The increased speed of glacial melt is the signal that global warming has arrived and we brought it on with our pollution and inefficient use of fossil fuels.

There is a good deal though we can do together to understand, address, change behavior and stop from making global warming and climate chaos worse for you and your children.

Take for example: actor Leo Dicaprio, who asserts that, in the short film Global Warning:

There is a lot we can do to combat climate change and global warming -- from moving to renewable energy to driving hybrid cars. Read on to find out more about global warming and what you can do to help slow it down.

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Glaciers are a signal that we are experiencing climate change and that it is not some future, still awaiting us -- out there in the Arctic native villages are being relocated because the permafrost beneath the tundra is now melting swiftly.

For example, The O’Higgins glacier in Chile retreated at an abrupt rate: 2000 feet of ice 9 miles long, melted in to a lake in a mere 100 years.

Antarctic change affecting krill, (chin-strap) penguins, and (fur and elephant) seals.

In three years ice noticeably retreated – thinned 92 feet in seven years.

Only 1 in 9 glaciers are not retreating today & these ice banks serve a billion people annually with melt water for crops, hygiene and drinking.

What is global warming?

Evidence | Our Teach-in | Dicaprio film | start | concluding goal

Evidence is mounting and cannot be ignored by small island nations, Inuit native peoples, or fisher's who trawl the oceans for food.

Impacts on wildlife.

Antarctic

Sixty percent decline in (chin-strap & Adele) penguin numbers in 20 years.

Krill decline is a ten-twelve year phenomenon as reported in the press (Time Magazine)

The atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide concentration and speed of rise is the highest level in 850,000 years (Paul Mayefsky)

Rise of 4 to 6 degrees if the heat trapping gases double in 35 years.

In the Antarctic today the rate of increase is one degree per decade.

Arctic

For 100,000 years the Arctic has been frozen and it will not be in a century

Bob Correll, 2004

 

The seas are rising

Temperatures rising twice as fast as the rest of the

Arctic Climate Impact Assessment

“the canary in the mine”

98% of mountain glaciers are melting and will raise sea level 3 feet in a century.

Greenland Ice has a 500K year record stored in the cores.

In 100 of thousands if not in millions of years.

“It’s human activity.”

More temperature rise is inevitable.

Ice is breaking up three weeks earlier in Canada’s Hudson Bay, less than 1000 Polar Bears there.

“floods, heat waves and :the severity of the storms” are going to be more severe.

Oceans in the Northern Hemisphere are the warmest they have been in a century of records.

Evidence | Our Teach-in | Dicaprio film | start

James Hansen --a NASA climate scientist, at Godard Research Laboratory-- was censored by White House staff at the Council on Environmental Quality, CEQ.

Global Warming is accelerating. “The speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the human impacts.”

2005        is the warmest year on record.

NAS –Dr. Cicerone—it is happening and human Green-House Gas emissions are driving this consequent climate instability.

Greenland ice sheet melting is accelerated.

What is urgent now is action, to retard the exponential rise in heat trapping gases (Hansen)

Just ten years to the tipping point, that is we have a window of opportunity in which to act, before, according to Hansen, “It will be a situation that is out of our control.”

He identifies “tipping points:”

Ice sheets for runaway melting & loss of water from melt.

Antarctic stability undermined & sea level rise can and has happened abruptly.

Hurricane and storm erosion of exposed coastal terrains.

Evidence | Our Teach-in | Dicaprio film | start

What is their focus at our teach-in

Since global warming is a problem we can solve together; we must begin to promote solutions and part of that process is for you to vote for candidates who support real solutions to reducing the international threat from (the rising rate of) heat trapping gases (carbon and nitrogen related compounds).

Climate chaos that accompanies Global warming and abrupt climate change is the most pervasive, persistent, prolonged and perplexing ecological problem we have ever faced.

But some of the solutions this problem calls us to implement can make us less wasteful, reduce our heat trapping gas pollution, and put people to work in those industries such as wind, geothermal, and solar power that build jobs locally while addressing global pollution.

Joseph  Siry

Why the statement "Global Warming is just a natural cycle, isn't it?" is a meaningless stentiment with respect to the facts of carbon dioxide build-up. By facts I refer to the saturation level of carbon dioxide in the air and the disruption of the carbon cycle. The influence of current levels of carbon dioxide on climate chaos and vulnerable communities around the world and the nation all suggest that human activities have altered the atmosphere and the oceans, wildlife propagation and migration patterns, and glacial retreat for some decades to come.

• Too abrupt to be natural,
  
• Too high a level not to be of some human origin,
  
• The rate is increasing as we speak at 2% per year or faster depending on the economy & may double in 35 years.
  
• At a higher atmospheric concentration than at any time in the last 850,000 years.
• no human civilization had ever witnessed this sort of flip.

Student organizations will play a part as well, to point Eco-Rollins and student Forum to promote action and community improvement.

• The fact that the US has scuttled the Bali negotiations and —as usual—interfered with the European Union’s attempt to get a solid agreement to move toward a more comprehensive protocol makes our work all the more significant.

• As German Chancellor, Andrea Merkel has commented it is "called it too late to stop global climate change" as we are in the midst of an experiment on ourselves from which we cannot escape.

Solidarity in finding solutions that promote healthy, clean energy and transportation, implement concepts that invest in people, promote energy efficiency, reduce heat trapping gas pollution and create jobs locally; these are the keystone points of our Focus the Nation teach-in as seekers of solutions to ecological problems we have to do our best to tell the facts as examples of globally responsible citizens.

New material | Opportunities | Serious discoveries

Evidence | Our Teach-in | Dicaprio film | start