by Orlando Rodriguez
I like my tea cold, my coffee hot, and my Earth just right. But the Earth has never been “just right” for very long and the planet is overdue for another ice age. It is certain that industrialization has warmed the planet’s climate, but what if we were not warming the planet? Here are some not well publicized facts about climate change.
Ice ages have been linked to the path of the Earth around the Sun, and we are overdue for another ice age. Some researchers think global warming may lead to global cooling by changing the chemistry of the oceans. Other researchers say to expect the next 10 to 20 years to have cooler temperatures, and then global warming will begin with a vengeance. Scientists argue the validity of each of these futures but the bottom-line is that no one fully understands what causes the climate to change. The only sure bet is that our climate will change and we are not taking steps to lessen the coming hardships.
We are making any solution to climate change more difficult by packing more and more people into ginormous cities. And Latinos like to live in large cities. The metropolitan area of New York City has a population of 19 million; the Los Angeles area has 13 million people; Miami has 6 million people; Sao Paulo has 20 million; Rio de Janeiro has 12 million; and la Ciudad de Mexico has 19 million. These hyper-urban areas have a lot of people living very close together and dependent on enormous amounts of food and water to be available to them on a daily basis.
What will happen to the millions living in cities if the planet gets colder and food production decreases? What if it gets hotter and there is less rainfall? Texas is suffering the worst drought (and as a result wild fires) in over 100 years, which may reduce fuel production. Less water in Texas is not only bad for Texans, but it may increase fuel prices, and the price of everything else, which will impact everyone in the U.S.
The Earth’s climate is changing and the outcome is uncertain, regardless of what researchers know and mostly do not know. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth stressed a sense of urgency for reversing global warming. However, might global warming be preferred to global cooling? Where is the urgency to reduce population growth and to encourage people to move out of huge urban areas?
While politicians, scientists, pseudo-scientists, wannabe scientists, and religious kukus argue about the validity of global warming, they forget that climate has changed in the past and will change in the future. The only certainty is that the planet’s climate will be different in the near future from what it is now. And there will be millions of people living in the wrong places who will have to move, or die, as a consequence. It is time to move beyond global warming and start talking about the people who are going suffer in a future with a different climate – maybe hotter or maybe colder.
To learn more about Orlando, visit his Bio Page.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of
the author and should not be understood to be shared by Being Latino, Inc.
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