Todd-Whitman – The Climate Is Changing
ASP Board Member – former Governor Christine Todd Whitman – wrote in Politico Magazine on Climate Change, science, politics and the need for action.
Governor Whitman started by explaining the issue:
This week, two teams of scientists announced that the West Antarctic ice sheet has begun collapsing, beginning what they call an “unstoppable” process that could raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet over time. “This is really happening,” Thomas P. Wagner, one of the researchers, told the New York Times. “There’s nothing to stop it now.”
She noted:
The climate issue is politically challenging not only because it’s at the bottom of people’s priority lists, but also because of overreach on both sides of the debate. Humans aren’t the sole “cause” of climate change, and environmentalists have done a disservice in making that claim too assertively. Our activities are exacerbating natural phenomena, making us part of the problem, but the Earth and its climate has been changing since it was formed. Because of human activity, things are changing faster than nature or humans can adapt, and the sooner we start taking steps to slow things, the better off we will be.
She concluded:
I remain confident that economic prosperity and environmental protection are not mutually exclusive goals, and as soon as my party recognizes the exorbitant economic costs of not acting on climate change, I believe we will start to make progress. It is imperative that Congress make this issue a priority. I only hope it’s not already too late.
Read more about our Climate Security work.
Read the full article here
2 Comments
Comments are closed.
Christine Todd Whitman blurs two things together to downplay the seriousness of climate disruption. Yes, the climate has always changed and the change has been caused by a variety of forcings. But study after study shows that since 1950 these other contributions to warming and cooling have more or less cancelled each other out and that human greenhouse gas emissions have contributed almost all of the warming. And since these emissions continue to accelerate and the political will to take the necessary steps to rapidly and dramatically reduce them is absent , it is looking increasingly as though we are willing to radically alter the world around us in largely terrible ways. While we seem unwilling to do what is needed to keep warming below the 2 deg. C line between dangerous and highly dangerous warming, the recently-released report by the International Energy now says our present course would raise global temperatures by 6 deg. C by 2050! Let’s stop kidding ourselves and get to work!
The article on the Antarctic ice sheet collapsing is similar to articles from the late 1990s. The current two articles indicate that the ice sheet could collapse in 200 to over 1,000 years (on the order perhaps of thousands of years). If the models that they are using are correct and if certain things remain the same.
The actual retreat or slow motion collapse of the ice sheet started about 20,000 years ago when the grounding line of the ice sheet started moving back. It is irreversible but very slow. Irreversible until something major changes such as the interglacial we are currently in grinds to an end.