Double Sundaes: Planet Earth

When I think about the future, I can't help but to imagine my home (maybe a white picket fence, although that's never really appealed to me), my wife, my kids, my job. I don't find myself often thinking about important things like future wars, or what type of fuel we'll be using, or how much a loaf of bread will cost or, perhaps the most important question: will the future even come?

It's not exactly scientific to think that, at least in my lifetime, the end of the world will come. Sure, there is a lot of hubbub over global warming now, but no one suspects that it will bring about a Day After Tomorrow style of "end" to the human race as we know it (or America at least). Movies like that attempt to show us where we've messed up; they try to teach America (and other gas guzzling rich nations like England or Northern Europe) a lesson. This proverbial shaking of the finger at our SUVs and oil dependency comes with entertainment and famous actors; not with real threat.

However, it is scientific to think that the world as we know it may be much different within our lifetimes, and easily within our children's' lifetimes. With increased threat of vicious storms, rising temperatures, and, eventually, lowered availability of oil, water, land, and food resources, our future planet seems to be in dire straits. And we really need to start bracing for that fall.

I'm not necessarily a subscriber to the "Humans are the sole proprietor of the destruction of our planet" ideology. While I do think that our actions since the Industrial Revolution have had a general effect on the earth's environment, the changes that are taking place now, have happened before. It would be interesting to look at a climate change graph of hundreds of thousands of years (rather than the thousand year graph we presently view when talking about global warming) to see the changes.

At some point in time, our planet was much colder than it is now. This is unquestionable. The ice caps of the north and south extended much further towards the equator, animals like Mammoths existed then, and animals like Dinosaurs were killed out because they couldn't take the cold (theoretically). In the same vein, the earth was also much warmer. At some point in time, the ice caps were much smaller than they are now, if not non-existent. In the US we can see this evidenced through cave formations like the Mammoth in Kentucky, which were formed when that state was under feet of water. Once Kentucky was a swamp, evidencing that water levels were once much higher than they are today.

Today's rising temperature could by the result of human interaction with our environment, or it could just be a sign of the regular climate changes that earth undergoes.

This doesn't, however, change the fact that the differing environment will have an increasingly important effect on the human population. And this is what has become an important cultural and political subject in America today. Al Gore and his fellow producers of An Inconvenient Truth have capitalized on this important issue. Populations in coastal areas are going to be directly effected by rising water levels, and millions of people (in America alone) will be displaced.

The question is: can we do anything to stop it? At some point, I'm not so sure we're the direct cause of this change, but we may be speeding up the time line. Anything we can do to stop our dependency on damaging fossil fuels is a good thing. Right now, we're in a war in Iraq that could, arguably, have been caused by our need for oil. Future wars are going to be fought over the liquid black-gold, unless we cease the need.

So, we can do something good for the environment (theoretically) while also doing something good for peace. Let's wait till water starts wars. Until then, we should all be able to breathe a bit easier.