World Environment Day
Today, June 5, is World Environment Day. The theme is “Melting Ice – a Hot Topic” in support of International Polar Year, which runs from 2007 to 2008 according to the website Environment news Service, http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2007/2007-06-05-03.asp. Tromso, Norway will host the event this year.
Melting polar ice is worse than we think. The article went on to say that the actual melt rate of glaciers into the Gulf of Alaska has nearly doubled since 1995. We should all be concerned, very concerned. Its effects will be felt by people in the tropics, temperate climates and large cities around the globe not only people living in Artic or ice capped mountainous regions because an estimated 1.5 billion people are dependent on water from rivers impacted by melting snow and ice. That would be our Northwestern states. The ice caps in Glacier National Park are disappearing at an alarming rate. The flow of water from yearly spring melts is what sustains the tributaries that maintain the water supplies of many cities out West. The increased rate of melting will eventually see the last of the water from those mountaintops and then what?
About 300 million people are dependent on snow and ice melting in periods with low precipitation. In Central Asia, Peru and Chile, large land areas are completely reliant on melting water from snow and glaciers. And melting snow and glaciers on the mountains of Asia alone could affect about 40 percent of Earth’s population, the report warns. The Norwegian Minister of the Environment said that we have started an accelerating process and do not know its outcome. Norway is one of the countries in an area that will see the first results of ocean levels rising and gobbling up shorelines.
As the ice and snow melt, avalanches occur that dump into glacial lakes causing the water to stir up and levels to rise. Many of these lakes are unstable with large areas of methane gas at the bottom. The report explains that rising temperatures, coupled with the thawing of frozen land or permafrost, are leading to the creation of new lakes and the expansion of existing lakes in places like Siberia, which are releasing bubbles of methane, estimated to be 43,000 years old.
The first global warming event that scientists have been able to reliably trace, took place 40 million years ago and was caused by the release of too much methane gas when the earth was still unstable. I looked into this quite a while ago and the most frightening aspect was that the climate temperature only rose a ˝ degree and slowly over a period of a thousand years compared to what we are experiencing now with a rapid change of possibly 1 degree in a little over a hundred years. The event caused the earth to incinerate.
Make no mistake. This is not the same temperature change we experience on a daily basis where a few days ago it was 85 degrees and today it is 66 degrees. This is about over all climate change across the entire world that drastically affects everything. So the next time you hear someone like Regis Philbin say, “One degree, I’m really scared” and make fun of it on TV, don’t rely on his or her common logic or should I say stupidity. It does not apply here and is not about the temperature fluctuation we experience seasonally or on a daily basis.
With less snow and sea ice the surrounding land will absorb more heat from the sun and polar oceans that will speed up the process even more. Anyone that skis the slopes in the winter knows about the reflected sunlight off the snow. With no snow the sunlight is simply absorbed. Sunglasses are a necessity and is it just me or is the sun getting to be sickening in strength? I can remember when I was young; it was possible to look directly at the sun for at least a few seconds. Now the glare is simply too strong to forego sunglasses when it’s a sunny day. Is this an effect from the loss of the reflective layer in our artic poles that protected us for so long? I do know that pets that are outside all of the time suffer cataracts earlier than pets kept indoors. I don’t doubt that in the future there may be warnings about keeping your animals outdoors at all as the ice and polar caps melt and the reflective process decreases. After that it may not be long before we are asked to stay indoors as much as possible. What kind of life will that be?