{"id":399,"date":"2008-01-25T17:48:53","date_gmt":"2008-01-25T21:48:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/25\/earth-out-of-balance\/"},"modified":"2008-01-25T17:48:53","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T21:48:53","slug":"earth-out-of-balance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/25\/earth-out-of-balance\/","title":{"rendered":"Earth Out Of Balance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Four years ago, the American Geophysical Union released a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.agu.org\/sci_soc\/policy\/positions\/climate_change.shtml\">statement<\/a> about human impact on the global environment. The 744 word document began with the sentence \u201cHuman activities are increasingly altering the Earth&#8217;s climate.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.agu.org\/sci_soc\/policy\/positions\/climate_change2008.shtml\">revised position statement issued today<\/a>, the society offered additional evidence that recent changes in climate are attributable to human activity. The terse 482 word document begins with much stronger statement \u201cThe Earth&#8217;s climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.agu.org\/\">50,000-member strong organization<\/a> posits that we will need to cut emissions of greenhouse gases globally by more than 50 percent to avoid warming the planet by 2 degrees Celsius. Much of the statement matches conclusions drawn by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ipcc.ch\/\">Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change<\/a>, which released its multivolume report last year and later <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ipcc.ch\/press\/index.htm#nobel\">shared the Nobel Peace Prize<\/a> with Al Gore. In fact, the society notes that many of its members helped write the panel\u2019s report.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nBolstering the warnings in the report, the <a href=\"http:\/\/nsidc.org\/\">National Snow and Ice Data Center<\/a> (NSIDC) has released several <a href=\"http:\/\/nsidc.org\/news\/press\/2007_seaiceminimum\/20070810_index.html\">animations<\/a> documenting how the amount of Arctic sea ice has dwindled over the past decade, reaching a record low in September 2007. Frankly, the animations are about as exciting as watching ice melt, so instead I have embedded below a video of a giant asteroid crashing into the earth and wiping out all life while a Japanese woman calmly narrates. It\u2019s a little long, but worth watching for the last shot of cheering crowds in Tokyo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Four years ago, the American Geophysical Union released a statement about human impact on the global environment. The 744 word document began with the sentence \u201cHuman activities are increasingly altering the Earth&#8217;s climate.\u201d In a revised position statement issued today, the society offered additional evidence that recent changes in climate are attributable to human activity. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4E3H-6r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}