A few weeks ago in a Backspin column titled Global warming, a hot time for IT I wrote about the impact that global warming could have on the IT world. Reader response was very interesting. Not only did I receive letters from people who seemed enraged by the idea that global warming could have anything to do with us humans but who were also willing to throw civility out of the window and be downright insulting. What really surprised me was that so many respondants appeared to be in favor of doing nothing rather than taking the conservative and safe path of, for example, reducing our use of fossil fuels. It seems eminently rational to take a path with lesser risk and then, if it turns out that we weren’t to blame, we would have at least stopped poisoning the atmosphere. (Even Pat Robertson now believes in global warming although not for rational reasons.) Now I know that there are people out there who will argue that the earth can clean itself up and that pollution is a local not global problem. Wrong. From AT AN UNDERWATER VOLCANO, EVIDENCE OF MAN’S ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT at Nasa’s Earth Observatory …
[At] an underwater volcano called the Marsili Seamount in the Mediterranean, less than 200 miles off the west coast of Italy … sediment was retrieved at a depth of 1,640 feet in the late 1980s by a Russian deep-water submarine [and] researchers discovered that the [lead in the sediment] was similar to lead mined from one of the largest lead mines in the world at Broken Hill, the “capital of the outback” in New South Wales, Australia. How did it get to near Sicily? … the most likely scenario is that the lead was mined at Broken Hill and shipped to Europe, where it was added to gasoline, burned by cars and emitted into the air. From there, the lead found its way into the sea, and then to the Marsili Seamount, where it traveled with water down into the earth and then re-emerged via the hydrothermal vents. Note that the sediment was collected in the 1980’s and here we are almost 30 years later astounded by the impact we’ve had. I wonder how much greater that impact is now? Pollution and energy are major concerns for everyone and the Western world in general and the US in particular have the greatest responsibility to be proactive. Unfortunately we seem to be too busy exporting democracy to worry about trivial issues like the environment …
