#exClimate week 3, Signs of Climate Change
Third week of the course, and it's going better and better. I'm really fascinating about this topic, so I'm enjoying every bit of information. This week we talked about signs of climate change and how human activities have changed the carbon dioxide cycle.
So, when it comes to signs of climate change is very important to understand when a weather phenomenon is caused by natural variability and when it's a signs of something much bigger going on. This isn't easy at all, because we have already seen how deeply everything is connected, from feedback mechanisms to natural cycles. A big proof of something huge has already occurred can be found looking at the Arctic. Because of its own unicity, we can tell that arctic is the region where the major change has occurred and will be occurred. This is linked to the ice albedo feedback we already saw in the past weeks. Another big proofs are graphic of temperature and sea level rise, as for the carbon dioxide emission graphic. All this things combined together traced a similar pattern that convinced scientists all around the world (the consensus is above 95%) that climate change is happening and the big change are directly cause by human activities.
Since the industrial revolution, we completely change the way we think about nature and resources. We like to think that we are in charge, we are the boss and so we can treat nature like disposal thing. This isn't started with the vapour machine of course, we can trace back to the early history of humanity the desire to have power over nature. This is a long conflict between “dominator” and “cooperator”, which Riane Eisler explain a lot better than me in her books. Give them a read, It's worth it and it'll give a new entire prospective of history and sociology.
But the industrial revolution has cancelled the last link we have with nature. Before that, energy was a nature force and was dominating by nature. After that, coals has given humanity the way to free themselves from the nature boundaries.
So we arrive at our days, when CO2 is up to 400ppm and we need to change and turn back before it's too late.
Some damages is already done and we must prepared ourself, but we can actually do something, by changing our lifestyle.
This course is really good, it give you some data to base your knowledge and it gives you a perspective of what is really happening. It's very objective. And the more I read and learn, the more I realize we need action. Now.
And it's not only an altruistic thought. The Earth and Life have their ways to survive, but what we can lose now is so precious that we need to take a step back. For our own existence.
