Meeting Dr. Lonnie Thompson

Last night I had the opportunity to attend a forum on Climate change sponsored by the City of Toledo and the University of Toledo. The main speaker for the evening was Dr. Lonnie Thompson from Ohio State University, a leading expert on climate change, especially related to glacier ice. His name will be familiar to those of you have read or heard or watched Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth.

Bottom line, no matter how you feel about global warming the reality is our Earth is changing and at a more rapid pace than predicted. The affects of these changes especially the melting of the glacier ice will have an impact on many parts of the world with huge ramifications possible when it comes to the access to water. China is putting a new coal powered plant to generate electricity online each week, that is going to create even more pollution and a global impact on our environment.

As Dr. Thompson aptly pointed out last night, part of our human nature seems to be never dealing with an issue until it reaches a crisis proportion. A river is polluted for years, a few keep talking about the issue, telling people that action needs to be taken. For years it's ignored until the river gets so polluted it actually catches on fire. That's just one real example of how we as a human race put off action. The reality is it is probably impossible to combat some of what is happening but there are steps we can take to minimize the damage, to not add to it.

Some of those steps were covered last night as far as solutions that will help our environment and make us less reliant on other countries to provide our nation with fuel.

So, even if you are a part of the group that believes that Global warming is a hoax and this is some natural cycle, the natural cycle will cause quite a bit of hardship and destruction that could very well impact us since we all do share the same Earth...