The Climate of Man-Summary

Elizabeth Kolbert went visit the little town in Alaska, Shishmaref. A town inhabited by Eskimos. In the early 1990’s, they began to notice that the sea ice was changing. The ice was starting to form later in the fall, and earlier in the spring. This and many other changes in the environment put the inhabitants in danger, make them consider relocating and leaving their homes. Results from more research done by Syukuro Manabe, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and another by James Hansen, at NASA’s Godard institute for Space Studies, were alarming. The AD Hoc Study group on Carbon Dioxide and climate, or called the Charney panel found that climate change was inevitable if CO2 increases. Hansen and Manabe followed with more research, and they discovered that almost every following year since 1990 has been warmer. Almost every major glacier in the world is shrinking. The ones in Glacier National Park are decreasing so quickly that it is predicted they will be completely vanished by 2030. Many other signs now confirm that global warming is no longer a theory. Kolbert took a trip through the interior of Alaska with a geophysicist and permafrost expert at the Univeristy of Alaska, Vladimir Romanovsky. Romanovsky took Kolbert to see a hole that had opened up in a patch of permafrost. The holes had appeared when the permafrost gave way. He also showed a trench that had been formed when a wedge of underground ice had melted. The trees that had been growing next to it, or perhaps on top of it, were standing at strange angles. Locally, these trees are called”drunken”. Ten years ago, said Romanovsky, no once cared about permafrost, and now in some places, the temperature of the permafrost is less than once degree below freezing. One of the most dangerous things that there is a risk of happening if matters get worse, is that if the permafrost were to melt to a point where the carbon and methane is released from the inside, that come from the plants growing out of the ice, which would be terrible.