Rendering № 9

The editorial published on August 10 is headlined "Global Warming Is Here to Stay”. The article carries a lot of comments on the today’s situation of environment in our world. The author, Eugene Robinson, tries to convince the readers in the importance of this problem through his writing. The article takes a critical view of the environmental changes and their possible consequences. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July was indeed the hottest month in the contiguous United States since record-keeping began more than a century ago. That distinction was previously held by July 1936, which came at the height of the Dust Bowl calamity that devastated the American heartland. Analyzing the situation, it’s necessary to emphasize that the average temperature last month was 77.6 degrees -- a full 3.3 degrees warmer than the 20th-century norm for July. This follows the warmest 12-month period ever recorded in the United States, and it continues a long-term trend that is obvious to all except those who stubbornly close their eyes: Of the 10 hottest years on record, nine have occurred since 2000. Giving appraisal of the situation, the author of the article cites Harsen’s opinion, who heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, summed it up in a piece he wrote for The Washington Post last week: "The future is now. And it is hot." Hansen wrote that when he testified before Congress in 1988 and painted a "grim picture" of the consequences of climate change, he was actually being too optimistic. His projections of how rapidly temperatures would rise were accurate, he wrote, but he "failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather." Summing Harsen’s statements up,  Eugene Robinson writes that scientists are finally asserting a direct connection between long-term climate trends and short-term weather events. This was always a convenient dodge for climate change deniers. There might be a warming trend over decades or centuries, they would say, but no specific heat wave, hurricane or hailstorm could definitively be attributed to climate change. The article consists of many other Harsen’s comment on this burning issue - "To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change," Hansen wrote. "The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change." It’s also every reason to believe that the odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills. There are indications that the other escape hatch for deniers is the question of why the Earth's atmosphere is warming. In this connection it’s worth while mentioning the fact that What we're witnessing is due to natural processes -- perhaps some long-term cycle we are too feeble to comprehend. You can't prove that human activity, specifically the burning of fossil fuels, is to blame.  Giving more essential details for the better understanding of the issue, Eugene Robinson refers to the statistics - between 2007 and 2010, the percentage of U.S. adults who believed human activity contributed to warming declined from 60 percent to 48 percent. It’s very hard to predict the course of events in the future, but physicist Richard Muller, who heads the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, wrote that he and his team tried correlating the observed warming with phenomena such as solar activity and volcanic eruptions. "By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide," he wrote. The deduction of Muller’s observation is that the more we burn, the faster the atmosphere will warm. And the crazier the weather will get. The author concludes the article that we can't do anything about the greenhouse gases we've already spewed into the atmosphere, but we can minimize the damage we do in the future. We can decide what kind of environment we leave to our grandchildren.

As for me, I completely agree with Eugene Robinson’s conclusion. The future of our children is in our hands. We should realize what kind of environment will be  depends on us, on every person in the world. It’s better to think of about it nowadays and launch some initiatives to create the alternative sources of energy as well as the ways to protect our environment. Undoubtedly, the scientific and technological advance is good and very profitable, but it is not the reason to forget or even ignore about the flora and fauna and their condition. If you are not ready to help to take care of our planet, please, don’t prevent other people to do it.  Of course, it is easier to follow the expression “that has nothing to do with me, it is no business”, but we all are responsible for the future of our children.