Now, Not Later

The time to act is now!  After reading the first portion of Bill McKibben's, Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, many of the fears I've been so briefly exposed to became very clear.  No longer is global climate change a matter of the future.

To me, it would be a waste of time to just summarize the reading.  However, there were certain parts I found were glaring issues worth a second word.

As stated above, and repeated now, global climate change has effected our planet much sooner then anticipated.  The Greenhouse Effect was first proposed in the 1800s, but only took root in the public around the 1960's.  Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses that cause the greenhouse effect are in fact apart of out planets natural systems, but this fact may be deceiving.  The debate is not over whether the greenhouse effect is a natural process.  Rather, it is debated if humans have added significant amounts of heat-trapping gasses to the atmosphere to alter the greenhouse effect.  In this debate over 90% of the scientific community agrees that humans have altered the greenhouse effect, and it's side-effect is global climate change.  Some places on Earth will in fact heat up, yet other places will cool down.  Every natural phenomenon has and will continue to worsen.

We measure the amount of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses in our atmosphere on a parts per million scale (ppm).  For ten thousand years our planet has sat comfortably, in a perfect harmony, to let human civilization thrive.  During this time the carbon dioxide ppm hovered right around 275-290.  350 ppm is now what scientists believe is our planet's ceiling for a sustainable, livable, "modern" life as we know it.