With some considerable trepidation, I've ventured some thoughts on the debate about global warming. To think this through, I've asked myself a couple of questions: First, is there any indisputable data showing that human activity can impact the macro or worldwide environment in detrimental ways. Second, if the answer to the first question is yes, what can be interpolated about actions going forward.
In a surprising admission, the Chinese government released a report indicating that one-tenth of China's 1.2 million square kilometers of farmland is polluted with potentially dangerous levels of mercury, lead and cadmium from industrial operations. In 2007, several articles reported about research showing that one-third of the pollution over California cities, and then spreading across America, comes from China. The articles appeared in the conservative press because of references to that pollution actually cooling the earth.
Scientists studying glaciers have known for decades that particulates from volcanoes landing on the ice increased the rate of energy absorption, the surface temperature and rate of glacial melting -- but volcano particles eventually flush out of the atmosphere. The last few decades scientists have been tracking a perpetual and increasing deposition of energy-absorbing pollution particulates on ice around the world originating from human activity that is accelerating surface melting and glacial retreat.
The term "acid rain" was first used by a scientist in England in 1872 who was researching local residents' complaints that trees were dying and lakes were going sterile downwind from industrial plants. By the 1970s scientists had shown that pollution from England was damaging trees and sterilizing lakes in Sweden. Similar research connected pollution from America's industrial region to sick and dying trees and sterile lakes in New England.
On Jan. 26, 1880, a fog settled over London for three days, trapping pollution from local as well as remote coal-burning industrial plants, homes and businesses. By the time the fog cleared, it was estimated that 11,000 people had died from the pollution.
There are other examples, but it seems obvious to me, based on measurable sources of pollution and impact, that human activity does have the capacity to produce detrimental health and environmental consequences hundreds and thousands of miles from its origin. OK, but change the whole climate of the earth?
Consider the strange convergence. Global warming skeptics argue humans are putting enough pollution into the atmosphere to actually cool the earth. At the same time global warming proponents claim we are putting enough of other kinds of pollution into the atmosphere to warm the earth.
While the debate rages about whether we are making the earth hotter or colder, both sides have advocates who agree that enough human-origin pollution is being injected into the atmosphere to modify the climate of the earth, but seemingly lost is that in consequence we are creating a toxic atmospheric brew known to melt glaciers and kill plants, animals and people. Does it seem to anyone else that the shrill debate may be drowning out the obvious?
Doug Ward has lived in Longmont for 44 years.