Eaarth Chapter 1

After beginning to read Eaarth by Bill McKibben I realized that what I was reading about was playing out in front of me this weekend. Having almost 60 degree weather in the middle of January is no where near normal. Not once in my life can I remember going outside in the middle of January without my winter gear on, let alone going for a walk outside in a t-shirt, jeans and sandals and not being even a little chilly. This really made me realize that what I was reading about it true. We are closer to having a major problem with global warming that we think we are.

One of the things that really caught my attention in chapter one was how incorrect the predictions of global warming were. I didn't realize how wrong people were about how long it would take for global warming to have a big impact on the world. Something McKibben said on page 13 really caught my attention. He said that "global warming is an experiment. We've never watched it happen before, so we didn't know how it would proceed." This is a very valid point because this has never happened before so we don't know how to respond. Our response will be more of guess and check than using a formula to get the correct balance in our lives to slow down, and maybe one day stop, global warming's impact on our planet.

Changes in Glacier National Park

There was a lot of statistics in this chapter and at first I was a bit overwhelmed. However, when I went back and reread them I realized that they were important to include in order to get the severity of the problem we are facing across to the readers. Some of the main problems that will impact the most people are glaciers and ice caps melting, oceans becoming more acidic, rain forests drying up and water levels rising which impacts smaller island countries causing them to prepare to relocate. To me these are the biggest problems talked about in this chapter and I believe that the information presented needs to become more common knowledge so that people around the world know what is happening around them and can be prepared as well as offer help.