Global warming: We want your take By Jeff Hammersmark jdhammer@care2.com lobal warming is happening. Those four words undoubtedly evoke a strong response in most readers, whether that response is to agree wholeheartedly or disagree vehemently. The debate around global warming continues to become more polarized as politicians and big businesses jump on the bandwagon, using the issue for political or financial gain. This poses a problem to the average person: With all the conflicting information out there, who or what do we believe? Do we buy into the story that the tree hugging hippies are telling? The one where if we don’t stop our greedy, dirty ways we will slowly toast ourselves to doom and extinction? Or do we believe the people who claim that our planet is SO vast, so powerful, and has been so enduring over its history, that we lowly humans could not possibly affect it in any significant way? The stakes are high, and every person on this planet owes it to themselves and future generations to at least become active in the debate, one way or the other. That brings us to the purpose of this column. In my experience, while there are a lot of young people who are informed and involved when it comes to the environment, there are is a much larger group of young people who don’t know and don’t care about it. Some of them don’t take a stance either way when it comes to the climate; some of them actively ridicule and belittle the ones who believe the planet is warming. With this column, I am asking all the readers out there to challenge me on the idea that the climate is warming and that it is humankind’s fault. I know what I believe, and I hope that I can convince you of the same, but ultimately I want to give people the opportunity to learn the facts, identify the false information, and make an objective, informed decision. At the very least, if the people who knew nothing have learned something, and the people who disagree are now doing so with better information, then we’re all further ahead than we were when we started. Since this is my first article for this column, I don’t have any e-mails with which to do my article on. So I'd like to share with you what I believe to be one of the most important, and startling facts regarding the environment. Carbon Dioxide, as we all should hopefully know, is a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases function like an insulator for the planet. They allow energy in the form of sunlight to reach the earth, but they prevent some energy from escaping back into space. This is a good thing, because if we didn’t have greenhouse gases, we would all very quickly freeze to death at night. Carbon Dioxide, while not the most potent greenhouse gas, is the one that gets most of the attention. This is for good reason. While reliable temperature records only go back as far as the year 1880 (which, by the way, show conclusive evidence of a warming trend between then and now), scientists have been able to get data on CO2 levels in the atmosphere much further back. They do this by drilling ice cores that have been intact for hundreds of thousands of years, and analyzing the gases trapped in them. This is a very accurate method of determining historical levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, and it gives scientists the ability to look back 450,000 years in time. One of the best examples of this is the Vostok ice to hear from you if you’re someone who considers themselves on the opposite side of the argument. If you believe human- please contact me and let me know why you think so. I’ll do my homework, and future articles will be based on the core, whose data was published in Nature, a peer reviewed scientific journal. What they found is that between approximately 420,000 years ago and recently, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, measured in PPM (parts per million), has been roughly between 185 and 300 PPM. In that time, we’ve had several ice ages, several almost ice free periods, and everything in between. According to NOAA measurements made at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, as of December 2010 we are at 389.69 PPM. We were at 300 PPM about 60 years ago. Is the red flag waving yet? Every year we are adding roughly 2 PPM to the atmosphere, and that number is predicted to increase as population grows, deforestation continues and fossil fuel consumption increases. The big picture? Simple math paints it for us. The total variation in CO2 levels over almost half a million years was about 115 PPM. The Vostok data shows that the fastest transition between a very low and very high CO2 level in that history happened in roughly 10,000 years. Modern society, barring any acceleration in CO2 emissions, will manage to increase the levels in the atmosphere by the maximum variation, 115 PPM, in 74 years. That’s 0.74% of the time it took nature. What I’ve explained so far is not contested. It is the raw science. The implications are where people start to argue. I’d like to leave you, the reader, with just the raw science and see where that takes us in future articles. Keeping in mind that it is an uncontested fact that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, it is an uncontested fact that greenhouse gases trap thermal energy inside the atmosphere, and it is an uncontested fact that we are increasing CO2 in the atmosphere at a rate far higher than the planet has ever experienced........ what do you think? Worth a closer look? I'd particularly like caused climate change is not happening, responses I get from readers. BROOKLYN PUB WATERFRONT LOUNGE 250 Columbia St. 604.517.2966 www.broolelyn.ca FRURSDEY is STUDENT NIGHT! DJ Tommy 4 the TUNE TWISTER 13