The Taipei 101 building in Taiwan, currently the tallest building in the world (but not for long), turns out its lights for Earth Hour 2009.

On March 29th, people from around the world turned off lights for Earth Hour 2009. 4,085 cities and 88 countries participated in the event, which is being described as the largest demonstration of public concern about climate change in history. Check out these pictures of international cities, monuments, and landmarks before and during Earth Hour. The lights on and lights off versions of each photograph are overlaid and will alternatively morph into each other if you click the picture. It’s a cool effect that lets you identify exactly where lights were off and what kind of difference they made.

Where were you and what were you doing during Earth Hour? Did you participate? I was on a train on the way into New York City, so I not only didn’t have any [of my own] lights on, but I was also using public transportation, an earth-friendly alternative to cars (OK, it was kind of by necessity, but still…).

A house boat stranded on what was once a tributary of the Amazon River.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve read a series of articles that, when considered together, paint a particularly scary picture when it comes to the condition of our environment and, accordingly, our future. Each article discusses the findings of a three-day conference held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in which nearly 2,000 researchers gathered from around the globe to discuss climate change.

The first of these articles, published by CNN, announces a central, and disturbing, conclusion of the researchers at the conference: the world is facing the risk of irreversible climate change. Irreversible…a heavy word. The scientists assert that temperatures, sea levels, acid levels in oceans, and ice sheets are already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability to a point, perhaps, that normalization will prove impossible, even if we do manage to make drastic, environmentally friendly changes. At a lecture I attended last night (to be discussed in later posts), I learned that political policy-makers hope to prevent, in an optimistic scenario, the doubling of carbon levels in our atmosphere by the year 2050, implying that ”back to normal” isn’t even in the cards. Essentially, humans have so dramatically altered the natural state of our environment that, in words that might be uttered by a middle school basketball player, we can’t stop climate change, we can only hope to contain it.

Given the self-reinforcing nature of global warming (if you’d like an explanation, I’ll be glad to give one or write a post about the topic), these conclusions don’t surprise me, but the implications are still sobering, some of which are discussed in the next two articles I point out below. Each article is published by the Daily Mail (which, admittedly, manages to make drama out of the DUMBEST freakin stuff, from Victoria Beckham’s shoe malfunction to celebrities without make-up, but in this case, is appropriate for relaying some pertinent news), and breaks out in further detail some of the findings of the Copenhagen conference.

According to this article, scientists have concluded that, under the most optimistic projections, temperature increases already set in motion will destroy 40% of the Amazon rainforests in the next 100 years. In the pessimistic and, apparently, most likely scenario, that figure rises to 85%. In either case, such destruction will have a devastating effect on the planet’s biodiversity and weather systems, and will, since the Amazon rainforests remove tremendous quantities of carbon dioxide from our atmosphere, accelerate global warming, leading to more temperature increases.

Climate change also presents us with the prospect of rising sea levels, and the latest forecasted increases (also from the conference in Copenhagen), according to this article, are far greater than previously estimated by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicted in 2007 that the maximum rise in sea level by 2100 would be approximately 23 inches. Conservative or not, 23 inches is no walk in the park. But now we’re predicting, in a “low-emission scenario”, about 39 inches, due to thermal expansion of water (expansion of water as its temperature increases) and ice-melt run-off. To make matters worse, ice is highly reflective and reflects much of the sun’s energy back into the atmosphere, while water absorbs it. Less ice, plus more water, equals accelerated global warming. Combined with disappearing rainforests, we’re looking at a very serious self-reinforcing cycle of atmospheric warming - ironically enough, a “snowball” effect.

To truly grasp the impact such changes will have on us as a civilization, take a look at this slideshow. Using three-dimensional models of major cities throughout the United States, these slides allow us to visualize what a rise of approximately three feet will actually do to our country’s major metropolitan centers. Streets in New York City become rivers, New Orleans virtually disappears, and I’d be ankle-deep in water in the house I grew up in. Unfortunately, at this rate, these catastrophies aren’t something we can let our great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren handle. These are catastrophes that we will be forced to face in our lifetimes, in our childrens’ lifetimes. To think that I could, one day, see water encroaching on the streets of Manhattan is just mind-boggling. Now that is some scary sh*t.

If we intend to avoid a future beset by flooding, drought, poverty, storms, and mass extinction of species, we need to make some SERIOUS changes at a very broad, pervasive level. And it won’t be easy…

Sorry for the long post.