Earth Equity News

Climate Change Greenland: Fast Enough to Witness. By Bryan Walsh, Time, August 10, 2008. "In some places of the world, that change is happening more quickly than in others, so quickly that our 'fast-thinking human mind,' as the University of Copenhagen geologist Minik Rosing says, can almost catch it. One of those places is the coastal town of Ilulissat, the last stop on our climate tour of Greenland... Climate change itself isn't a bad thing; it isn't even unusual. Take a geologic step back, and you can see that our climate has always changed, alternating just within the past several hundred thousand years between ice ages, when glaciers covered much of the Northern Hemisphere, to eras warmer than our own. Change is the nature of the planet, just as every winter and summer Sermeq Kujalleq advanced and retreated, long before we were here to give the greenhouse effect an added push. Our own human period has been one of unusual climatic stability -- a fact that has been essential to our own species' success. What matters is not that change is happening but that it is happening so fast. In Ilulissat, the ice that once covered much of the sea in the winter and allowed hunting, fishing and travel by dogsled comes no longer. In less than a human lifetime -- barely the blink of an eye in geologic time -- a way of life millenniums old will be lost here. Elsewhere we may see temperate and fertile areas turn dry and barren in the same time period. What we've known and lived with may no longer exist -- and we may not be able to adapt in time for what is coming."