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> Reading the New Yorker, anecdotes piling up
Tom_Crumrine
post May 20 2005, 01:09 PM
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18 May 2005

I guess you’ve gotten old if you are too old to skip work to go to see the new Star Wars movie. I thought about it but there was no way I could justify Star Wars over students. Any vestiges of old rebelion must have faded away. I’ll have to settle for watching the original Star Wars while I write a little message.

I’ll admit I felt a little overwhelmed when people actually started reading these posts. Especially when my friend Gooch read and said that my conclusions were a bit obvious. I’m not mad at Gooch this whole thing is about greater communication but I did wonder if I was thinking deeply enough about all of this stuff. Gooch made me realize that maybe I was writing to a certain level and I guess I’ll just have to stop worrying about all of that. The point is that we are all trying to increase knowledge about global warming. We know that something is going on and we need to share that.

I have been doing a great amount of reading. The last three New Yorker’s have had great stories about climate change. They also include an important and frustrating fact: people have been trying to drum up support for global warming for 30 years. Evidence has always been there and it keeps mounting and mounting but somehow the message never really gets through. To create an entertaining article the author of the New Yorker articles paints a wonderful picture of the people that are directly involved in climate change in Alaska. The first article talks about the village of Shishmaref and the warming conditions that have created a situation where those villagers are considering moving to the mainland. With an island just a few feet above sea level warmer weather and ice that lasts for a shorter time each year has created conditions that are eroding their island. The article also talks about the amount of permafrost in Alaska. I was intrigued to learn that permafrost can be a better indicator of climate change than temperature because it fluctuates more slowly. I know the article includes lots of anecdotal stories but you put enough of those together and all the stories add up to some evidence that can’t be ignored. If everyone is noticing that their winters are shorter and there is less ice then something must be happening.

The article also talks a good bit about what I think Donie Bret-Harte (the researcher I am working with in Alaska) is working on. Permafrost holds carbon found in plants and keeps it from being released into the environment. There is a lot of permafrost so there is a lot of carbon that is held within it. As temperatures get warmer and this carbon is exposed so it can decay a lot of carbon can be released into the atmosphere. As I understand it this carbon could act as a fertilizer to encourage the increase of biomass in the arctic. Donie’s research is a piece of this puzzle and I’m excited to learn more about it when I join her team at Toolik.

This entry is really a mish-mash of a lot of thoughts. I’ve read so much about global warming lately that I can’t help but be a little enraged about the lack of action around it. It is the only issue that I have been thinking about for a year or so. So please write in with questions or comments about seeing this issue a little more widely. If you think I’m narrowing in too much and forgetting about the economy or how hard it would be to change from a petroleum based economy please let me know. Right now the bottom line for me is that carbon dioxide has increased, we caused it, and we should do something about it.
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