Global climate change is a reality, and a presentation at Bucks on Oct.16 revealed that the world must take action now in order to stop it.
“Climate change is real, it is happening now, it is caused by humans, and we have the means to avoid the worst if we start acting now,” said Steve Bacher, director of E-Marketing at Bucks is part of the Climate Reality Project, a grassroots network of more than 6,000 people who have been trained by former Vice President Al Gore. The 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” was about Gore’s efforts to educate people about global warming.
Bacher’s “Climate Reality: 2013 Update” mainly focused on the fact that if carbon dioxide increases our temperature does too. Scientists have been able to figure this out by studying ice core samples. Carbon has never gone over 350 parts per billion, but currently it’s at 400 parts per billion and that number is continuously rising.
“As temperatures continue to rise, that doesn’t mean we won’t have cold days, but on average the temperature continues to move up,” Bacher said.
“Temperature affects society more than we realize. As the temperature increases more water evaporates, so then there is more moisture in the air, so all the precipitation is more intense, every rainstorm is more intense, every snowstorm is more intense, and when it’s drought time, every drought is more intense because it is hotter and then evaporating more water out of the land.”
The more drought we have, the less food production, which means the price of food will rise.
For example, Russia is a huge grain supplier and when they recently had a major drought they kept the grain they had and stopped supplying the world. So the prices of grain here went up.
The U.S. did something similar with corn and soybeans. So the hotter the temperatures, the more our agriculture suffers.
Australia recently had to add two more colors to their weather maps because it has been so hot, Bacher said.
“2012 is the 36th consecutive year that the global temperature is above the 20th century average,” Bacher said, adding that climate change can also result in more natural disasters like super storm ‘Sandy.’”
Bacher said climate change and disasters like Sandy have already affected areas like the Jersey shore. If more and more storms his coastal areas, he said, it is possible that the government will no longer want to rebuild such devastated areas, or the insurance companies might not want to keep paying for these places.
Mary Anne Kepler is the coach of the sustainability team at Bucks. The mission of the team is to spread awareness and get students, facility, and the community involved.
Currently the team is working on putting water dispensers on campus that use filtered water to reduce the number of disposable water bottles used. Students can put the fresh filtered water into reusable bottles.
The team meets every third Friday of the month in the Linksz Pavilion. The next meeting is on Oct. 25 at 1 p.m.
For more information on the topics and “Climate reality: 2013 update” you can go to www.bucks.com/about/sustainability.