Big Poop
I try to find something interesting every day. Today, this story in the New York Times caught my eye:
DUVANNY YAR, Russia (Reuters) - Sergei Zimov bends down, picks up a handful of treacly mud and holds it up to his nose. It smells like a cow pat, but he knows better."It smells like mammoth dung," he says.
This is more than just another symptom of global warming.
For millennia, layers of animal waste and other organic matter left behind by the creatures that used to roam the Arctic tundra have been sealed inside the frozen permafrost. Now climate change is thawing the permafrost and lifting this prehistoric ooze from suspended animation.
But Zimov, a scientist who for almost 30 years has studied climate change in Russia's Arctic, believes that as this organic matter becomes exposed to the air it will accelerate global warming faster than even some of the most pessimistic forecasts.
"This will lead to a type of global warming which will be impossible to stop," he said.
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Comments
Well, now this something that is definitely worth commenting on. I am one of those few that do fear the climate change of our world in our not too distant future. This article might seem a little funny, perhaps because any bodily function always has its awkward funniness, poop being no exception. It was interesting to read that even the most pessimistic predictions about global climate change are more optimistic than this new (or maybe not-so-new) theory of biomass being one of the main contributors to global warming. It brings up a good point of the people who propose that humans are not the root source, but cows and their (dare I say it for humor) farts have just as much blame as the industrialized world of humans? It seems reasonable that methane is a much harsher ‘greenhouse gas’ than carbon dioxide is, but who are we going to blame for the up rise of the ancient dung? Is it the earth’s natural heating up process that happens every hundreds of millions of years? Or could we trace this tundra thawing to the urban exhaust? It is a fact that Mother Nature in all her ways can (and does) contribute to our crisis of a global meltdown (tundra, polar icecaps, glaciers, etc.), but her natural cycles are being fueled by the outputs of civilization itself. I just thought this story was interesting, and I liked it.
I also have a very random story about mammoths. A couple years back I went on a road trip to South Dakota and went to a mammoth dig site. It was an ancient tar pit that had drowned mammoths in it, and preserved the remains very well. This dig site was really cool. They had this huge building built up around the dig site, so it could remain out of the elements while archeologists dug up ancient fossils. There were walkways so we could watch the digs, and learn about the mammoths. The most intriguing thing about that whole day was, and the mothers on the trip got a kick out of, was that the 20 some fossilized mammoths in this tar pit, were all teenage males. The mothers were convinced that they had obeyed their mothers, or were trying to be that ‘macho teenage boy’. It wasn’t that funny at the time, but now in retrospective, I can see where our mothers really enjoyed that day at the mammoth dig.
Posted by: Robert Preston | September 17, 2007 9:55 PM
This is a really scary thought! I was scared of global warming ever since I saw the movie, "An inconvenient truth." The fact that global warming could be occurring at an even faster rate is terrifying. From what Al Gore says effects of global warming would take place during my lifetime; I would hate to die from global warming during my lifetime, all because a little mammoth poop accelerated the process; how embarrassing!
This seems embarrassing not only because I would be partially killed by poop, but the fact that if we had been more proactive we might have been able to reverse the effects of global warming. Now finding out that it is too late to act, makes me feel guilty for not doing anything before. I wish I would have recycled and tried talking my parents into buying efficient cars. Of course I only learned about it last year. Some people have known about global warming for decades and not done anything about it.
This show how unaware we are as a society, and that is sad. We are not knowledgeable about daily news even if it's a matter of life or death! And to make matters worse, some people either don't believe global warming is happening or they just refuse to change their lifestyle. I am not sure if they are being stubborn, ignorant, selfish or a combination of the three.
They are being stubborn by refusing to change in the first place. However, some people may argue that many can not afford the change. A good case for this is not every can afford to buy a new a car with less gas emissions. In this case I would say car pool or take the bus. I am not saying that I am perfect and that I live a perfectly environmentally friendly life, but it seems that there is always something that we can do to help and it is sad that some people don't do anything. And everyone can do more.
As far as being ignorant people are just plain uneducated about the current situation. I have no facts, or numbers about the number of people who are educated about global warming, however, the number of people who watch the news, compared to the number of people in our country, don't quite match up. Thus it seems that some people might not know the severity of the problem and thus do not act to stop global warming.
When I speak of people being selfish, I mean that some people may not feel the need to change their ways because they think that global warming wont effect their lifetime, so they don't need to do anything about it. Some people take the, "let someone else deal with it." stand point. This I see as being incredibly selfish, because they are not thinking of anyone of the next generation or of anyone other than their selves.
I know this statement is very opinionated, but I am passionate about global warming and I do not want my future to be jeopardized by something that I can not control.
Scary stuff!
Posted by: Amber Kennedy | September 17, 2007 10:10 PM