The Host of CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks suggests, as our climate changes, people will need to adapt.
The planet earth, its ecology, its environment and its resources, was among the topics examined earlier this month in Winnipeg as Farm Credit Canada hosted FCC Forum.
Bob McDonald, a Bestselling Author and Host of CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks, says we know, from a scientific point of view that the earth goes through its own changes.
We know from the geological record, we know from ice cores, we know from tree rings and other evidence that we’ve had at least five ice ages in the past. So the earth gets warm then it gets cold then it gets warm it gets cold. It stays warm for about 10 thousand years at a time and then it gets cold again. It’s been 12 thousand years since the last ice age so we’re due for another one and we’re not in one right now. In fact it’s getting warmer because humanity, since the industrial revolution came along, has been pumping carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere so we’re pushing the warm part of it and we know that. In the scientific community there’s no debate about that what so ever. It’s real, it’s here so the earth is changing. By change that means it’s not just getting warmer on average because climate is an average. It’s over a long period of time.
Weather is what happens day to day year to year. Climate is an average, so the climate is getting warmer. But change means that we can still get weird weather. You can still have wet summers when it should be dry or get warm winters when it should be cold. It’s all part of the system and that’s the challenge is to try to understand those changes. We still have trouble predicting tomorrow’s weather so trying to predict the long term is very very difficult but it is changing and we need to adapt to it.
~ Bob McDonald, CBC Radio
McDonald acknowledges getting ourselves off fossil fuels is not going to happen overnight. He says it’s got to be a gradual bringing in of new technologies, an evolution not revolution and that is happening.
