More, To Consider...

Global Warming or Climate Change, whatever it is called - and whoever believes it is more than a theory; even those who do not believe that human activity is concerned - is producing some alarming consequences. If we cede to the theorists who believe that Global Warming has resulted entirely from human-related spewing of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, upsetting the balance of nature's normal atmospheric climate, then it becomes urgent to log onto personal responsibility in altering our normal day-to-day interactions with nature.

On the other hand, even if we remain skeptics and don't subscribe to the human-centric causative of catastrophic environmental changes, we still have an obligation to become more aware, to take cautionary steps in our personal lives to treat nature and her environs with far more sensitivity than we have in the past. And that holds true, even if it is eventually proven that nature has taken her own course, a cyclical one having little to do with deleterious human interventions, and which the fossil record claims of little ice ages followed by warming periods is naturally cyclical.

The new publication by Bill McKibben, eaarth, gives much food for thought, even though its clarification of some issues may still leave room for doubt. Irrespective of what has been causing the great environmental disruptions and marked deviations from what we consider the 'norms' of our atmospheric condition, the reality of his observations appear unassailable. There has been a noted melting of glaciers, and in such areas of the Earth that have traditionally been frozen, like the Arctic regions and the Antarctic.

The planet has been suffering extreme weather conditions, harsher and more dangerous than previously, more frequently. From floods to cyclones with all the related damages and damages to nature and human security following. Hydrological cycles, this author points out, have altered on a hugely unprecedented scale (at least as far as human record-keeping is concerned). Warmer air has the capacity to absorb greater amounts of liquid. Areas that do not receive much rain therefore, are becoming drier, as the warmer air takes up what moisture is there.

Areas of the world that normally receive quite a bit of rainfall, are now experiencing rainfalls in volumes beyond the capacity of the environment to adequately deal with, resulting in severely irreparable erosion damage, and massive flooding on a scale hardly seen before, victimizing urban populations as well as outlying settlements in both the First World and the far more vulnerable and harder-hit developing world.

"...streambeds gouged down to bedrock, culverts obliterated, groves of trees laid to jackstraws..."

According to Bill McKibben,

"Total rainfall across our continent [North America] is up 7% and that huge change is accelerating. worse, more and more of it comes in downpours. Not gentle rain, but damaging gully washers: across the planet, flood damage is increasing by 5% a year. Data show dramatic increases - 20% of more - in the most extreme weather events across the eastern United States, the kind of storms that drop many inches of rain in a single day."

Certainly something to think about, to occupy our mindful hours...