During the ongoing debate about the nature of climate change, I had assumed, as I’m sure most others have, that the revelation both regarding the extent of climate change and the cause of that change being greenhouse gases was relatively recent. I certainly never remember the subject being raised before the 90s.
I was shocked therefore when I recently came upon the following while reading Rachel Carson’s famous and well-respected book, The Sea Around Us. The book discusses the origins of the oceans and the evolution of oceans, continents, climate, and human settlement over geologic time into the present. Writing in 1961, she said:
“It is now established beyond question that a definite change in the arctic climate set in about 1900, that it became astonishingly marked about 1930, and that it is now spreading into sub-arctic and temperate regions. The frigid top of the world is very clearly warming up.”
She goes on to discuss a resulting dramatic lessening of ice in the arctic, the greater ease of navigation, the retreat of glaciers, the impact on the migration patterns of animals, and the lengthening of growing seasons in sub-arctic regions. She also notes the rising of the seas.
But she puts this in the context of “we are still in the warming-up stage following the last Pleistocene glaciation - that the world’s climate, over the next thousands of years, will grow considerably warmer before beginning a downward swing into another Ice Age.”
She states that the dramatic change seen since 1900 is “of a shorter duration, decades or centuries,” perhaps because the change is so much greater than would be expected, and goes on to note the several possible explanations that scientists have proposed … an increase in solar activity or the cycle of the ocean’s deep currents. She ends with “the long trend is towards a warmer earth; the pendulum is swinging.”
She does not mention the greenhouse gas effect. Yet in fact, the theory of the impact of greenhouse gases on global warming from burning fossil fuels was formed and studied by the late 1800s. But scientists being often ego-driven and slow to accept another’s research, this theory was not taken up again until the 1950s and was not broadly accepted until the 1980s. Apparently when Rachel Carson wrote, there wasn’t a serious question in scientific minds at that time that this warming was caused by the greenhouse gas effect.
So we have been sitting on a climatic time bomb for more than a century. And for most of that time, scientists and governments have been asleep at the wheel. We have virtually lost the opportunity to act so as to prevent future climatic disruptions and disaster for the human race. Even if the will were to be found.
The question I ask myself is: how many other issues are there that are of vital importance to the future wellbeing of the planet and mankind that we aren’t addressing because no one is paying attention or no one has a confirmed answer. Just like there is a group that is scanning the skies for asteroids that might strike the Earth, creating havoc, there should be a committee which focuses on evidence of other matters that are of great import to our future and sees to it that they receive appropriate public and scientific airing.
