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Greenhouse Gases Reach a New Record
The World Meteorological Organization reports that 2011 saw greenhouse gases reach their highest ever. Carbon dioxide was at 391 parts per million and methane at 1,813 parts per billion. These are trace elements in the atmosphere but nevertheless play an important role in the radiative forcing that leads to global temperature rises.
Some will argue that carbon dioxide is essential to life, and indeed it is. That argument ignores misses the point; you can have too much of a good thing. Water is essential to life but drinking too much of it will kill you. Arsenic in small doses has medicinal uses, especial in identifying tumors. If you eat it, arsenic will kill you.
2012 has been a bad year for weather events. There has been drought and crop failure in the United States, which has suffered from very strong storms and forest fires. The extent of Arctic sea ice in the summer has reduced so that it stood in 2012 at record low levels. Billions of dollars has been lost as a result of extreme weather events all over the world, the price of food is rising, as a direct result of poor weather, especially grains such as wheat. Our daily bread is becoming more expensive. The oceans are becoming more acidic as a result of absorbing record amounts of carbon dioxide and that acidification will affect sea life.
No doubt eventually the world will agree that too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is bad for the planet and bad for humans and we will eventually take real measures to reduce its atmospheric concentration, stabilizing the climate and perhaps slowly the rate of global warming.
Climate change is not an inconvenient truth, but an unpalatable truth. No man thinks that he kills the thing he loves or that he sows the seeds of his own destruction and will be forced to reap the bitter harvest, still less that his children will.
Filed under: carbon dioxide, carbon emissions, climate change, energy, global warming Tagged: arctic sea ice, climate, environment, extreme weather events, methane, nature 
2012-11-21 15:40:06
Source: http://robertkyriakides.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/greenhouse-gases-reach-a-new-record/
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