Musings: Climate change is on all of us
A NASA rendering of planet Earth. Credit: Getty Images/deliormanli
As a retired science teacher, I’ll note that when we are closer to the sun in New York, we are in winter, and when we are farther from the sun it gets hotter, in summer. This is because of the tilt of the earth, not the earth’s distance from the sun.
According to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology portal team, Earth has gone through repeated cycles of warming and cooling for hundreds of thousands of years. Roughly every hundred thousand years, there has been an ice age, driven by changes in the planet’s tilt and orbit that allowed less sunlight to reach the arctic. Between these ice ages have been periods of warming.
The speed of climatic change today is also more or less unprecedented. The amount of carbon dioxide that humans have added to the atmosphere over just the past 100 years is comparable to that added over 100 centuries after the last ice age.
In the modern day, atmospheric carbon has risen about 100 times faster than when humans emerged from the last ice age.
Climate change is real and until people understand it and vote for legislation to reduce it, we are in big trouble for us and future generations.
— Janet Mar, Massapequa
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