Al Gore Climate Project presentation,
25 November 2008
About 26 FSIers and friends met at Sarah’s (Sustainable) Café for the 2008 FairShare Dinner with a Difference, to hear from one of Al Gore’s Climate Project presenters.
Darren Bilsborough showed us about 50 slides from his collection, beginning with pictures of vanishing glaciers and snowcaps to establish that global warming is really happening. The graph, based on 650 000 years of ice core evidence, established the relationship between the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the earth’s temperature.
In the past, global warming, caused by factors such as variations in the tilt of the earth’s axis, has led to a subsequent rise in CO2 levels, but in the last century, the process has reversed, so that rising CO2 levels precede and cause global warming. Unchecked CO2, and therefore temperature rises, produce some pretty scary scenarios for the planet this century and, on current trends, much more quickly than even pessimistic forecasts predict. While opinion pieces by anthropogenic climate change deniers outnumber believers in the popular media 55/45%, in scientific journals the deniers’ publications are outnumbered 968 to nil.
Darren’s presentation did end on a note of hope. The technology to arrest disaster already exists and has existed for some time. What we need is for people like us to: