Frog Soup

In the movie about climate crisis, An Inconvenient Truth, (see last month's blog), Al Gore lives up to his name and illustrates the threat of increasing temperature failing to cause the alarm in should in populations and governments. He uses a frog. It happily abides in a beaker full of water even when the heat is raised to the extent it will kill it. If the heat is raised quickly, the frog jumps out and escapes; if slowly, well ... you get the idea - Gorey frog soup.

We are that frog, says Al Gore. We are in the beaker. The heat is being raised, but so slowly that we are oblivious to the danger, only conscious of discomfort. The thing about crises is that we expect to have time to jump out of danger. And doubtless some people will relocate to better climes or adjust with air-conditioning or otherwise climate controlled homes.

The equator will see the least rise in temperature, 1 degree Celsius, in the next 50 years, but the polar regions will see up to 12 degrees rise. The average rise will be about 5 degrees. But, if you are thinking of jumping to equatorial safety bear in mind that many islands and coasts will be flooded beneath the sea or lakes and other land will be scorched to desert.

So, does groggy froggy disintegrate into an amphibious soup in An Inconvenient Truth? Or is it rescued? If so, how?

You know how to find out.

An inconvenient reality

I watched The Inconvenient Truth on DVD this afternoon. Impressive. I believe it now; before I thought it was probably true, but just a theory, not a fact. Global Warming was something one believed in, rather than ineluctably deduced or knew. Now, I am convinced and it is an inconvenient reality that I will have to live with from now on.

The clincher was the Antarctic and Greenland facts of melting. Gore calls it the climate crisis, and that is a better term. Ice is reflective, and when it is gone, the seas warm on which it sat in the Antarctic, so more ice melts. This is just one powerful argument among many. Greenland is losing its ice much faster than predicted, as photographs show.

Getting warmer is just the symptom and, let's face it, hating warmer winters and summers in the UK is a bit hard to do! Global Warming just does not sound serious to me, and that was why I heard the arguments but resisted them, I think. Climate Crisis is more than inconvenient - it is a catastrophic threat to me, my own and humanity, the planet ... see, I can get quite worked up about that. The multiple threats are undeniably grave for mankind.

Gore's movie offers hope. Personally, I like to think in terms of changing emissions and our ways of living, and Gore's movie gives hope for that. 70 million tonnes of CO2 are emitted world-wide per day and 25 million tonnes are absorbed into the seas causing them to become acidic, killing coral and making it harder for animals that make carbonated shells, and that includes the base of the food chain- plankton. He says we have to stop doing that, and, he is clearly right. Sometimes the right course of action is simple and obvious. We need to change how we use energy, and how we dispose of the atmospheric gasses that are overwhelming the Earth's natural dynamics.

If you have not seen the movie, I recommend it.

http://www.climatecrisis.net/