Part 1

Part 2

Global Warming
The birds are shrinking…
Planet Earth has been here for about 4.5 billion years, there have been some ice ages, a meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs, and even a medieval warm period.  This last decade was the warmest ever on record and 2005 the warmest year since the 1880s, but this year is cold again. Can you disregard the warming trend?  Are there signs of global warming? Should we be concerned? Do something? Let us look around our planet…
The permafrost, that layer of frozen ground found usually close to the poles, is melting at a rate of 1.5 inches per year, they are finding mammoth bones and tusks like never before, in Siberia there is even a new word for searching for bones, ”mamontit”.  It is amazing that you can buy a chess set made of Wooly mammoth ivory.  Maybe if this melting keeps up we can find a mammoth we can clone;   forget the species we might lose because of the warming, a wooly mammoth would be priceless.  Then again, it might not survive the heat.
The warming has affected the Inuit as well, in Western Greenland the sea did not freeze in the middle of winter for the first time.  Greenland lost more than 200 billion tons of ice in 2007.  This complicates dog sledding, hunting, and fishing; integral parts of the Inuit culture.  There is a project called coolEmotion, which is creating sculptures to put on melting icebergs to raise awareness about climate change.  Well at least the Inuit will have some artwork up there; they can always open a casino if they cannot hunt or fish anymore.
The birds are shrinking…
There is a little island in the Bay of Bengal, an island by the name of New Moore.  For 30 years Bangladesh and India have been arguing about who owns this rock of about 4 square miles.  Thanks to global warming, the island is now completely under water.  The people of Lohachara, a nearby island that met a similar fate, also had to abandon their homeland.  The good news is that relations have improved between India and Bangladesh; no one is fighting over New Moore now.
Glacier National Park has only 25 glaciers left, down from more than one hundred a century ago.  Global warming is to blame.  In a few decades, there might not be a single glacier left.  No need to worry, we can just change the name of the park to Montana National park #7.
Magellan penguins are showing up in tropical Brazil.  The Niteroi Zoo, near Rio the Janeiro, has returned around 1000 penguins back to the Patagonia and Antarctica.  Some scientists believe that global warming is disrupting the currents penguins use to navigate, which causes them to get lost and end up in strange places.  So a few hundred penguins get lost, some die, but the lucky few get to see Brazil.
The birds are shrinking…
Corals live in symbiosis with zooxanthellae, algae that produces food for them.  As the ocean temperatures rise the coral colonies expel this algae, this makes them turn white a process called coral bleaching.  Sometimes corals can recover, but sometimes they die.  Corals have been dying in the Seychelles, in the Great Barrier Reef and in other reefs all over the world; scientists believe global warming is the culprit. Corals are among the most diverse places our planet has to offer, in a few decades there might not be any left.  At least living in the digital age will spare us from having to visit such beautiful places because we will always have them available on YouTube or Google.
Have you heard that the birds are shrinking?  Over the last fifty years both bird size and feather length has been getting smaller, says a study of songbirds in North America.  Yes the birds are shrinking, which means they are adapting and we do not have to worry about them…if it keeps getting warmer we’ll just have bald eagles the size of hummingbirds…hmmmm…what about the hummingbirds? What will happen to all the species that cannot shrink or adapt?  Bye-Bye birdies?
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which means that as carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere (everything else being held constant) temperatures in the earth increase.  We are emitting about 27 billion tons of CO2 each year.  The volcanoes do it (emit CO2), it is natural, so it must be ok, never mind the fact that we currently emit ~130 times what they emit.  Surely, we can keep increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and nothing will ever happen, our planet will take care of itself, right?  Let our children’s children worry about it, we will be fine or we can shrink…like the birds.
The roaches will survive…why be concerned with global warming?  Why do anything when we can take a chance on mass extinction.
The birds are shrinking…what are you going to do?