Recently in Global Warming Category

Besides the obvious issues that global warming introduces, like the melting of the polar icecaps or the rising ocean levels, issues affecting smaller areas are still disastrous. They are determining the future of our everyday lives and the land set aside permanently as national parks. According to a recent National Geographic news article, redwood trees, the world's tallest living things, may go extinct. We might have seen them just in time.

When we were staying in CA, sometimes we would be driving in at night. We lived about 45 minutes away from the beach, so the fog would drift in over the road and make it nearly impossible to see. We would cross over Golden Gate Bridge and look down at the gently rolling mists. While they made it harder to drive, they were also essential to the survival of these botanical giants.

The clouds kept the conifers moist, at exactly the climate they required. A hundred years ago, there was no threat from global warming. A university study said that there has been a 33 percent reduction in the amount of coastal fog produced today when compared to the data from a century ago.

The redwoods only live in the humid areas near the coast, where the fog keeps them watered. Because they have adapted to this ecosystem, they cannot live long in a drought by shutting down their systems to conserve water, as other desert plants do. This means that if there is nothing that can be done, the redwoods may dry out and wither. Some other species of tree, however, can adjust to living with less fog by not growing as quickly as they do in years when water is plentiful.

We went to Humboldt State Park on a mostly overcast, cold day. Logging had thinned many of the forests; the largest existing piece of hewn redwood, made into one person's RV, is on display at the park's visitor center. Early environmentalists had preserved large groves, which have been turned into state parks. To this day, the groves bear names like "Founders Grove," or "Rockefeller's Grove," after these early conservationists.

The tallest tree blew over in a storm a few years before and became a "nurse log." Nurse logs are decaying trees that provide the necessary nutrients for other plants to grow. Saplings, fungi, ferns, and lichen are common plants that sprout from the reddish-brown bark. Insects, like beetles and ants, live in the log's crevices. In places humid enough, these are also home to banana slugs and snails.

As well as being an impressive species themselves, these trees are essential to many other kinds of life. The terrible fact that they are in danger means that if they do not live, their ecosystem will be seriously disrupted. This issue is another reminder that the choices we make in our everyday lives do have consequences and therefore we need to decide to do everything in a manner that will not harm the planet. The fate of these giants is uncertain, the fate even of our planet is uncertain, and it's our actions that will determine it.

Becoming a vegetarian not only benefits the animals, it also helps the planet. By easily altering your diet, you can save many resources, including land, food, water and energy.

Energy One third of all fossil fuels produced in the US are used to raise livestock to be eaten. Eighty percent of all agricultural land is used by the meat or dairy industries. All of the little stages needed to convey meat to your home add up into one huge problem. Turning off lights or unplugging appliances when they are not needed are very minor contributions when compared to the immense environmental profit created by a transition to vegetarianism. Consider the steps needed to produce a packaged hot dog or hamburger or chicken nuggets:

1. Remember the 80 percent of all farming land used by the meat companies? They use a lot of the land to grow corn, soybeans and grain to be used as feed. These crops must be watered, sprayed with pesticides and nurtured just as food for human consumption would be. This uses a lot of energy in itself. While this process is not eliminated by vegetarianism, many of the other steps could be.

2. When you see 18-wheelers driving down the highway, don't they strike you as being very bad for the environment? They're giving off clouds of pollution, and they get very bad mileage or they use more gas per mile than an energy-efficient car would use. Those trucks carry the grain to the feed mill. The feed mill isn't environmentally-friendly, either. It uses a lot of electricity to power it. Although being a vegetarian isn't perfect, at this point the food would be ready to go to the grocery store. But there's still a long process before the final product arrives at the supermarket.

3. The feed is loaded back into the 18-wheelers and driven to the factory farms, where animals are mass-produced. The animals have to be raised on the factory farms, which wastes a lot of energy. Think about it - they have to be fed, watered, and given injections of hormones and antibiotics to prevent the diseases which spread quickly in such unsanitary conditions, and many other things that most people don't realize are necessary.

4. Once the animals are grown, they are loaded onto specially-equipped 18-wheelers and trucked to the slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse, which is yet another inefficient industrial building, takes huge amounts of energy to run.

5. After they have been killed, the animals are often again transported and delivered to packaging factories, which must be powered to pack the bags of processed food that you buy in a grocery store.

6. The packaged food is driven to a grocery store, where it must be refrigerated to prevent its spoiling. You buy it and take it home, where it must again be kept cool.

Greenhouse Gases If every American substituted vegetarian food for a meal of chicken once a week, the carbon dioxide reduction would be equal to taking over half a million cars off the road, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, an organization trying to preserve natural resources. Eating one pound of meat is the carbon dioxide equivalent of driving an SUV 40 miles in the amount of energy expended to produce the final product.

Wasted Food Eating meat wastes more grain than dining on vegetarian foods, which do not have to be harvested to feed animals before they finally become human food. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of animal meat, according to John Robbins' Diet for a New America. That's a ratio of 16 to 1. If every pasture used to graze livestock or grow cattle feed was planted with soybeans for human consumption, no one in the world would be starving.

Pollutants The runoff from factory farms producing meat pollutes public water more than all other industrial sources combined. In towns around Bellingham, in Washington state, the fields are sprayed with contaminated, brown water from chicken plants. We went to a town, Lynden, which had a Dutch heritage and featured windmills and half-timbered buildings. It would have been quaint, except that it smelled horribly like the dirty water being used to irrigate the nearby fields. Because the corn fields were also being watered with the polluted water, that Halloween we could not go to any corn mazes.

Scenic Drives The French and Swiss Alps have been turned into huge cow pastures. The smell in some towns was so bad that we could not walk around in them. We tried to hike up to a glacier located in open space in France, but had to jump fences and avoid the fields with grazing cows in them. In England, it is sheep and not cows which roam everywhere. Although the sheep are not as bad as cattle, they still make traveling less enjoyable. When driving through the Midwestern US, we often pass stockyards where cows are packed into small, muddy enclosures.

Benefits of Vegetarianism Although being a vegetarian sounds strange and difficult, it is one of the very best things you could do for the environment. People turn off the air conditioning or the TV when they leave a room and use canvas grocery bags instead of paper or plastic ones, but, although this helps the environment some, eating meat wastes a lot more energy.

Arctic Tale is the story of a polar bear named Nanu and a walrus named Seela. They start as babies. Nanu and her brother hunt on ice, but Seela spends the days when she's young going on clam hunts. The clams can even "fly" away, leaving Seela and her mother, helper Auntie, and the rest of the herd to catch the ones that stay on the ocean floor.

Then Global Warming begins to disturb the life of these arctic animals. The adorable Ringed Seal pups are left on the ice to the male polar bear's advantage (he later eats them). There is not enough snow for digging birthing caves. The ice is too thin for Nanu's mother to go hunting. An entire walrus herd struggles to survive on a tiny melting iceberg. Finally, they take refuge on Rock Island, which doesn't have much ice, until it is time to go home when the ice has frozen back again. Then, Nanu finally contacts a male polar bear after avoiding them most of her life (in a very playful way), and Seela gives birth to a walrus of her own.