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The summer floods in England, following deluges of rain more resonant of the Amazon, the searing, deadly heat in Southern Europe, with temperatures at times exceeding 45^°C, should be enough to silence those who stalwartly maintain that we are experiencing no more than natural swings in climate. Those sceptics, who have insisted that long term changes in the Earth’s orbit as well as in the flux of sunlight are accountable for the extreme weather and global warming, have basically been routed. But have we got it right? Should we be concerned solely with greenhouse gases? Or is our obsession with carbon emissions a dangerous diversion from what we are doing rapaciously to our planet’s natural ecosystems, in particular to the remaining tropical and boreal forests? Is the extreme weather we have been facing during the past decade simply a consequence of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuel burning and forest clearing? Or could there be a connection to landscape and land-use changes?

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2008-12-09   |   694 visitas   |   Evalua este artículo 0 valoraciones

Vol. 12 Núm.1. Enero-Junio 2008 Pags. 15-28. Rev Orinoquia 2008; 12(1)