Our Heating Earth – It Ain’t Natural!

By James Donahue

While perhaps not as loud as they once were speaking out, the "global warming nay-sayers" are still out there, doing their best to assure an anxious world that the extreme run of severe storms and wild weather patterns is nothing to be worried about.

We watch with forboding sorrow as residents along the Northeast Coast, so battered by Hurricane Sandy and a string of severe winter gales to follow, struggle to hang onto the property they once occupied, knowing that even worse storms are coming along with even higher ocean tides.

The best scientific studies, some only now being published, are reinforcing what researchers have been warning us about for years.....global warming, alias climate change is real. It is going for the extreme in ways humanity has never imagined, and life as we have known it is basically over.

Climatologist Shaun Marcott, who worked on one of the new studies, said in a CNN report that the Earth's climate has been propelled from one of its coldest decades to one of its hottest in just the past 100 years. He said a heat spike like this has never happened in the 11,300 years that global temperatures have been studied.

Marcott's study, published in a recent edition of the journal Science, noted that researchers used various temperature indicators in the fossil record to chart global warming and cooling trends. The team concluded that while world temperatures have not yet exceeded the steamiest periods that happened thousands of years ago, but they are getting alarmingly close.

"By the year 2100 we will be beyond anything human society has ever experienced," Marcott warned.

Marcott and his team from Harvard University collected data from 73 sites around the world, both on land and under the sea. They went beyond the usual study of tree rings, which limit the study to the life of trees. The study used ice cores from Greenland, stalagmites in Borneo, fossilized pollen in Scandinavia and even shells of ancient acquatic microbes dug from up to 50 feet under the ocean floor.

The objective was to gather data covering the Holocene, the geological epoch that began at the end of the Pleistocene (about 12,000 years ago) and encompasses what is believed the impact of the human species throughout the world.

And no matter how they cut it, the blame for the sudden rise in world temperatures, the melting ice caps and the drastic extremes in weather is still pointing to human behavior. We are burning more and more fossil fuels and the atmosphere is heavy with carbon emissions.

If we don't stop, we are driving ourselves into a disaster beyond all comprehension.