Global Warming is not coming soon...

It’s here. That’s the message that needs to get out. It’s here right now.

Here are a couple of reminders from the news today:

1. Current temperature readings in the Alps show that they are the warmest they’ve been in at least 1200 years. The warming trend began in the 1980s, about the same time that the hockey stick graph of global temperatures shot upwards.


2. We know the oceans are warming, and now we have hard evidence of what one of the consequences will be. A study published in Nature provides a direct link between warmer water temperatures and the shrinking of phytoplankton production – a double whammy since they are both the base of the ocean’s food web and a major carbon sink.

Add this data to the abundance of evidence that species are migrating because their habitat is getting too hot, the current loss of both sea and glacier ice, the measured rise in sea level, the increasing fury of ocean storms…how big does stack have to get? This isn’t tomorrow’s problem, it’s today’s problem.

Most worrisome, of course, is that we’re seeing the evidence today – and we’re already locked into several decades of further warming even if we immediately stop pumping CO2 and methane into the atmosphere.

Where is Chicken Little when you need him?