#PaleBlueDotDay | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

cantus-arcticus · 3 years

Text

Climate

Chapter 5 in Robertson’s “Sustainability and principles” was an interesting and informative read. One of the most notable parts of this reading for me was the following quote: “Ice cores are proxies that can go back in time nearly a million years, collected by drilling into an ice sheet in Greenland, the Arctic, or Antarctic. “These ice sheets are formed by snow-fall that gets compacted, trapping bubbles of air inside; the layers within the ice cores give a record of the temperatures at the time precipitation fell. Those temperatures are determined using ratios of oxygen or hydrogen isotopes” (Robertson 2017). This caught my attention because this shows that we can analyze the climate of the earth sometimes from even 1 million years ago, which is just an astounding amount of time. I had no idea that we could go that far back in time to analyze climate. It also shocked me that we could determine temperatures just by using ratios of oxygen or hydrogen isotopes. Another fascinating part of this reading was the following passage: “The past 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, featured mild climate with stable temperatures. This brief interglacial period, with its ideal and unusually stable climate conditions, was an exception to the extreme temperature variations of the past, a window which made it possible for humans to invent agriculture and for civilization to develop (Wijkman and Rockström 2012, 39). Research indicates that, without human impact on the climate system, these conditions would likely continue for several millennia more (ibid., 40)” (Robertson, 2017). The last sentence is particularly striking because it’s unconscionable to me that humans would disrupt several millennia of climate stability of the Earth.

As climate change worsens, we seem to be coming up with excuses for not doing anything about the problem. One such excuse for my age group is that we’re too young and people won’t listen to us, which is interestingly enough the excuse that was presented to me in the provided in the don’t choose extinction webpage. This excuse is easily refutable because we are the future leaders of the world, so our voice matters even more so than the older generations because we are the ones that unfortunately have to bear the brunt of the consequences of our inaction towards climate change. It is up to us to save our Earth. To wrap this up i would like to leave you with a quote by the famous astrophysicist Carl Sagan:

https://dontchooseextinction.com/en/

source of pic:

https://www.facebook.com/palebluedotday/

MLA 8th Edition (Modern Language Assoc.) Margaret Robertson. Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge, 2017. APA 7th Edition (American Psychological Assoc.) Margaret Robertson. (2017). Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge.MLA 8th Edition (Modern Language Assoc.) Margaret Robertson. Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge, 2017. APA 7th Edition (American Psychological Assoc.) Margaret Robertson. (2017). Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge.

0 notes