around 10 days ago I went to see the "An inconvenient truth" documentary with a friend.
I feel that Mr. Gore makes sense in what he says and, if not, it seems to me a nice way of passing the time till he finds anything he likes more (presidential elections?) or both.
After leaving the cinema, I felt sorry for all those huge glaciers just getting smaller and smaller, then becoming tiny seracs…then i thought about Zaragoza and its desertic surroundings...
I also felt confused with all this data that talks about warning but in fact, in some places, could mean freezing…for instance, Mr. Gore explains that the last Ice Age in Europe came quite suddenly when fresh water from North America went into the ocean and, as a result, Europe temperatures got drastically colder…
A summary in my head is, if understand it correctly, and overall increase in temperatures (helping the Poles ice-melting … rising sea levels up to 6 metres by…well, we don’t know…) with some poorly understood changes in weather patterns.
At the end of the movie there is a link to a webpage which I visited. You can do the same at http://www.climatecrisis.net/aboutthefilm/ . There you can find the following apocaliptic message: “Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced”.
Uff, I think the page should deal with information and awareness but without creating any anxiety to the visitors. What do you think?
Let’s relax and try to understand the Global Warming hipothesis. What follows is my (poor) understanding (critics/comments accepted ;)
First you need to figure out the relation between CO2 increase and temperature increase.
To do that you will need to establish Co2 levels over a period of time. Mr. Gore do it for you and states that the level of CO2 (measured through ice cores) is now higher than at any time in the past 650000 years. And the temperature too…The last eleven years have included the ten hottest since records began.
Second, you need to believe (as Scientifics seem to do) in the Greenhouse effect
Third, and last step, the link needs to be made: more CO2 means more greenhouse effect, which in turns helps to trap more heat…Simple.
Well, no thatsimple. First, warming doesn’t ocurre evently across the planet…why? Well, we don’t know. And as we don’t know why, we say that weather patterns have a great degree of variability…this is what we say when we don’t understand something….too complex. Second, it is not that easy to measure the earth temperature (it is not like fever measuring with thermometers)…
But in the meantime, till we understand, we in Europe are already limiting those nasty greenhouse emissions…also in big events…as in our Expo Zaragoza 2008. Please, let us know any examples of best practices from previous Expos and/or events that could be implemented in the Expo Zaragoza 2008. From my side, I will check what is being actually done in Zaragoza…Last but not least, let me know what do you thing of all this…
5 comments:
i think if the governments are convinced about the impact of human activities on global warming, it would be interesting to have something practical people can use in their daily lives, such as recommendations on changing their private behavior, consumption, housing isolation, etc, rather than put forward extreme messages.
also, this is something that can be discussed at schools to favor more rational behavior of children.
Anna
Pour moi, Al Gore n'a pas autorité morale pour donner des leçons sur l'Environnement. Il n'avait fait pas suffisamment quand il était vice-président des USA avec Clinton et il avait vraimentle pouvir
Ánimo lo haces genial!!!! Sigue con estos buenisimos articulos!!!
I do know about the reasons why climate change is not distributed equally. In the McGill School of Architecture I took climatology courses as electives with Stuart Hill a great environmentalist and entymologist. Changing the 'surface reflectivity' in various regions of the globe can have severe localized consequences.
That is part of your answer. We did climate transacts as part of the course. A little site testing would confirm alot of things for your anti-galileo religious types.
My uncle opened the Science Centre on Yonge Street in Toronto in 1950. His daughter who has all the measuring instruments is in charge of cleaning up Lake Ontario. She did research on the Red Pole bird in Northern Canada which led to the discovery of the effect of acid rain on egg shells and her being considered Canada's outstanding scientist of the year for 2007.
McGill incidently is considered the 12th best university in the world. Miri Diamond was a biology teacher there! She should be invited, (along with me her cousin and expert on world fairs)
to speak on the subject of water at the Expo Zaragoza. Her father could play violin! I could present my futuristic digital art. The Canadian pavilion said I was ''too professional'' for the Expo 2005 in Japan!!!
Miriam which means 'water' in Hebrew is currently teaching at the University of Toronto. Our family has often been overlooked by the International Media!
Personally I think McGill is number one, and I am the number one student in the world. My student number was 7411111!
Miriam's father used to work at the Redpath museum at McGill when he lived in Montreal. That is where William Dawson recorded his discoveries of 'the ice age'.
I could also present a lecture on 'Water and McGill IN HISTORY'.
BRIAN LORNE MAGED toonisbureaut@msn.com
Please invite Miriam Diamond's kids also. They would love a trip to the Expo. I remember my trip to the New York World's fair in 1964 and the water related exhibits: the great fountains, the Pepsi-Cola 'Its a Small World ride' by Walt Disney and the Unisphere that hovered on a base obscured by a set of water jet fountains! It was the largest stainless steel globe ever constructed!
We also saw the first theatre show in a water tank 'Sea Hunt' presented by Lloyd Bridges in the Transportation building.
Our local 'Pointe Claire pool' had alot to do with the development of synchronized swimming.
The 1936 Great Lakes fair in Cleveland had an aquacade by Billy Rose which featured the popular handsome star of Tarzan.
I knew several Montreal lifeguards in my younger days - Jane Evans of the YMCA Westmount, Leslie from the Women's Downtown Y, and Collette DuHamel who was the second best back stroke swimmer in Canada.
I was a photographer and artist at the 1976 Olympics and a designer and renderer of the landscaping for the Equestrian events.
I am also instrumental in the promotion of spring water worldwide.
My father's uncle was a great painter just off of Manhatten New York who won many prizes there and painted the beautiful waves in the area where English people first colonized America! He did the state legislature. His canvases are exceptional! His daughter Gladys was a member of the New Jersy swim team.
My father was an athlete. A basketball and soccer player. He took my mom to the ocean beach where she would pose with Mexican sombrero in the days before Marilyn Monroe and the invention of the bik-kini. Got some cool pictures.
Dad had a giant wireless TUBE radio. He took it to the lake up north of Montreal and all his friends jumped onto a rowboat. The radio sunk with the boat!
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