Climate for Life

Global warming is accelerating at an unexpected rate. It is a “life issue,” as the title of Elizabeth Groppe’s essay in today’s America Magazine indicates. The situation is not simple because the

global climate is a very complex reality in which a small

change in average temperature has ripple effects on ocean currents, precipitation patterns and other climate systems. An apparently small temperature increase is already destabilizing the energy balance of the climate and spawning changes adverse to human beings and other species.

Ms. Groppe summarizes effects on agriculture, sea level, oceans, weather and extinctions. She explains that climate change is a life issue because “failure to protect the earth [endangers] generations unborn.”

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Wiki-diagram of an array of systems effected by global warming is in the public domain.