How can scientists possibly know that the Earth is now hotter than it’s been in 125,000 years? According to a July 8 Washington Post article, they look at everything from lake bed sediments to tree rings to ice cores that have been frozen thru all those millenia.
Humans have only had reliable temperature measuring devices for a couple hundred years, but paleo-climatologists who study the planet’s climate history have deduced the truth from the evidence of fossils remaining from times when we’re not sure that homo-sapiens even existed.
The Post article said that if any day in many thousands of years was as hot as July 2023 was, it could only have occurred about 6,000 years ago when the world had warmed with the end of the last ice age.
That was the start of a global cooling trend that lasted until recent results of the industrial revolution. The factories that sprang up all over Europe and America, created the man-made pollution, much of it from coal, that trapped the heat of the sun near the Earth’s surface, instead of letting it dissipate into the atmosphere as it had always done.
The factories drew workers from the farms. Urbanization separated our psyches from the soil. We lost touch with old world wisdom, like you shouldn’t foul your nest. Just in case the air wasn’t poisonous enough, we mimicked the belching smokestacks and took up smoking for slow suicide.
In this milieu of losing the land from our lives, we forsook the flora and fauna of the fields, except when they served us as food or favor.
Now our abuse of terra firma has come back to bite us. It is also biting a million innocent species which had always lived in harmony until man dominated their domain.
But as obvious as global warming seems, no amount of catastrophes will convince climate deniers that it’s real and we should try to deter further damage. In fact, the deniers, often in service to fossil fuel forces, have doubled down and aggressively resist any efforts to awaken the public to the peril, including legislators making it illegal for state workers in Florida to even mention climate change.
Here’s a news flash, Florida: Your state has extremely low-lying land, which will become home to the dolphins, not the football team as sea level rises. Another clue for Floridians is the 100-degree ocean water that was recently recorded near Miami. That’s hot-tub temperature. Those temps will kill millions of fish and marine mammals.
In Iowa, a weatherman named Chris Gloninger talked about climate change on TV and received so many death threats he resigned.
Still, there is a glimmer of good among the gloom. A 2023 study from Yale found that 74% of Americans agree that global warming is real. So that awareness is a start. The question is: now that most of us know what is happening, are we willing to change our ways to protect the planet? It will take personal efforts, government’s laws, and corporate responsibility all working together to have any chance to survive the devastating effects that await us.
And whether we understand the details or not, preserving the planet is the only path to protecting its people.
Frank Lingo is a free-lance writer based in Lawrence, Kansas. Email: lingofrank@ gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2023
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us