A trip into space and glacier melt -- Make the mental connection by watching these videos

This link brings you to a ‘very cool’ story, about a private astronaut’s trip into space last year.

This is a fun one – awe-inspiring and fascinating.

Richard Garriott was interviewed by Orlando Science Policy Examiner Steven Andrew, about his recent trip to the International Space Station.

How many of you remember how, as a little kid, you yearned to be a space explorer, blasting off into the great unknown, forging new worlds and making great discoveries?

Take a few minutes to enjoy Richard Garriot’s journey, his thoughts– and his realizations about the fragility of our blue planet.

The reality of seeing Earth suspended in the great black void, sweeping around the sun, harboring and sheltering millions of amazing, complex, beautiful life forms, and protected only by it's delicate thin atmophere, hits us with new conviction.

This miracle is our home.

Now take a few moments to watch this video:

The footage of monumental glacier melt starts about halfway through, if you want to skip ahead.

Here is disturbing evidence that the climate of our planet really is changing – the precarious, time-honored balance that has nurtured every marvelous natural system for eons, is now out of whack; with dramatic consequences for every living thing on it.

Man has a history of demonstrable impacts on the natural world. Is it so inconceivable that our unprecedented cleverness and ingenuity, which has leveled millions of terrestrial and mangrove forests, exterminated entire species, literally blown the tops off hundreds of Appalachian mountains and introduced so many toxic chemicals into the environment that even wildlife
is getting cancer , could also damage the fragile layer of atmosphere cradling our planet?

As I reported here previously, scientists are now acknowledging that early man, through deforestation and short-sighted agricultural practices, probably triggered anthropogenic climate change.

Forests – particularly old growth forests -- are instrumental in stabilizing the Earths’ temperature by sequestering carbon.

We’re still relentlessly razing millions of acres of forest every year.

It’s starting to look like large-scale deforestation, clearing for housing and commercial development, and the endlessly expanding network of roads being built around the world are simply escalating the wasteful land use that started our climate problems. Add in the heavy use of fossil fuels and other pollutants and the recipe for a cooking globe may be nearing completion.

For those who still desperately cling to the notion that ‘global warming’ is simply a hoax, perpetrated by liberals to place yet another tax on working people, please consider that, certainly, the entire globe can’t be part of a conspiracy against American workers. In fact, other parts of the world are feeling these effects much more strongly than those of us in the US have been -- until recently.

A favorite comeback of those who doubt that Earth is experiencing any man-made change, is ‘Look, it’s snowing; so much for ‘global warming’, as if the presence of ice negates all other arguments.

Perhaps a better tactic is to take some time and trouble to investigate the scientific literature. As climate patterns shift so do climate zones. This planet is not simply a pot of water on the stove, heating evenly. It is a living, breathing, responsive organism, and will try to regulate and adapt to the changes. We are only now beginning to understand how everything interrelates. Ocean currents, air currents, mountains, deserts, sweeping rivers of hotter and colder air into areas not adapted to them.

We just don't know the consequences of all the changes we're creating.

Even if the fabric of the world doesn’t end up unraveling, the world we know might.

Economic gain means absolutely nothing when life itself is threatened. If the climate really is changing, if the world is getting hotter, with more extreme weather, droughts, floods, famines, wildfires, plagues and escalating extinctions of species (resources) worldwide, what kind of world will our children and grandchildren face?

Maybe it’s time to put the partisan squabbling and conspiracy theories aside and err on the side of caution when it comes to the fate of our planet.

Other articles you may find of interest:

Plankton crucial for ocean mixing

Whaling industry supported by tax-payer dollars

We may not be able to count on captive breeding to save species