Climate News and Views
October 2011
Billboard showing the retreat of one of America's most prominent glaciers will be installed August 30 inside Reagan National Airport in Washington DC
Scientific observations and readings worldwide show that climate change is real, it is happening now, it is unusually rapid, and that the primary cause is the accumulation of man-made greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. The Del Mar Global Trust and World View of Global Warming bring this truth directly to the American public in the This Is Climate Change project. This rephotograph by Gary Braasch of an archival image is displayed in a giant back-lighted advertising panel for viewing by passengers at Reagan National airport as they arrive in Washington DC beginning August 30. Reagan airport hosts more than one and a half million business, government and tourist passengers a month.
The first pair of photographs shows how the famous Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau Alaska has retreated since around the turn of the 20th C. The ice has thinned and melted back more than 2800 meters (more than 9000 feet) since it was measured in 1911. The archival photo from the National Snow and Ice Data Center/ NOAA archives was made in 1894 by William Ogilvie. The photos are one example of the scientific observations of more than 100,000 glaciers measuring an ongoing trend of "global and rapid, if not accelerating, glacier shrinkage" which may lead to the deglaciation of large parts of many mountain ranges in the coming decades.
This is Climate Change was developed by Del Mar Global Trust (DMGT), a private charitable foundation with a focus on the environment, to publicize the real effects of climate change which have impacts on the environment and human lives worldwide. Our intent is to educate and increase awareness of climate change among the general public. More displays will follow.
This billboard project extends World View of Global Warming's work to inform Americans and people worldwide of the ongoing science of climate change and the effects of greenhouse gases which are being spewed into the air at record rates. Despite the physical evidence that the earth's climate is changing, many Americans remain skeptical of the reality of climate change, its severity, and even the science supporting it. A 2010 Pew Research Center poll found that only 59% of adults in the U.S. believe "there is solid evidence the earth is warming."
A continuing poll by Yale/George Washington University showed that even though approximately 97% of publishing climate scientists agree that climate change is occurring and that it is caused primarily by human activities, most of the public does not realize this high level of scientific agreement. Opinion about global warming in the US has been vacillating and, in general, the US lags behind other developed countries in understanding that rapid global warming is the result of human activities. This Is Climate Change counteracts misinformation disseminated by industry sponsored lobbyists and other special interests who deny not only the changes but the basic science.
Giving the public the straight story on climate change is also important in the face of what appears to be an anti-science know-nothing surge among GOP voters and candidates. NY Times columnist Paul Krugman described the "terrifying prospect"" of the "willful ignorance which has become a litmus test" for Republican candidates. And many of President Obama's environmental supporters are disappointed in his failure to bring climate change forcefully to the nation as a national priority, and become the "educator in chief" about the dangers of rapid global warming and the many changes needed in how we get and use energy. Hundreds of citizens are so concerned he will approve a pipeline to bring heavily polluting tar sand oil from Canada to Texas that they have been demonstrating daily in front of the White House for two weeks. About 1250 have been arrested for peaceful civil disobedience of orders to move away from the White House security perimeter -- one of the largest such public demonstrations in U.S. environmental history.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE:
Photography and text Copyright © 2005 - 2017 (and before) Gary Braasch All rights reserved. Use of photographs in any manner without permission is prohibited by US copyright law. Photography is available for license to publications and other uses. Please contact requestinformation@worldviewofglobalwarming.org. View more of Gary Braasch's photography here.