Claire Conger

Al Gore leads the charge for reducing green house gas emissions with his lecture An Inconvenient Truth, but the really inconvenient truth is told in Snowball Earth by Gabrielle Walker (2003). Basically, we’re doomed.

Mr Gore graphs the earth’s climate fluctuations as they correlate to carbon dioxide levels and predicts that we’ll soon be off the charts–the world will be too hot for humans to survive. Ms Walker describes, over the history of the planet, how both warming and cooling of the earth is self-perpetuating and self-escalating. She discusses the events that disrupt equilibrium and cause the changes from warming to cooling and cooling to warming. Her book is fascinating.

For example, as our deserts produce more dust, due to drought and human activity, the snowmelt comes earlier because the snow gets more dust on it. The snow melts before it’s warm enough for plants to grow, so green life is disturbed, and less greenery exacerbates the pressures toward warming. (See Scientists find windblown dust hastens mountain snowmelt by Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press, June 30, 2009. Link is to SF Gate.com)

Mr Gore puts the blame on too much human activity. Ms Walker tells us that once the world starts warming, nothing short of a cataclysm will stop it.

What we need is a good volcano to set things straight! (See Popular Mechanics article by Bijal Trivedi, July 29, 2009, Hacking Earth Against Warming. Link is a reprint at SF Gate.com.) Particulate matter in the atmosphere cools the earth by reflecting sunlight back into space.

The effects of green house gasses are far reaching and many scientists don’t believe that cooling the earth by reducing sunlight is sufficient to take us back to the world we enjoyed in the mid-twentieth century, when Al Gore was born and our coral reefs were vibrant, before there were too many people.

There’s no guarantee that anything we can do will reduce our warming trend. Doomed or not, we must at least try to reduce the toll we put on our environment in any and every way that we can, because worse than failing is not trying at all.