The Climate of Man - 1 Summary

Over the years, the Alaskan village of Shishmaref, an Inupiat village, has been drastically changing due to constant changes in the environment caused by increasing temperatures that have actually forced the people to relocate their village, costing an estimated one hundred and eighty million dollars. President Jimmy Carter first took drastic measures to start a climate study after findings of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA’s Godard Institute for Space Studies. Members of the Charney panel tried to find mistakes in their climate studies so to say the Carbon Dioxide had no effect on the global temperature but were left with unsatisfying results. Since the time the Carney panel reported on their studies, many other reports and books were written, explaining the problems with the global temperature and how it’s hurting the Earth, when at this same time, carbon-dioxide emissions have increased to seven billion metric tons, a whopping two million more from the previous five million metric tons. The shocking results of the FORTRAN-generated figures have shown that to people’s unknowing knowledge, “the Arctic is melting.”

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Climate of Man – 1. The New Yorker, NY. TNY, 2005.

Trenches in the ground formed by melted, underground ice, had formed trees that grew at odd angles, making people in the area call them “drunken trees”, due to their awkward shape. Permafrost in Alaska is soil that has a temperature below the freezing point for a minimum of two years and scientists in Alaska have found out that most permafrost dates back to when the last glacial cycle occurred. Roads in Alaska weren’t just for driving but instead mostly used for Alaskan oil, a main source of income for the state. Studies have shown that the farther one travels down in the ice, the warmer the temperatures of permafrost is. Recently, scientists that have studied permafrost temperatures have discovered that the temperature of permafrost in Alaska has dropped and now has its coldest spot now near the middle, instead of being at the top, which proves that as the permafrost temperature drops, the climate is getting hotter. This is a growing problem due to the face that permafrost has become a place for carbon to be held and stored so that it isn’t released, but with the increasing temperatures, the permafrost temperature starts to decrease, causing the carbon being stored to be released, along with carbon dioxide or methane which has been proven to cause more damage to the environment that regular carbon. A group of American geophysicists tried to do some experiments by locking their ship on a piece of deep ice and do some experiments while on the ice but were unable when the ice peace they were planning to lodge their ship on for years was too thin to even have the ship stick in place. In the Arctic, there has been recording two types of ice that has formed, seasonal ice, which has been known only to be seen in the winter since it melts due to the heat in the summer, and perennial ice which is visible and able to be studied throughout the year in the Arctic. Back in 1979, NASA’s satellite measured the amount of perennial sea ice that was present in the Arctic sea during that time, which was recorded to be about 1.7 billion acres. Since then, NASA has run some more satellite measures that discovered that over only a few decades, the amount of ice in the perennial sea has minimized by nearly two hundred an fifty million acres. Donald Perovich studies how the sun’s projected radiation is affecting the Earth’s sea ice by using a spectroradiometer which keeps monitoring the conditions on ice’s movement and measures the incident light by being faced toward the sun. When faced down to the planet, the spectroradiometer is able to measure the amount of reflected light that the Earth is producing which forms an amount scientists call an albedo. An albedo measures the amount of light on a surface; a white surface has an albedo of 1.0, while a black surface would have an albedo of 0. By scientists using this method of measurement, they have figured out that the Earth has an albedo of 0.3. Scientists have also discovered that since the sun heats up the water on the Earth, if more of the ocean and water is visible rather than ice, then more solar energy is needed into warming up the ocean which leads some of the scientists that have discovered this to be a main reason for the Arctic to be heating up so quickly. With the ice melting so quickly, it was discovered that with each ice sheet that broke apart from the Arctic and melted, there was an increase in the carbon dioxide levels. Scientists have placed models all over the world so to measure worldwide weather changes, out of the major ones in the world, each has predicted that by the year 2080, the Arctic covered by perennial sea-ice will have completely disappeared, leaving some places of the Arctic Ocean completely free of ice. The equilibrium of the Earth’s energy must always be the same, if not, it could change the temperature of the planet to cool down or warm up, but with this equilibrium, the amount of energy received from the sun is always the same. Without the effect of greenhouse gases, scientists predict that any form of solar energy that is bouncing off the Earth would actually not stay with the Earth, but instead be traveling away from the Earth. If the Earth didn’t have those greenhouse gases, then the planet’s temperature wouldn’t be changing constantly but instead be at zero degrees, but since the Earth has greenhouse gases, fifty-seven has been known to be the average global temperature. The temperature of the Earth all depends on greenhouse gases, if the amount of gases increases, then the temperature of the Earth would too. A research camp in Greenland named Swiss Camp is located on a piece of moving ice sheet that due to greenhouse gases, has shrunk most of the ice sheet it’s located on, causing most of the living quarters unable to live in, making the researchers and scientists sleep outside in tents. This unexpected decrease in ice was something the director of Swiss Camp, Konrad Steffen, predicted since he didn’t foresee Swiss camp being effected by global warming. Greenland is known to be the second largest ice sheet on the earth, having a piece of ice sheet two miles thick at the center, also having ice that fell hundreds of thousands of years before the recently fallen snow. Mostly, scientists only know what they do from Greenland since that’s where most of them studied by drilling holes into the ice, then they would figure out how old the piece of ice they’ve taken out was and use it to study with. With that piece of ice, they are able to know a lot more about the land like how they’ve figured out that the annual temperatures in recent years have increased by an average of twenty degrees in ten years. Global warming has not just effected Greenland and the Arctic but also floating glaciers like the Eemian or tee Holocene. Scientists use all kinds of tools in today’s word to learn things in the ice like drills that aren’t mechanical but instead, use heat as a way to bury its way down deep in the ice for them to study. With each piece of ice breaking off, forming glaciers, the increase in pieces has created a slow acceleration in each glacier, making them spread apart faster than scientists predicted it would. Scientists worry that if Greenland as an ice sheet were to start disintegrating, it would be impossible to stop it due to the amount of greenhouse gases already present in the atmosphere, causing it to continue to disappear, no matter what they try to do. In addition to that problem, the scientists also fear that if the warm water from the tropics were to mix in with the cold water from the north and south, it would make the water less salty, which, in result that would be unstoppable, could change the climate of the Earth entirely. Some researchers, like Steffen, hope that the atmosphere would help solve the problem of the climate change by dampening the rate of the temperature increase or even completely reverse it, which most scientists disagree on, saying it’s highly unlikely for that to happen. Out of all of the countries worried about climate change, Iceland fears the change the most since the country is covered ten percent by glaciers. The group that studies the changes in Iceland, the Icelandic Glaciological Society, has been created by a group of people wanting to help, studying the glaciers like it’s a family tradition, gathering data and working together to see what they could do to help the problem since the amount of glaciers from the nineteen-seventies and eighties grew but in the nineteen-nineties started to disappear and go away. To try to solve the problem of global warming and greenhouse gases, officials from the eight Arctic nations met in Alaska to agree on a plan that would help study and better understand the climate change happening around the world, costing an estimated two million dollars and consisting of three different, very detailed parts would be created and studied to figure out what the authorities should do. They discovered what people already knew already, that the Arctic temperatures were increasing and that something needed to be done, and fast because the temperatures of the glaciers will reach a temperature which will completely melt them, making global warming worse, and an unstoppable end. The first two parts of the new agreement was a giant technical document and a long, hundred and forty page summary of what was happening to the Earth while the third part of the new agreement was a policy document that would create simple ways to slow down global warming and ways to react to it.