Part of the Alaska Range in Denali National Park
So now that we have touched on the carbon cycle from the May 3 journal, and talked a little bit about the experiments on warming from the May 4 journal, the question is, what is going to happen to the humans? Remember that we are not talking about the end of the world or movies like The Day After or 2012. The good news is that the world will go on with its business of cycles and spinning and everything else. The serious news is that people, along with some other species, will need to make some adjustments to these changes. For the people those adjustments are going to cost everyone a lot of money and effort.
Just on the NPR radio report today was a representative from the IPCC, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He stated that the countries that inhabit the Arctic areas on the planet, such as Canada, Russia, Greenland, and the U.S., are coming to the conclusions that melting of the Arctic ice sheets is happening as much as three times faster than expected. The IPCC estimates that the oceans may rise from 3 to 5 feet over the next hundred years. No one is going to be overrun with seawater anytime soon, but for about half of the world's population, which lives in the coastal areas of the world, adjustments are going to be needed.
Caribou in Denali National Park
So here is the question, and assignment, to my students and anyone else who cares to join in. NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has a web site on Global Climate Change. The site is at http://climate.nasa.gov/. On this site they have a row of topics that they call the Vital Signs of the Planet. This includes measurements on the Arctic Sea Ice Minimum, Carbon Dioxide, Sea Level, Global Temperature, and Land Ice. If you place your curser over any of them a drop down will appear which will give you the option to view interactive data, at the bottom. You may need to give it a second to load, or in some cases a plug-in will need to be downloaded. This is all very easy to do. Once you are looking at the data and the descriptions, read the information, look at the graphs, and slide their time-line on the interactive map.
The assignment is to choose one of the topics and answer the following questions on the PolarTREC, Ask the Team page for my expedition. This is the same place that most of you have been writing to me anyway.
The Savage River running through Denali NP
The first question is, How do you think this area of change will affect people? Will it kill them? Will it cause them to move or build different structures? Will it change the way they get their food or go to work or anything else?
The second question is, Who are these people being affected? Where do they live? What countries?
The last question is, What can we do to keep this change from happening? And if we can't keep it from happening then what will the world look like in one hundred years?
You can answer any or all of these questions. I would like to have your answers over the next two weeks. So there is time to think about what you want to say. If you need help Mr. P can give you some ideas. I have already received some very interesting questions from some of you, so keep up the good work and keep thinking!
How would climate change affect this area?