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Guest Commentary May 11, 2002
Global Warming Is Real and Imminent
The Honorable Tom Carper
The issue of global warming has been vigorously debated for the past two decades. Is the climate on Earth getting dangerously warmer, and if so, is modern-day air pollution to blame? While many have exchanged rhetoric on the matter, two American researchers have trekked to the world's remote ice fields to dig for answers.
Dr. Lonnie Thompson and Dr. Ellen Mosley-Thompson are husband-and-wife collaborators who study climate change and global warming. They have spent the past 25 years collecting and analyzing ice cores extracted from glaciers on the five continents.
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Their research has yielded a remarkable and priceless archive of the earth's ancient climate. What's more, their findings offer some of the most convincing evidence yet that global warming is real, and human activity is a contributing factor...
Dr. Lonnie Thompson is a professor of geological sciences. He has led some 40 international expeditions to collect ice cores from the mountains of Africa, South America and Asia. His wife, Dr. Mosley-Thompson, is a professor of geography. She has led similar field programs to Greenland and Antarctica.
To understand the Earth's past and present climate, their research teams analyze the chemical and physical properties preserved in ice cores.
Lonnie Thompson's research is unique because it focuses on the ice fields of the tropics and sub-tropics instead of polar ice. He believes the hottest part of the globe is crucial to understanding global warming. Tropical glaciers, he says, are "the most sensitive spots on Earth" and serve as "an indicator of the massive changes taking place" in today's global climate.
Cores have been drawn from mountain tops from throughout the world.
New cores from two sites in central and southern Tibet reveal that the past 50 years have been the warmest in the last 10,000 years in that part of the world.
Using two decades of ice core data and aerial mapping, the Thompsons offer proof that the world's tropical glaciers are melting faster and faster as the years pass.
The icecap on Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest peak, has lost 82 percent of its area since it was first mapped in 1912. One-third of the area has disappeared just since 1989.
Based on this dramatic evidence, Lonnie Thompson predicts that the snow cap of this storied mountain will be gone by 2020. He says the same fate awaits other mountain ice caps in Peru and around the world. These vanishing glaciers "will have a massive effect on humanity," he says, posing an urgent natural and economic threat around the globe.
I think it is important... to remind ourselves that, yes, indeed, we import entirely too much oil from around the world from people who do not like us, in some cases, and who, I am convinced, use the resources we send to them to hurt us. I think it is important that we remind ourselves of the economic trouble we create for America by a growing trade deficit, a third of which is attributable to our dependence on foreign oil, on imported oil. ...
The climate of the Earth has changed and is changing more rapidly as time goes by. Fully one-quarter of the carbon dioxide that we put into the air comes from the cars, trucks, and vans we drive. ...
I used to think global warming was a figment of somebody's imagination. I don't see how any of us anymore can say that is the case. It is real. It is here. It is imminent. It is something we can do something about.
Tom Carper, a Democrat, is a U.S. Senator from Delaware. The above commentary has been adapted from a speech Sen. Carper delivered on Senate floor, April 23, 2002. To contact him, Click Here.
The above column has been distributed by PoliticsOL.com.
