Turning Point | Global Warming | DISCOVER Magazine

1: Turning Point | Global Warming | DISCOVER Magazine:

January, 2005:

"Evidence of global warming became so overwhelming in 2004 that now the question is: What can we do about it?"

When our grandchildren write the history of global warming—how we discovered and debated it, and what we finally did about it—the stinkbugs that ate Maggs’s tomatoes may not loom large. Nor will the blue mussels that showed up this past year off Spitsbergen, Norway, at 78 degrees north latitude. Nor even the catastrophic failure of Scottish seabirds to breed, which some researchers attributed to a dearth of plankton in the warming waters of the North Sea. But our descendants may well decide that it was the long string of such close-to-home observations—the early springs, the shifting ranges of plants and animals, the mortal heat waves—that, more than any climatological data, convinced people that something needed to be done about global warming. And maybe, just maybe, those future historians will decide that 2004 was the turning point.