We Don’t Have a Spare Planet

Why isn’t everyone concerned about global warming? Especially in recent years and even months the argument that something very serious seems to be happening is snowballing. Why is it that there are still people who will not buy into this idea and refuse to believe there is anything to worry about? The black fog that obscures the reasonable conclusions about this situation appears to be political debate.

Since when did caring about the planet that we live on, the one and only planet we have, become a political issue? Who decided that being responsible for our actions and limiting the impact we have should be a negative thing? This should be a moral value that all of us share no matter your political affiliation, or even if you don’t care about politics at all. A problem that affects every living species has no business being separated into political categories. I would think that the universal consensus would be that we are going to need this planet, and so will our children, and their children after them.

I understand that it is somewhat difficult to come to a conclusion about whether or not climate change is man made. There is a lot of back and forth conversion that aims to discredit one side or the other in this argument. Those who trumpet the dangers of the situation are labeled as alarmists and on the other side are the people who are stubbornly insisting that there is no problem. For those who simply believe that nothing is happening or that it’s completely natural, I tend to believe scientists. I know it’s kind of silly to think that way, but with all of their crazy facts and numbers I just lean towards them. You have to be very resistant to not want to believe there is at least something to take note of.

Of course the Earth changes over time. Every piece of land was once connected, and before that it was entirely water. The problem is that the evolution of the planet is supposed to be gradual. Over more time than we can possibly fathom, the Earth has fashioned itself (minus our adjustments) into the blue and green work of art that we call home. It naturally develops a harmonious equilibrium that sustains life almost perfectly. When that balance is corrupted, it will right itself. It has found ways to correct problems since its birth, but it appears that we are the first species Earth wasn’t ready for. Our insatiable desire to use sustainable resources at an unsustainable rate is not something the Earth is prepared for. The impact that we seem to be having is too overwhelming for her to handle.

Try and grasp the actual magnitude of the following. In the past 50 years, the Dead Sea has been lowered by 80 feet. The impact is evident in places like Shishmaref, Alaska, where the ocean is ominously approaching the village at a rate of about 10 feet per year. If you do the math on the above examples it seems as if something quite unnatural is going on. Cartographers literally have to redraw maps to account for the drastic changes.

We are seeing the impact of warming everywhere. Animal species have begun to and will continue to die out unless the trend is reversed. They will be the first ones to suffer but certainly not the last. It should not be up to us to decide the fate of the planet or its inhabitants, but it appears that we may have unknowingly been doing so all these years. More than likely, man will not really begin to panic until he is more directly affected by shortages of water, proliferation of disease, and various other complete global disasters.

We can be selfish creatures, but we also have great capacity for good. Now that we can clearly see problems and have the technology to provide solutions, all that lacks is the will. Our government is not going to baby-sit all of us and take care of the mess we have created. We have a responsibility think about what kind of a legacy we want to leave to future generations. This is one situation that should be discussed openly without being tainted by partisanship. It seems that if you are a liberal you believe in climate control. If you are conservative you automatically think man-made global warming doesn’t exist. Why should we let politics decide what our values are? It should be our values that decide our politics.

Even if for some reason it turns out that we are not the cause of rising temperatures, why should we do nothing about it? I’ll borrow an analogy from a failed species, the dinosaurs. It is largely accepted now that an asteroid caused the extinction of one of the most impressive collection of animals the Earth has ever seen. An asteroid is obviously not a man made phenomenon, but we would do everything in our power to stop that from happening again. Well, there is an asteroid heading for us right now, maybe not from the cold depths of space, but it is going to seriously affect mankind’s future, only we have to capability to alter its course.