Spartan Daily - Serving San Jose State University since 1934

Issue date: 4/22/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Sarah Kyo Some simple ways to reduce CO2 emissions every day.

In his film "An Inconvenient Truth," former Vice President Al Gore constructed the argument that "we can no longer afford to view global warming as a political issue; rather, it is the biggest moral challenge facing our global civilization."

Working with the 2006 nonprofit organization Climate Project, Gore trained volunteers from across the United States to present a version of the film as a slideshow to the public.

Tawana Karney, who spoke at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library on Sunday afternoon, said she was one of the 1,000 volunteers Gore trained in Nashville, Tenn.

"You can see that the Earth has boundaries," said Karney. "We all can make the assumption that no matter what we do to the Earth, it can handle it - that the Earth can heal itself. But it really is an assumption because the Earth is a finite entity."

Referring to Professor Roger Ravelle, who started measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in 1958, Karney said the discovery of increasing CO2 levels had already looked alarming.

"When the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere increases," she said, "some of the radiation going back in the form of infrared gets trapped, trapping more of the heat into the environment and gradually raising the temperature of the Earth as a whole."

Karney used photographs of places where global-warming consequences are visible to support the message of "An Inconvenient Truth."

She presented recent pictures of the minimal snow on the peaks of Kilimanjaro mountains in Africa, pictures of disappearing mountain glaciers such as the Portage Glacier in Alaska (emphasizing the importance of glaciers in retrieving historical information), the occurrence of the first hurricane ever in the South Atlantic in Brazil in March 2004 and more.

Karney said the current CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is estimated to be 385 ppm (parts per million), when at no time in the past 650,000 years had the CO2 concentration gone above 280 ppm.

Mongbay.com, an environmental science Web site, published an article in November 2005 stating that carbon dioxide levels are now 27 percent higher than at any point in the past 650,000 years.

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