York Town News
Presentation draws crowd to learn about global warming and simple, day-to-day ways to help protect the environment
By Melissa Wood
YORK - Could you decrease your impact on the environment by 10 percent just by making some small changes?More than 40 people came to the York Public Library on Friday night, March 30, to watch scientist Dr. Kristina Dahl present "Climate Change: A Call to Action" and talk abut how small changes can make a difference in a person's impact on the environment.
Eric Hopkins, chairman of the York Energy Efficiency Committee, said that the group is trying to increase energy awareness by helping the library reduce its energy costs by 10 percent. He said they are exploring the possibility of installing solar panels on the building's roof to help meet that goal.
Hopkins said the library building was a good place to rally around the 10 percent goal, and "practice what they preach" to show that individuals can also save on energy without making major changes in their lifestyles.
"You've got to be looking at solutions," he said.
Some of the small changes the group talked about after the slideshow were using a home compost system to reduce waste, installing compact fluorescent bulbs and carrying reusable grocery bags.
Members of the audience also suggested driving the speed limit, which saves on gas mileage; bringing your own containers to restaurants for leftovers; unplugging chargers while they're not being used, and simply turning off the lights in rooms not occupied.
"Ten percent isn't that much," said Hopkins. "You can do it by using these bulbs."
As part of the effort to raise awareness, the group hosted Dahl, who is a paleoclimatologist studying ancient climate in the sediment or mud at the bottom of the ocean. Now in her late 20s, Dahl has studied the subject for the past 10 years in places such as the Bahamas, Indonesia and remote islands south of Hawaii. In 2005 she received her doctorate in climate science from the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program.
While working as a researcher she came to realize that the scientific perspective on global warming was different than the general public's, and she became involved in the Climate Project, where volunteers are trained to give slide shows similar to Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth."
"I'm here to tell you as a scientist there is no debate among scientists who are credible," she said.
She said the misconceptions among the general public are a result of the consensus among scientists not being reflected in the general press. Looking at 928 randomly chosen scientific articles about global warming, she said none of them raised any doubt that it existed. However, in 636 articles in the popular press, 53 percent contained doubts.
"No wonder we're confused," she said, but added that's been changing recently and the percentage would be lower if it contained articles from the last six months.
Dahl compared the skepticism about global warming today with the skepticism people had about plate tectonics before that was a widely accepted theory. She said both required looking very far back in the past.
Dahl said scientists studying climate in ice sheets can tell the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, year by year, going back 650,000 years, by little bubbles in the ice. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere directly corresponds to warming and cooling trends.
She said although there was a lot of variability in the amount of carbon over time, it has never gone over 300 parts per million in the past.
Currently, the earth has 380 parts per million of carbon, and that is expected to reach 600 in 45 years.
"It's not part of a cycle that we've seen in the last half million years," she said. "You have to take a view that's much longer than your own lifetime."
The slideshow contained images of Hurricane Katrina, as Dahl pointed out that warming oceans cause greater storms, and compared images of melting glaciers with those same places in the past where the ice and snow were much greater.
"It's shocking," she said. "Within about a decade we expect there will be no snows on Kilimanjaro."
For more information about the York Energy Efficiency Committee, call the York Public Library at 363-2818.
