Some people do read and act upon environmental news. Some people have made the connection between mankind’s personal habits and the natural world around us.
Now, I’m not advocating we all stop viewing Corrie Street on TV in order to read books about our responsibilities related to climate change. However, once the hour-long program is over, keeping up on environmental news would be a very good use of our time.
Though we likely know quite a bit about the degrading effect of BP’s oil disaster upon the Gulf Of Mexico because news was transmitted in many forms almost daily for several weeks not all that long ago, I don’t recommend we wait ‘til there’s an oil disaster in the North before we learn about a part of our country that is slowly (some scientists would say ‘rapidly’) disappearing.
Some worrying information concerning the effects of our behaviour in the far north - other than in Greenland; its loss of ice depth has been well-recorded for many years - has been receiving growing attention in a few arms of the media lately.
Already I’ve mentioned a few sentences from a recent news clipping:
“Canada’s coastline is changing because ice shelves are breaking up faster than expected, experts say. Almost 50 per cent of the ice shelves have been lost in the past six years... Features that we consider to be part of the map of Canada are disappearing and they won’t come back.” D. Mueller, researcher at Carleton University, as reported in London Free Press, Sept. 28
Prior to that news I read about the loss of Arctic shoreline in ‘You Are Here’ by T. M. Kostigen. When the author bunked at Shishmaref Village Emergency Station a few years ago, he saw the destruction of the Arctic shoreline - and parts of the village - first hand. (The entire village will have to be moved at great expense in the near future. Because of the loss of shoreline around the globe, the Inuit will not be alone in having to move to a new, less-troublesome location, but they will be among the first).
[“The northern lights, prettier than the northern hole”: photo link]
http://www.sharenator.com/Northern_lights/
Most recently, news about a growing hole in the Arctic’s ozone layer has been reported.
The following appears on an online news site:
NASA Discovers Northern Arctic Ozone Loss
By Kevin Lee, PCWorld
Scientists have discovered an unprecedented depletion of the Earth’s ozone layer in the Northern Arctic region. A NASA-led study released on October 2 in the journal Nature reports that a loss of ozone similar to the one found in the Antarctic has begun to develop due to a prolonged period of low temperatures.
The Ozone layer is the stratosphere, extending from about 10 to 20 miles (15 to 35 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth. Ozone is a molecule made up of three-oxygen-atoms that absorb 97 to 99-percent of the Sun’s ultraviolet rays.
The next sentence in the same article reveals mankind’s fingerprints have been found in space.
I.e., The Ozone layer suffers some amount of damage every winter, as the cold temperatures cause ozone-destroying forms chlorine to be converted from human-produced chemicals.
"The difference from previous winters is that temperatures were low enough to produce ozone-destroying forms of chlorine for a much longer time,” said lead author of the study Gloria Manney, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a press release. "This implies that if winter Arctic stratospheric temperatures drop just slightly in the future, for example as a result of climate change, then severe Arctic ozone loss may occur more frequently." (www.pcworld.com)
A large hole. Our fingerprints. 10 to 20 miles over our heads.
What next?
Stay tuned.
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Please click here to read Climate Change Concerns: PT 2 “R.I.P. He entertained himself to death”
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