Tag Archives: Global Warming

Time Is Running Out 

08 Saturday Mar 2025

Posted by in Climate Change

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Imagine being on a train speeding down the rails towards a tunnel through a mountain. Various devices have been installed to tell the engineer to slow down before reaching the tunnel. A rock slide has closed off the tunnel but crews and equipment are working to clean the tracks so our train can safely pass through. Now imagine those devices are being dismantled allowing the train to speed back up. In addition the work at the tunnel entrance has been slowed and maybe stopped. Time is running short and unless the engineer applies the brakes quickly the train will be wrecked with disastrous consequences to the passengers. The rails are climate change.      

This imaginative teaching scenario is an accurate description of what is happening here regarding efforts to deeply reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. If we don’t do it quickly the effects of climate change will become unbearable. We have known for almost 250 years that carbon dioxide kept the planet warm. We have known for almost a hundred that the level of the gas was increasing but at a slow rate so scientists studying the rise were not very concerned.

About 50 years ago they started getting concerned. About this time the scientists told their bosses at the major oil companies that they were causing a substantial increase which would lead to an uncontrollable warming of the planet. The companies managed to dissuade and con people into thinking it wasn’t true. Millions of Americans still believe their propaganda, and they just put in a President who either ignores the facts or just doesn’t care. He has said many times he wants to produce more fossil fuels and cut regulations on burning them. He wants to reduce government spending on combating the efforts to use wind and solar power.

Scientists said a 3.5 degree rise over the start of the industrial age was a tipping point and we are very near that point. We are about to hit those rocks at a high speed. How many people will survive…if any?

Big Oil Knew

31 Thursday Oct 2024

Posted by in Carbon Fuels, Climate Change

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        I am a contributor to several green organizations who try to protect us, wildlife, and the planet. Billions of people are aware of global warming and we are the cause through our burning of the fossil fuels the planet buried millions and billions of years ago. Global warming and our exploding population are causing hundreds of species to go extinct each year. Every year we dig huge holes in planet big enough to be seen from space.

            Today the global warming I studied in 1970 is now called Climate change. We have known that carbon dioxide kept the planets re-radiation’s longer rays from escaping into space for 250 years. Some of the people demonstrating during the first Earth Day tried to make people aware of the danger.

            They tried to say each of us had some responsibility for it, which is true, Big Oil was told by nuclear scientist Edward Teller in 1959 at an American Petroleum Institute meeting so they have been aware but chose to put greed over the safety of their descendants. In 1979 Exxon’s research scientists told management of the dramatic changes in the World’s climate in the next seventy-five years. That’s on track for the projections for 2054.

            The oil giants and coal companies have put money over the future health of humanity and wildlife. As we try to limit the damage we are using more of the CO2 producing fuels and not making significant changes in reducing the damaging effects. How far can the damage go? Venus is the best example of runaway global warming. Its atmosphere is enough to melt lead!

Rising Water

09 Friday Feb 2024

Posted by in Global Warming, Rising Water, Water

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Sea levels in the Gulf of Maine have risen seven and a half inches in little more than the last hundred years. The Gulf is located between Maine and Nova Scotia. This has caused much shore erosion and the increase in more violent storms has destroyed centuries old buildings and piers. Storm surges are reaching higher than ever before, flooding modern buildings. Current levels have not had a noticeable effect on upstream communities but will with the projected rises.

The scientists at the University of Maine have been studying the increase along with their climate change research. The models of the effects of climate change over that one hundred year period closely matches the seven and a half inch increase. Their programs indicate the levels will rise another ten inches by 2050 and forty inches by 2100.

As you visit coastal cities, imagine the sea levels being ten inches higher in a couple of decades and four feet higher when a child born today retires. What cities will still exist, not only on the coast, but tens of miles inland? What will Washington D. C. do in just a few years since the area is already being flooded by high tides backing up the Potomac River? Where will the Federal Government move to the next few decades? Will the climate change deniers block the need to relocate cities and tens of millions of citizens until it is too late?

The Water Is Rising Now

12 Friday Jan 2024

Posted by in Glaciers

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Mel Gibson starred in a movie called “Water World.” It was about the world after the glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica had melted, flooding the cities and most of the land. In the movie the surface was more than a thousand feet high. The actual depth would be about 275 feet higher than today.

Before they melt a century or two off in the future some possible events could happen making that far off eventuality come very soon, perhaps a year or two. Greenland has more ice than Antarctica’s shelves. What many people know is Greenland has several volcanoes but did they know two are under the glaciers producing a little melting Image if they started spewing lava under the ice causing them to melt while sliding off the island. All that additional water would raise the Atlantic Oceans level a “Quick” 150 feet. Coastal cities would have little time to prepare to save the buildings, all they could do is evacuate.

Antarctica has earthquakes and volcanoes too. If one or two of the shelves broke loose and slid into the ocean, the seas would rise even more and faster in the Southern Hemisphere, Coastal cities and islands would again be drowned. The rise from Greenland’s glaciers would float the shelves off the rocks holding them in place.

Either of these events would lessen when the waters spread around the world’s oceans. Even then the coastal and many inland cities would still be permanently underwater. Florida, Louisiana and much of twenty states would be under water.

These geological events could happen today, tomorrow, or never but those glaciers in both places are already melting faster every year and raising the sea levels each year. Some cities are thinking, some are planning, and some are building to postpone the flooding. Others are doing nothing.