Glenn Stewart Coles, 9251 Yonge Street, Suite 8-924, Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada, L4C 9T3
Text Box: With the rise in popularity of Al Gore’s movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, it appears that mankind is finally realizing we must change in order to survive. Worshipped as a star among stars, Gore declined to announce candidacy for president of the US during the world broadcast of the Academy Awards. As the almost-president who is ‘not-Bush’, Gore’s popularity increases along with mass awareness of our environmental challenges. Of course there are people who argue that the global warming bandwagon is an alarmist technique intended to reduce the effectiveness of our economy, or to make profits for environmental companies. People are asked to calculate their ‘carbon imprint’, and then to make lifestyle adjustments to become ‘carbon neutral’. However, it is possible to buy ‘carbon credits’ to make up for bad behavior. The carbon credit system could be likened to the clearing of sins in confession. Neither prevents the damage, but personal justification is reached by ‘paying dues’. Whatever your position on global warming, we know that we can do better. China plans to build more than 500 coal burning plants over the next couple of decades. Perhaps we should propose helping them build windmills instead. We have the technology and knowledge, and it is only a matter of choosing. While coal-burning plants may be more profitable in the short term, we know that they have much greater costs. The bottom line is that the climate of the earth is shifting faster than we have ever seen before. Perhaps mankind has influenced this shift, or perhaps it would have happened anyway. The existence of life is always cyclical in nature, and the climate of our planet has always been changing. In Antarctica, teams of scientists drill holes through the ice, extracting long cylinders of frozen history. Like tree rings, the marks on the ice cores reveal climate conditions throughout the years. So far, the scientists have retrieved ice cores dating back 900,000 years. During that time period, earth has experienced eight glacial ice ages. We are also experiencing the highest levels of carbon dioxide and methane in 650,000 years. There is a lot of ice in Antarctica, which contains about 90% of earth’s frozen water. Though drilling has often started at the top of mountains to allow for deeper cores, scientists expect to reach bottom at the million-year mark. While some ice below this has been melted due to the extreme pressure, just over a million years ago there was no ice in Antarctica. The earth is over 4.5 billion years old. What was in Antarctica before there was ice? Remember the tsunami in December 2004? Do you remember that the earth shook like a bell for a month following the earthquake? The massive movement made the earth smaller and more compact, and the planet began to rotate faster. Even though the amounts were miniscule, they still have influence. When it comes to the history and future of our planet, we are really just guessing. © Copyright Glenn Stewart Coles, 2007 First Published March 18, 2007

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Planetary Shifts

 

The climate of the earth is shifting faster than we have ever seen before.

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