Yesterday evening, it was nice enough that I could sit in the backyard. At 10:00 p.m. it was a pleasant 26 degrees, which is normally the high for this time of the year.
It was unsettling.
The drought in southern Minnesota continues and there is no snow on the ground here in Minneapolis or most of the state. A snow-less period around Christmas occurs about once out of five years. However, all of December has been atypically mild with many days 10 degrees warmer than the average.
Sitting in the darkness, looking at the overcast sky, I realized that we are living in the last days of Holocene Earth, that period of time in which we humans went from a scattering of forager bands in Africa until now when 7 billion of us cover the planet.
We don’t need to wait 20 years to see the disastrous results of climate change. It is all around us.
The climate is changing and we are experiencing the effects. Scientists are careful to say that any particular weather event can’t be labeled as the specific result of global climate change. Yet, the trends conform to the predictive meteorological models. Ocean temperatures are increasing which causes shifting weather patterns. Storms are more frequent. In 2011, in the US, 2,942 monthly weather records were broken with an historic 14 weather disasters costing $50 billion. (1)
It appears that things are happening faster than predicted. The Antarctic and Arctic ice shelves are melting more quickly than scientists had believed possible. Around the world, mountain glaciers are in full retreat. The glaciers are major sources of fresh water that hundreds of millions of people rely on.
Fresh water makes up only 2.5% of all the water on the planet and of that, glaciers and the ice packs account for 68%. Ground water accounts for another 30% and the remaining 2% is found in our lakes, rivers and streams, wetlands, soil moisture, and the atmosphere. (2)
An Historic Duty
We have a duty to do what we can to mitigate the causes of climate change and the dwindling supply of fresh water. We also have a responsibility to help those people who are the casualties of our changing world.
Creative people, such as photographers, artists, and writers have an obligation to document this critical time for our children and grandchildren.
Photographs are memories.
Now is the time to start remembering before it is gone.
- Natural Resources Defense Council; Extreme Weather Map; 12/28/2011; http://www.nrdc.org/health/extremeweather/
- United States Geological Survey; Where Is Earth’s Water Located? 12/28/2011; http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthwherewater.html