Global Warming and Our Planet

ECO NEWS, January 2008, by Deanna Fry

Global Warming
and Our Planet
Should we be worried?


You probably hear about global warming at school and on TV. Do you ever worry about it? To be truthful, it’s a problem, a big problem, and one we need to learn about so we can make changes right away in order to save our planet.

Although there is lots to be worried about, worrying won’t change anything. There are so many things we can do, right now, and learning is one of them.

Heat in the Atmosphere
The concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is the highest it’s been in over 600,000 years. Too much heat in the atmosphere is causing temperatures to rise around the globe. The last few years have been the hottest ever. Many damaging trends are emerging as a result, such as the polar ice caps melting more quickly. This will cause habitat loss for animals like the polar bear, and cause ocean levels around the world to rise, flooding low-lying areas of land where millions of people live. Extreme weather events like hurricanes, storms, droughts and forest fires are occurring more often, and in more places than they used to.

Here in North America we need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and overconsumption of energy and material goods.

An Inconvenient Truth
There is a great movie that explains what causes global warming and the scientific danger warnings about climate change. It’s called ‘An Incovenient Truth’, by former US vice-president Al Gore. In fact, it was so well done that on October 12, he and the United Nation’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) were awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their “pioneering contribution to the world’s understanding of the threat posed to every one of us by climate change”. 

Al Gore had been delivering a slide show presentation about global warming all over the world for many years. The spring of 2005 is when he made it into a movie and a book, to reach more people. He even won an Oscar at the Academy Awards in March 2007.

Gore says that the current climate crisis is an opportunity for people all over the world to work together in acting, “boldly and quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming”.

The cool thing here, pardon the pun, is that Al Gore is not just jumping on the environmental bandwagon. He actually studied with one of the first climate change scientists when he started college back in the 1960’s. Prof. Roger Revelle was the first person to propose measuring the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere. The early results of his experimental data could be clearly seen on the steadily increasing graph of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over time.

What You Can Do
Search back issues of GCDA Magazine to find out more about how all this works (My Canada, May 2007) and what you can do about it in your own life (My Canada, June and July 2007). Also, go to Climate Crisis and many other excellent websites. Definitely get a copy of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ to watch if you haven’t already. You can make a world of difference!

What are you doing about it and what do you think we should all do?

~ Deanna

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