Human Race - Planet Earth killers?

I've recently realised that my notion of global warming probably wasn't very accurate. See, I think I've often wrongly associated global warming with every other negative aspects of what has been happening around the world these last couple of years. Naively, I perhaps wasn't all that informed about what global warming really is and what it means. To me it was just another environmental problem, like pollution, just presented on a much grander scale.

So here's the deal. Simply put the Earth is heating. It is becoming warmer than it was years ago, causing all kinds of things to melt, like glaciers; not to mention sea levels are rising; warmer seas are causing coral bleaching; and even tropical diseases are spreading because of global warming. Greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide emissions are said to be the main reasons for these climate changes, some of which are actually naturally produced. Of course human activity has inevitably greatly increased production of these gases.

When you look at what they're telling us is happening, it does all seem pretty terrifying. But the truth is it can't be that simple. No one can say with absolute certainty that all of these are the cause of global warming. Sure, they may be factors, but that's different than saying it's because we drive our cars to the shop up the road and leave the lights on that all of this is happening.

In reality you can't deny that there is a probability that some of these things, for example ice sheets retreating, is just nature taking its course. And admist the global warming hysteria, there has been an effort to support that claim. When the Earth cooled, scientists claimed we were about to face an Ice Age. Safe to say, it hasn't happened. Yet. Now, the opposite is happening, and there is a widely spread notion that we are responsible for the increasingly negative environmental changes. But how much of that really was inevitable? After all, isn't it just normal that after centuries of occupying a planet, it is bound to be 'worn out'?

Admittedly we may have hastened the process with technological progresses, growing populations, etc.., but we can't honestly believe that while we're sustaining lifestyles and continuously evolving, the Earth would remain just as it was. Nothing lasts forever, why should we expect our planet to? Everything eventually, well... depreciates, I guess you could say. And the plain fact is, no one can or wants to put their lives on hold, stop building factories or use their car, just so the planet survives longer.

I know it sounds like I'm exonerating the human race from the possible destruction of the planet Earth. I'm not. I'm simply saying maybe this is actually supposed to happen - eventually. Not so much the end of the world part, but more so the climate change and natural disasters. Yes, human activity factors into it, but of course we do, we 're living on it! We're bound to leave traces of our existence. And yes, we could take a hell of a lot of more care of our planet. But that doesn't rule out the fact that some aspects/evidences of global warming is just the work of mother nature herself and/or the cycle of life. The question is, how fast are we going to make it happen?


That being said, I'm still trying to do and live right by our planet - to an extent.

When it all began

Having had no internet (nightmare!) for the past two weeks did give me a lot of time to think about how I wanted to approach the topic of global warming. To be honest, I think it's an enormous subject to approach that I'm probably not even all that informed about. So I won't and don't pretend to know or understand everything about it.

I don't know about you, but it feels like five years ago global warming was seldomly mentioned, perhaps only more so within the scientific and environmental communities but definitely not so much within the general population. Whereas now, "global warming" is a term tossed around daily as an explanation for negative changes of the environment. in 2001 a map was released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chance (IPCC) which highlighted areas in which various types of natural changes linked to global warming were occuring. Even then mother nature was no longer taking all the credit - or blame - for seemingly natural occurences like warm weather, sea rise, melted glaciers. Of course between then and today, we went from "likely" to "very likely" as the primary culprits for those bad changes.

If anything, this is an indication that we have known for some time that there was something wrong happening with our planet and that we were somewhat responsible for that. So why did it take years and a losing president candidate turning to filmmaking to finally get the word out that we were 'killing' the Earth? Because now, there is a sense of urgency and panic to rescue it, when it is possibly too late. Then again, one has to wonder if those years really would have mattered, especially as no one can fully determine the extent of the damage, not in an exact capacity.

The hype surrounding global warming for me really began of course with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth . There's really no better way to inform mainstream audiences about what's happening to the Earth than through movie theatres with the Ex Vice President of the USA as its mastermind. Personally I have yet to see it. Let's just say I wasn't exactly keen to spend $10 just to feel depressed about all the harm we humans have done to the Earth's health and consequently feel very gloom about our future on this planet. But don't worry, I plan to catch it on cable.