“If our children knew the facts we do, they’d take action. Shouldn’t you?”

Canadian environmental groups Environmental Defence and ForestEthics are behind the bold campaign that encourages parents to upload photos of their kids to encourage Stephen Harper to think of their needs in considering COP-15, the necessary treaty in Copenhagen.

For those of us who are deeply concerned about Climate Change, it is great news that Climate Change deniers are holding up the HEADLINE from Nature Magazine and saying – “Look at this!”  Deniers have ignored hundreds of similar reports, let’s hope the Headline gets everyone to try to understand the report which supports everything scientists have been saying all along.

How is this report the Trojan Horse that may help get deniers to fully embrace the global crisis of Climate Change?

Consider this graph from the report:

• The red line is the 10 year mean for temperatures over past decades.
• The black line is global rise in Climate change suggested by a International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  The panel of thousands of scentists who are urging the world governments to take action.
• The short purple line shows what the temperatures would have been in 2005-2010 had man-made carbon emissions stopped.
• The green line is the forecast temperature from the “Climate Change Pause” study.
• The start of the dark grey area is where we are on the timeline, today – 2008.

While the media have grabbed what they call the dip in the green curve (or global cooling), showing a slower rise in global temperatures over the next ten years, here are the important things to note:

• the next ten years actually refers to the past seven years and the next three . . . ie: the current decade.  Temperature increases this decade have slowed.
• temperature rise in this report meets the IPCC projected global temperature rise of .8 degrees C by 2025.
• the report supports previous studies which show that it’s going to get quite hot, quite quickly over the coming decade: 2010-2020
• the curve doesn’t dip or cool at all, the report suggests that temperatures are projected to rise for every single projected measurement period.
• the purple line (what would have happened, had human created Green House Gas emissions stopped) helps deniers see that human activity causes the temperature increase.
• supports other Global Warming Reports like the one in Science.

Those of us who teach others about Climate Change need to celebrate the Nature Magazine report that is getting Climate Change deniers to use the basic concepts of the Climate Crisis:

• the earth is warming
• human activity is causing the warming
• It’s going to get a lot hotter soon
• scientific studies are cause for action, NOW.

Now, if we can just get a Headline that says “ocean levels are dropping over the next decade”, maybe we can get deniers to understand the threat that rising oceans associated with the climate crisis are having across the globe.

It got me thinking about people who scorn this kind of information and think that a small increase in temperature might not be that significant. So I crunched the numbers. Earth is covered by 1.4 Billion cubic km of water. Most of that in deep ocean water that covers 75% of the planets surface. What if the heat the scientists were talking about was all focused on Canada’s water? How much water could be heated to the boiling point: 100 degrees C?

Turns out, that if all the heat added to the worlds oceans in the past century were focused on Canada, there would be enough heat to Bring to Boil all of Canada’s 890 000 km2 of fresh water including all of the Great Lakes as well as Hudson Bay and the Gulf of St Lawrence. And there would be heat left over to warm the Gulf of Mexico!

.6 degrees C, over the entire planet . . . that’s a lot of heat, and with it comes significant consequences as shown to the world in Nobel Prize winner Mr. Al Gore’s Academy Award winning movie An Inconvenient Truth.

Perhaps more people would pay attention and take action on the Global Climate Crisis if it was positioned as a Canada-Wide boil water emergency.

No more according to Google Earth. Are Google, NASA, and other organizations conspiring to make Americans think that the Arctic Ocean is in fact ice free already? These are screen shots from Google Earth taken today on my computer.

I guess with this Google Earth conspiracy teaching us that there is no ice on the Arctic Ocean, the political gamesmanship over rights to the oil on the bottom of this ocean can begin. The tragic consequences of human inaction on the climate crisis that will eventually bring about an end to this ice covered ocean, are already bringing about serious consequences…. just ask the people of Myanmar about weather-related consequences of Global Warming (May 3, 2008 Cyclone killed over 20 000).

Thank you Google, for making it easier to sleep at night.