Living the Change: Climate Science is Unfolding

The nurturing and respect for Life is a central doctrine of all faiths on Earth. Yet today we are endangering life on Earth with unacceptably high and rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions. These gases are destabilizing the global climate system, heating the Earth, acidifying the oceans, and putting both humanity and all living creatures at unacceptable risk.


 

EUROPE swelters. Greece, California and even the Arctic burn. Following record-breaking flooding, Japan is now being hit by a record-breaking heatwave.

No one can say we weren’t warned. The reality of human-made climate change has been apparent for decades to anyone with even a tenuous grip of basic physics and chemistry.

Climate science remains an imperfect science. Researchers have been unable to directly attribute specific weather events to a warming planet even as they build evidence of an overall trend, a reticence seized upon by climate denialists as evidence of uncertainty in the science.

No longer. It seems likely that climate change made the current European heatwave twice as probable, and that disruption from similar extreme weather is a certainty we must now adapt to.

Less certainly, rumblings of change deep in the north Atlantic Ocean suggest far worse is to come.

Human-made climate change risks becoming a human tragedy. Those who wilfully deny its reality, or play the fool for the crowd or in defence of vested interests, must be called out.

Source: New Scientist, 4 August 2018