Journal: News & Comment

Looking at the earth

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Did you notice Earth Day over the weekend? Well, it's been 25 years since the first warnings of global warming:

As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years. In the same way that global warming has gradually ceased to be merely a theory, so, too, its impacts are no longer just hypothetical. [...]

As it happens, the most dramatic changes are occurring in those places [...] where the fewest people tend to live. This disproportionate effect of global warming in the far north was also predicted by early climate models, which forecast, in column after column of fortran-generated figures, what today can be measured and observed directly: the Arctic is melting.

This post was originally going to follow up on James Archer's list of neat Google Maps satellite photos, with some more interesting locations, and it still will, but now it will start with something else:

• Shishmaref, Alaska - highighted in the New Yorker article (you can zoom in with a map, but not very far with the satellite)
• Diamond Head, Hawaii
• CN Tower and SkyDome, Toronto
• Meteor Crater, Arizona
• Long Beach, Vancouver Island, B.C.
• Churchill, Manitoba
• W.A.C. Bennett Dam, northern B.C. (it made Williston Lake, British Columbia's largest)

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