I saw the Al Gore film, “An Inconvenient Truth” last night. I was simply amazed at some of the statistics and photos. And I was touched by Gore’s lifelong passion for the environment and in particular, the issue of global warming. I’ve been confused about the issue for some time– whether the climate change we’re experiencing is simply a regular climactic cycle or if the human effect on the atmosphere is actually raising the temperature of the earth. I left the film convinced that we have set ourselves up for catastrophic climate change. I took a screenshot of one of the most compelling arguments in his slideshow (below), apologies for the resolution. In it, you see CO2 levels (in yellow) for the past 600,000 years as collected from 3km deep Antarctic ice cores. The white line below the CO2 line indicates temperature. You can see that the temperature and CO2 lines closely follow each other over this huge period of time. The higher the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, the higher the avg. temperature. The lower the CO2, the lower the temperature, etc.
The far right of the yellow chart indicates CO2 levels today– off the charts. Much higher CO2 levels than have ever been present in the atmosphere in the past 600,000 years. That’s not good. I’m planning to support Eco-friendly industry and business like my father’s company, Discovery Sea Kayaks that offers Kayaking tours in the San Juan Islands.
2 comments ↓
Looks interesing. How much does it help to the cuase that Mr. Gore promotes his moview traveling in a private jet?
on the submitted slide, you can almost see the truth of the fact that temperature (first) is the cause, and the rise of CO2 is the result. The previous spikes in CO2 levels may not have recorded in the ice cores, as there was no new ice formed in those hot years.
“Newly found” evidence indicates centuries of warmer than today environment as recently as 1,500 years ago, and certainly some 4,500 years back.
Al Gore, with all his “compassion” uses easily 20 times the per-capita amount of energy as measured by the western standards, and perhaps hundred times that of the rest of the world. What a leader.
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