Exit Glacier and Climate Change
Alaska Travelog #21
Glacier Overlook Trail - Tue, 18 Jun 2024, 1:30pm
Yesterday when we visited Kenai Fjords National Park to hike partway up Exit Glacier I noticed there were signs along the road and the lower part of the trail, indicating how much further down the foot of the glacier extended not that long ago. Today we've come back to the park to hike another trail, and I've made a point of recording bits of video showing these historic markers. Check out this 3m43s montage I've put together.
Link: watch video on YouTube
In the video I mention "global climate change" a few times without elaborating on it. Climate change is a real and ongoing thing. The climate on this planet has been changing since long before modern humans first emerged. Consider how different things were even 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. That's natural climate change. But there's also man-made climate change.
Man-made climate change is a real and ongoing thing, too. Carbon dioxide and other substances we've been pumping into the air since the start of the industrial revolution, often called "greenhouse gases" are accelerating the rate of natural warming since the end of the last ice age. And it's not just a little bit of acceleration. Various scientific models show that man-made causes are changing the earth's climate anywhere from 10x faster to over 100x faster than has ever happened before in millions of years.
There is no serious scientific disagreement about man-made climate change. It may seem to a layperson that it's "just a theory" and "there are two sides to the issue", but that is just a distortion created by, on the one hand, propagandists and denialists who peddle disinformation for various financial reasons, and on the other hand, weak minded news media lacking both scientific literacy to sort fact from fiction and the spine to hold habitual liars to account.
Glacier Overlook Trail - Tue, 18 Jun 2024, 1:30pm
Yesterday when we visited Kenai Fjords National Park to hike partway up Exit Glacier I noticed there were signs along the road and the lower part of the trail, indicating how much further down the foot of the glacier extended not that long ago. Today we've come back to the park to hike another trail, and I've made a point of recording bits of video showing these historic markers. Check out this 3m43s montage I've put together.
Click to viewLink: watch video on YouTube
In the video I mention "global climate change" a few times without elaborating on it. Climate change is a real and ongoing thing. The climate on this planet has been changing since long before modern humans first emerged. Consider how different things were even 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. That's natural climate change. But there's also man-made climate change.
Man-made climate change is a real and ongoing thing, too. Carbon dioxide and other substances we've been pumping into the air since the start of the industrial revolution, often called "greenhouse gases" are accelerating the rate of natural warming since the end of the last ice age. And it's not just a little bit of acceleration. Various scientific models show that man-made causes are changing the earth's climate anywhere from 10x faster to over 100x faster than has ever happened before in millions of years.
There is no serious scientific disagreement about man-made climate change. It may seem to a layperson that it's "just a theory" and "there are two sides to the issue", but that is just a distortion created by, on the one hand, propagandists and denialists who peddle disinformation for various financial reasons, and on the other hand, weak minded news media lacking both scientific literacy to sort fact from fiction and the spine to hold habitual liars to account.