Camille Parmesan is a conservation biologist, an expert on butterflies – and she has the gentle, unhurried disposition that comes from living in a tent for weeks at a time, studying the breeding cycles of insects and animals in their native habitats. Yet there is a hardness in her voice, a sense of urgency, whenever she talks about global warming and its effect on the planet. ‘We’re definitely seeing species going extinct because of climate change,’ says Parmesan, sitting in her second-floor biology office at the University of Texas, which overlooks the turtle ponds north of the UT Tower. ‘We’re going to lose the penguins. We’re going to lose the polar bears, no question. . . . I’m seeing high mountain butterflies literally being pushed off the mountains. This is happening. It is not theory. It is not people saying, ‘Oh, we think it might happen.’ It is happening, and it is incredibly depressing.’ Parmesan has been talking this way for almost a decade now – on ABC’s ‘Nightline,’ in magazines such as Nature and National Geographic, in major scientific papers and in public lectures, long before the recent surge of global warming stories in American media. Her […]
Sunday, April 23rd, 2006
Do we Care Enough to Save What’s Left?
Author: BRAD BUCHHOLZ
Source: American-Statesman (Austin, TX)
Publication Date: Saturday, April 22, 2006
Link: Do we Care Enough to Save What’s Left?
Source: American-Statesman (Austin, TX)
Publication Date: Saturday, April 22, 2006
Link: Do we Care Enough to Save What’s Left?
Stephan: I have become truly tired of the naysayers about Global Warming. They now seem to be in what might be called a third stage of denial. The first stage was Global Warming doesn't exist. When that became obviously wrong, they moved to the second stage: It exists but isn't caused by anything humans do or don't do. When that became intellectually bankrupt as a position, they moved to the third -- current -- stage: It exists and people probably have something to do with it, but it is too expensive and problematic to fix. The media bears some of the responsibility for the confusion this causes, because on their scale of fairness, a handful of scientists on the payroll of the industries that will have to change if serious steps are taken to deal with this onrushing catastrophe are considered to be of equal weight against thousands upon thousands of disinterested scientists who actually do the research, and who are driven only by the data. To get the flavor of what I mean go see Thank You for Smoking.
