Getting a Grip on Climate Change, Not a Moment Too Soon
By the time a subject appears routinely on ABC News, AOL's news page, the cover of Time Magazine, yada yada, you might think that the public has a grip on it. You would be wrong, according to David Suzuki, head of the David Suzuki Foundation, an organization which was founded in 1990 to
work to find ways for society to live in balance with the natural world that sustains us. Focusing on four program areas – oceans and sustainable fishing, climate change and clean energy, sustainability, and the Nature Challenge - the Foundation uses science and education to promote solutions that conserve nature and help achieve sustainability within a generation.
Recently, my foundation conducted a focus group about global warming to see where people are at in their understanding of this complex and challenging problem. The results? Let's just say they were disconcerting, to say the least.
Simply put, most people don't have a clue. The majority felt that global warming was a pretty important problem and they were concerned about it. But when pressed as to why it was a problem or what caused the problem, all heck broke loose.
Apparently, according to the average Joe, global warming is happening because we've created a hole in the ozone layer, allowing the sun's rays to enter the atmosphere and heat up the earth -- or something like that. The cause of the problem is cars, or airplanes, or aerosol cans. No one really knows for sure.
The kicker to this, of course, is that people exist who actually do have a pretty good idea of the cause of the problem. Headlines on a report by a group of scientists ( including my favorite government maverick climatologist James Hansen) published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences read: Earth May Be at Warmest Point in One Million Years, in a Reuters article from ENN, and: Earth Headed for Warmest Temps in a Million Years from an ABC News story featured on AOL's news page today.
According to the report,(...) the planet is just two degrees shy of an average temperature of 59 degrees Fahrenheit, which is what they believe the temperature was about a million years ago.
NASA's James Hansen, along with colleagues from the University of California and Columbia University, are for the first time, marking a calendar signaling the approach of temperatures that humans have never experienced.
"Humans are now in control of the Earth's climate, for better or worse," Hansen tells ABC News.
Based on a "business as usual" scenario in which greenhouse gasses continue to rise unabated, Hansen says we'll break the million-year-old record in about 45 years. But he stresses we can't wait that long to cut greenhouse gas pollution, because of the decades it takes for the climate system to respond to changes.
A fun post script to the latter article is that the group took time out to rebuke popular science fiction writer Michael Crichton, for his misleading of the reading public as well as of our gullible administration:
And in a highly unusual move for a scientific paper, the authors devote eight paragraphs to systematically deconstructing the assertions of a prominent science fiction novelist. In the non-fiction sections of his 2004 book "State of Fear," best-selling author Michael Crichton wrote that Hansen's climate change calculations were "wrong by 300 percent."
Hansen says Crichton misrepresented his scientific work and, adds the scientist, has done so in testimony before Congress and in a meeting with President Bush -- even though he is not a climate expert.
"He is propagating false information to the public," Hansen says.
Crichton, through a publicist, declined ABC News' request for an interview.
So, the "average Joe" might do well to drop his science fantasy fiction and hie himself over to the Climate Change section of Suzuki's site (the "average Jane" can join him), where the science of the issue is made beautifully clear, the solutions to the problems are outlined, and simple changes you can make to slow global climate change are clearly presented. It's not necessary to belong to the National Academy of Sciences to begin to get a pretty good grasp of what this is all about.
