Temps, They Are a-Changin'The world is getting very hot. Polar ice is melting. Surface water is drying up. Deserts are expanding. Species are going extinct. The environment is in tatters. Since the middle of the last century, mankind's behavior has affected the planet deeply and quickly.
To make matters worse, things continue to look bleak for the world's biggest economy. Last month, a major US manufacturing index fell to its lowest level in 26 years, while General Motors -- which was the world's largest automaker from 1930 to 2007 (after which it was surpassed by Toyota) -- is down 47% in October, the lowest level seen since World War II.
As Bob Dylan sang in 1964, "Times, they are a-changin'." Almost half-a-century later, his words ring truer than ever.
As Americans head to the polls today, the world looks on with an intensity that hasn't been seen in recent history. And if the possibility of a black man becoming the leader of the free world isn't enough to create an international media bottleneck, the future of the global economy largely rests on what happens in America during the next four years.
Because if there's one thing that Wall Street's meltdown proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's that everything and everyone in this world is connected...somehow.
Crises in Context
Our coffee comes from Brazil. Our computer memory chips are made in South Korea. Our retirement funds are invested in Canadian natural gas development. And the global trade in oil is done in US dollars.
Whatever happens in America -- whether it be a credit crunch, a mortgage crisis or a slump in consumer confidence -- definitely does not stay in America.
There is no shortage of crises. But there is one crisis that we probably can't just "ride out" like a bad storm: our contribution to the decline of our known environment.
In what has been called the "Sixth Extinction," a fourth of all mammals are dying out -- a rate of extinction not seen since the time of the dinosaurs.
One-third of the 6,000 species of frogs face extinction. So too, one-third of the planet's coral reefs. Almost 50 percent of forests and temperate grasslands are gone. Fisheries around the globe are on the edge of collapse.
The planet will survive these changes, which are relatively small compared to the changes that it has undergone during its 4.5-billion-year history. But these staggering numbers should still help keep other numbers like the Dow Jones, the jobless rate and the Consumer Confidence Index in perspective.
Our place on Earth is less secure than it was in the past. Our decisions have, taken as a whole, negatively affected the state of life on the planet.
The Other Meltdown
The next American president faces huge challenges on multiple fronts. Voters in this historic election would do well to cast their ballot for the man who they believe will not only provide a steady hand in guiding the nation through the financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a broken health care system, but who will also consider the environment -- and specifically, global warming -- a top priority.
Voters have been pummeled with numbers and percentages for two years of presidential campaigning. And in the numbers game, there are two that matter a great deal when it comes to deciding on a candidate based on their environmental record.
The League of Conservation Voters, a group that monitors the environmental records of the members of Congress, gave Senator McCain a score of zero percent last year. Senator Obama scored a 67%. And the average score was 53%. For voters who consider the environment to be the big issue, this election is about doing the math.
The economy is experiencing a meltdown. But the economy won't really matter too much if the environment melts down too.
photo: Image shows the instrumental record of global average temperatures as compiled by the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office. Data set TaveGL2v was used. The most recent documentation for this data set is Jones, P.D. and Moberg, A. (2003) "Hemispheric and large-scale surface air temperature variations: An extensive revision and an update to 2001". Journal of Climate, 16, 206-223. This figure was originally prepared by Robert A. Rohde from publicly available data and is incoporated into the Global Warming Art project.
Posts
