Op-Ed: My family sees climate change in the Arctic. Here's how we've learned to take action (via latimesopinion)
The world is dangerously off track in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The main barriers are no longer science, technology or money, but politics.“Mommy,” Anders shouts. “Just on the other side of those trees, I found another lake with a big hole in it. It must be bubbling!”
These lakes are emitting carbon that has been frozen and locked away from the atmosphere for thousands of years. Warming causes the freezer door to open, allowing microbes to eat carbon from formerly frozen soil in lake bottoms. Some of the microbes produce methane, which bubbles out of lakes, contributing to atmospheric warming, as does the fossil carbon emitted by human activity. This in turn causes more ground to thaw and more methane release in a vicious feedback cycle.
“No,” I respond, smiling at them. “I am interested in understanding the problem so that we are better prepared to make wise decisions, but I’m not worried.” Rather than getting scared, my husband and I have decided a constructive thing we can do is show our kids what they can do right now to be close to the Earth in all its splendor. As part of their home-school science lessons, we teach them how to monitor lake temperatures and make homemade barometers, which are useful tools to predict how much bubbling will happen in lakes.
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