Blog Action Day & Theme Thursday - Climate Change

This week Theme Thursday has coincided with Blog Action Day, and so the organizers of Theme Thursday decided to adopt this year's Blog Action Day focus as this week's theme - climate change. You can visit the Blog Action Day website to find more posts on climate change by clicking the logo to the left. And you can visit more climate change posts from the Theme Thursday gang by clicking here.

There are sure to be a lot of very informative posts today about climate change, complete with lots of charts and evidential pictures and links to academic papers and journal articles detailing findings on the subject. There are also sure to be lots of motivational posts urging you to get involved, who to talk to, which government officials to contact, which legislators to write to to convince them to institute measures to solve the problem. But this post isn't one of those.

I'm not a writer, I'm a photographer. I can't write you an informative article on the subject, nor can I write a motivational post to get you all pumped up and ready to go out there and get things done. Even as a photographer I'm limited; I can't afford to go up to the Arctic areas and show you evidence of the polar ice cap melting, or Polar Bears wandering around because the ice they used to hunt on isn't there any more. What I can do is show you what there is to lose in the area where I live, in Newport, RI. Much of what makes this place the unique area it is would be lost forever under water if the warming continues and the world's ice continues to melt. So let me show you.

Gooseneck Cove's valuable salt marsh wetland would disappear, and there would no longer be a place for Herons and Egrets and Ibises and Double-crested Cormorants to nest and breed.

We would lose our beautiful coastline. These rocks where this young lady spent a beautiful September afternoon painting would be well below the low tide level if the polar cap melting continues.

And Tern Rock in Gooseneck Cove, where Common Terns have established an annual breeding colony and where, later in the season, Double-crested Cormorants rest between dives into the water after food, would be entirely submerged.

There's more, but I think you get the idea. There's a lot to lose.

As is my custom on Theme Thursday, I have a video for you. I went cruising on YouTube looking for pertinent music/image combinations, and found some nice candidates: a version of John Prine's "Paradise" with pictures of what coal mining has done to the Appalachian Mountain area; a version of Pink Floyd's "Breathe In the Air" with pictures of air pollution, its causes and effects; and more. But one video touched my heart, and is closest to the theme I've struck here - flooding. This is a video of the damage Hurricane Katrina did 4 years ago set to Peter Gabriel's "Here Comes the Flood". The intensity of both Summer and Winter storms is attributable to the warming of the Earth and the melting of the world's ice caps. We're creating a wetter world, and the results are disastrous.

And that's my perspective on climate change.

Photos & text © 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger