No Time to Waste When It Comes to Global Warming
In addition to “Chiropractic News” in my e-mail “news alerts” I receive “Science” news alerts. As a chiropractor I am often more interested in breaking scientific discovery when it comes to health issues than in medical news. The Science article I found most interesting was indeed about health, human and otherwise, because it was about a serious new finding relating to environmental health. Scientists are saying (and I believe it’s what they’ve been saying all along) that climate change is turning Antarctica’s ice into one of the biggest risks for coming centuries because even a tiny melt could drive up sea levels, affecting cities from New York to Beijing, or nations from Bangladesh to the Cook Islands.
The scientists are trying to design ever more high tech experiments, using satellite radars, lasers, robot submarines, or even deep drilling through perhaps 3 kilometers of ice in order to “fill in the gaps” in understanding the risks. “If you’re going to have even a few metres it will change the geography of the planet,” Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said of the more extreme scenarios of fast ocean rise.
I’m just wondering if it wouldn’t be more beneficial to design “ever more high tech experiments” that would actually do something to reduce global warming? At this point, we know that we have a limited amount of time to solve critical environmental issues like global warming. It just seems to me that getting into the small minutia and filling in “the gaps” in understanding the risks is a lot like spending a whole bunch of time and money on a really cool, high tech barn door after the horse has escaped.