Wednesday, September 21, 2005

No Way Home

Global warming 'past the point of no return' A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover.

1 comment:

muse said...

I saw a conference by David Suzuki last year (http://www.davidsuzuki.org/) and he basically said the same thing.

He compared overpopulation (and the resulting pollution) to growing bacteria in a test tube: the bacteria double every 10 minutes, for example, then it comes a time where the tube is suddenly too full and cannot sustain the growth and survival of the bacteria anymore. He said this to point out that the Earth is a finite living environment, we can't just move elsewhere when we've polluted it too much for us to live in it, but that from the looks of things, we might already be past the "oops, too many bacteria" stage.

I'm going to see him again -and Hubert Reeves, an astrophysicist and environmentalist whom I admire greatly- in October (http://www.equiterre.org/en/organisme/climate_alert.php?PHPSESSID=ade93783843638b0f971e34c7230cde0)