The topic of climate change and the fate of Earth's ecosystems in response to an ever growing human population is something we all must consider with honesty and integrity. We were stoked today to see @leonardodicaprio share one of our posts and help spread information on the subject. This is one aspect of social media that is absolutely awesome, spreading knowledge to all. Today we thought it might be fun to dive in a little deeper!
The scientific community has reached a consensus, the world is warming up and nearly all indicators suggest that humans are accelerating it. Skeptics, whether those with biased agendas or not, will often cite the fact that Earth's climate fluctuates naturally between periods of cold and warmth and that last year was the coldest winter they can remember (we mean you Bostonians!). These are all true points, but they are misleading. In terms of climate, one must consider the entire planet, not just a particular region. While it may be colder in your town, the mean global temperature averaged over a year has been rising steadily since 1900 (data source @nasa). To look farther back than that, scientists can examine the vertical structure of cores from the ground and determine periods of "glaciation", the times in Earth's history tens of thousands of years ago when temperatures were cold and much more of the water on the planet froze. What is scary isn't the fact that we appear to be moving deeper into an interglacial period (warm periods between glaciation), it's the rate at which we are doing it. Dr. Larry Peterson, a professor of Marine Geosciences at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (i.e the guy that goes out into the middle of the Ocean and collects the cores from the sea floor) explained it best to us by saying, "During the last period of deglaciation, CO2 rose in the atmosphere at a max rate of 30 parts per million (ppm) per thousand years. As a result of human activities, CO2 is currently rising at a rate of 30 ppm in 15 years!" THAT is scary...