This made me cry

I downloaded the complete Stern Report yesterday.

I read most of it.

The Stern Report is a complete study of all the data to date on global warming, produced by the British government. The Brits are far ahead of us on this as are other European countries. The report was dispassionate and covered all the possible scenarios in a rigorous manner.

The developers of this report are alarmed. I am too. I have been following the RSS feeds using "Global Warming" and "Climate Change" as the topics for several years now. I'm not a gloom and doom person, but my educational background and my technical bent has caused me to pay attention to this warming phenomenon.

About 25 years ago I was a professor and department head at my university. The former department head who taught a course in industrial safety and health died suddenly. The only person in the department that could take over the course on short notice was me. This necessitated quite a bit of learning on my part so I did a lot of reading outside of the text as preparation. One interesting bit of information that I shared with the class was about the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii. This observatory, which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory, has been measuring carbon dioxide and other gases in the air since 1958. The charts that I showed the class showed a steady increase in CO2. The connection that I made for my students was that most of the carbon dioxide had to come from industry, where they were headed, and that they should be aware of this as a safety issue. Little did I know!

The 2006 Mauna Loa data shows not only the expected increase but a spike in CO2 level. It is actually the highest level of CO2 in 650,000 years!

I can hear the raucous laughter and comments now. "How can you possibly know what the concentration of a gas was that long ago?"

Scientists have been taking ice core samples from the arctic and antarctic ice sheets for years. The valuable information gleaned from the cores includes tiny pockets of air which when analyzed yields the percentages of the gases that made up that air. The longest core samples are from the ice layer of 650,000 years ago.

So, why is it important to know about "greenhouse" gases? First, realize that the "greenhouse effect" allows life on this planet to exist. About 30 percent of the sun's energy is reflected back to space. The other 70 percent is absorbed by the earth. If this didn't happen the planet could not support life as we know it. The reason that so much solar heat is absorbed is because the earth has an insulating layer of gases that prevents much of it from leaving. These greenhouse gases are water vapor ( ), carbon dioxide (), methane (), and nitrous oxide (). The gas that is seen as critical at this juncture is CO2, the product of burning carbon-containing fuels. Humans are burning more and more coal, gasoline, oil in the production of the increasing energy required for modern civilizations. Every electric plant, every farm tractor, every automobile contributes carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Now there are CO2 sinks that natually soak up much of the CO2 produced. All of the plant life in the world takes up CO2 and releases oxygen as part of their respiration, just the oposite of animal respiration. The oceans are another huge sink. So what's the problem? Trees are the greatest soaker-upper of CO2 on land. And trees are being cut down at a prodigious rate. One of the largest forests in the world is in the Amazon region of Brazil, South America. Those trees are being cleared at a frightening pace. The oceans absorb CO2--if they are cold. As the waters warm the amount absorbed lessens.

One of the most frightening aspects of global warming is a positive feedback mechanism involving deposits of peat in Siberia. Two years ago scientists discovered that melting permafrost was forming lakes above peat bogs allowing bubbling methane into the air. As noted above, methane is a greenhouse gas, one that is 20 times as powerful as CO2 in atmospheric warming. The positive feedback results from increased warming that allows more melting and therefore more methane release.

All of this points to a probable train wreck at about the middle of this century according to the Stern Report. The cost to the world will be huge compared to the cost of lessening the damage by restricting greenhouse emissions now.

I won't be here to witness this debacle. But my grandkids will. I don't want them to inherit that kind of world. What about you and yours?