Earth Day 2014

April 22, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/upshot/forty-four-years-of-earth-day.html

When environmentalists proclaimed the first Earth Day, on this date in 1970, the air was filled with doomsday predictions. At the initial rallies to mark the day, people warned of overpopulation, a denuded planet, hundreds of millions of people starving to death, a new Ice Age or the greenhouse effect. Many — though not all, obviously — of those forecasts were off.

Forty-four years later, human-caused climate change [global warming] has grown into the dominant concern for environmentalists and governments. America’s environmental problems are less severe, thanks in part to a market economy’s ability to produce new technologies and in part to the political action that the environmental movement produced. But the global problem — like choking smog in developing economies, rising sea levels and the rise in the planet’s temperature — remains worrisome.

Why don't these people simply say "global warming" instead of "climate change?"

I agree with including the term "human-caused", regardless of what phrase is used.

The concerned are talking about human-caused or human-accelerated global warming.

And the earth is warming. Since that first Earth Day, the world has been warming at an accelerated pace compared with prior decades, and scientists believe rising emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.

Decades? The Earth is over 4 billion-years-old, and the data comparison only encompasses decades of time? How is that statistically relevant or significant?

They calculate that the world has warmed by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century, with about 1 degree of that occurring just since 1970. The warming has been sharply higher over land and in some polar regions. As a result of melting glaciers and the expansion of warmer ocean water, the sea level is rising ever faster. It rose at an average rate of 2 millimeters a year between 1971 and 2010, and even faster in the past decade, after rising at an average rate of 1.7 millimeters per year in the last century.

I don't understand. How can conclusions be made from a tiny piece of data.

Glaciers covered Ohio at one time. Then those glaciers melted. Humans didn't cause those dramatic changes.

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