxide) which traps heat and warms the planet. Since carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for up to 500 years, we need to start mitigating in a hurry.

There are things that can be done, and they might even be good for our economy. Certainly paying inordinate prices for increasingly scarce fossil fuels is not good for the economy, and neither is going to war to ensure access to oil, without mentioning the humanitarian cost.

Although at this point biofuels do not seem to be a solution (they raise the price of food and require energy to make), we can do a lot more to conserve energy. European countries are far ahead of us in conservation, and China, for that matter, has stricter car emission standards than we do.

Recent headlines in the Bangor Daily News make it harder and harder to ignore the gravity of climate change: “Earlier springs may cause extinction of more species” and “Western Antarctic ice chunk collapses” (the “chunk” was seven times the size of Manhattan).

For our children and grandchildren, we need to act. We can reduce our individual carbon footprints (drive less, turn down thermostats, use fluorescent light bulbs, recycle, weatherize, etc.) and we can demand action from our leaders at local, state and national levels. To their credit, the city of Bangor and the state of Maine already are taking steps to address human-induced global warming.

For suggestions on what can be done, check out http:wecansolveit.org. Useful information is also available at www.rprogress.org and www.bp.com.

Christina Diebold is a member of Penobscot Valley Senior College and the Cool Bangor Coalition.