Earth Is At A "Tipping Point"

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Earth Is at The Tipping Point
By JEFFREY KLUGER, TIME
The climate is crashing and global warming is to blame. Why the crisis hit so soon -- and what we can do about it.

No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.


It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry -- a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180 m.p.h. -- exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast -- when the emergency becomes commonplace -- something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.


The image of Earth as organism -- famously dubbed Gaia by environmentalist James Lovelock -- has probably been overworked, but that's not to say the planet can't behave like a living thing, and these days, it's a living thing fighting a fever. From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us. Scientists have been calling this shot for decades. This is precisely what they have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows in from the sun and raising global temperatures.

[edit on 29-3-2006 by SpeakerofTruth]

interesting article, but could you please add some of your own thoughts, take or perspective on it? We kind of don't pay attention to one liners and linked articles threads around here. We like discussion

Many cultures started off thinking of the earth as a living entity and even call her Earth mother, but over the centuries we have lost our respect for the earth and the mystery, the whatever you wanna call it, that Earth itself may be aware of our actions upon her back. Whatever perspective you want to put on it, scientific, spiritual or whatever, all the signs are pointing to earth changes that will not benefit mankind.

Well....I can say a lot about this. When one looks at the current condition of the world,I mean really examines it, it becomes apparent that it may be too little too late to do much. There are huge ice quakes occurring in the Artic. Ice quakes essentially are "earthquakes" on top of the ice due to glacial melting.

Now, we have already been told by scientists,psychics,et cetrea, that the world will be much different 30 years from now. I think we can get the picture of what they mean when we look at what Katrina did to New Orleans. However, I think that the earth being a sentient being knows that it has to reconform to what humans are doing in order to continue its existence. It's in the process of doing just that.

If it means that 100s of thousands or even millions of people have to be wiped off the globe,so be it. It's past time that people appreciated the earth for what it really is.

Ahh mother earth got to love the old gal

But speaker I would like to know what you based this assumption on while some of what you said holds true did you know that in the Antarctic only part is warming while the other is actually cooling down? And that the earth has been warming at the same rate for thousands of years long b4 we started the industrial revolution. As for the world being different it will it always has been in the history of earth there has not been a place of zero slope on a temperature – time graph. What is interesting is take the hole in the ozone while it lets more radiation in it also lets it out 2. so is it letting more in or more out? While humans have had an impact on climate are we the only thing holding back another ice age b/c there is plenty of data to support that 2. the true problem is time we do no have enough of it to actually tell what is going on. we as organisms on earth put out far more CO2 then humans produce, and in many ways the earth does heal its self like by rain scrubbing CO2 fro the air. While we should respect the earth, how can we make assumptions on the global weather when we can not get a 24hr forecast right yet?