mediacrit.com

If you are older than 40, do you even remember 1969? Maybe you were too busy watching “The Love Bug.” Playing the new Led Zeppelin album. Learning the words to “Hair.” Protesting the war. Or celebrating the first moon landing.

So, you might be excused if you missed an article on December 21 of that year in the New York Times. In a small report on a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the Times published its first article that used the term “global warming.”

The science, even in 1969, was stunningly accurate. The article noted “global warming could cause further melting of the polar ice caps and affect the earth’s climate,” and quoted a physical scientist who said that humans have “only a few decades to solve the problem of global warming caused by pollution.”

Since that day, hundreds of news stories have been published and broadcast, detailing scientific reports warning that human-induced warming could lead to ocean levels 20 feet higher, flooding some of the world’s largest cities and most populated regions. Even inland areas would suffer from such climate change, as the heat shifts planting zones to the north (including moving the corn belt from Iowa into Canada).

So, here we are 38 years later after the national newspaper of record first reported on global warming, and the question still is, what are we going to do about it?

We have now reached a point where the fingerprint of human-induced global warming is clearly evident. If you didn’t believe in global warming before (and the fossil fuel industries have been buying and distributing disinformation for years), you have no excuses for not getting it now.

We are personally experiencing the results of our unquenchable demand for fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution began in the 1800s. It took millions of years for all of that prehistoric plant life to decay and get locked in carbon form as coal, oil, and gas.

Then in just two centuries (a blink of an eye in earth’s history), we burned enormous quantities of it and released the carbon into the atmosphere. According to National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), by the end of this century, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will be from 75 to 350% above pre-industrial concentrations. That’s more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than the earth has had in the last 420,000 years–before humans even existed.

NOAA reports that U.S. and global annual temperatures are now approximately one degree warmer than at the start of the twentieth century, and the warming has accelerated since the mid-1970s at a rate approximately three times faster than the century-scale trend.

The past nine years have all been among the 25 warmest years on record for the contiguous U.S., a streak that is unprecedented in the historical record.

As a result of the increase in temperatures and carbon dioxide, the oceans are increasingly becoming acidic, killing coral reefs and other aquatic life essential to the food chain. Fueled by warmer seas, hurricanes are becoming more severe. Glaciers in Alaska and the European Alps are rapidly receding and the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro are almost gone.

In December, Canadian researchers reported that a 25 square mile ice shelf broke off from the coast of Ellesmere Island (find it on your globe about 800 miles north of the Artic Circle). The remaining ice shelves are 90 percent smaller than they were when they were discovered 100 years ago.

Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research now predict that the Arctic Ocean could become completely ice-free during the summers by 2040.

Good luck trying to explain where Santa’s workshop is–maybe a rusty vessel flying a flag of convenience and plying the warm waters of the arctic with an underpaid crew?

In the past few months, the New York Times and other news organizations have written stories decrying China’s race to build more dirty coal-fueled power plants, further hastening our planet’s boiling point.

Given what we now know about global warming, it’s almost absurd that power companies are rushing to build coal-fired power plants in America as well. (Very impressive, I might add, that we model our energy policy on China’s.)

What America’s coal-burners are hoping to do is build as many smokestacks as possible now, knowing that when regulations do change, the existing plants will likely get grandfathered in by politicians.

But now is the time to take a stand against the short-sighted visions and short-term profits of the fossil fuel industry. It’s our responsibility: we’re the end-users, and the consequences are unfortunately ours and those of the generations to come.

The rallying cry against new coal-burning plants should be more than “not in my backyard.”

Let’s try “not on my planet.”