Global warming has been a villain straight out of a science fiction movie. It slowly destroys continents and shorelines like a revolting blob. It seems like we'll all be owners of beach front property within the next century, if not sooner, and some nations could be obliterated from the map.
Hikers in New Jersey might feel a bit vindicated by what I might say next: it is indeed getting way hotter on our trails. However, much to the chagrin of those Prius-driving environmental types amongst us, the problem for us isn't the changing atmosphere. Our problems are more obvious and immediate, yet the fight for global warming has led us a bit astray.
So what are the real problems with our environment in New Jersey? The two major reasons are the largest barricades to our environmental stability are obvious to those familiar with them, but far different from the overall panic presented by global warming:
- Urban heat - Urban Centers are by definition hot. So hot, indeed, that they can presage the overall effects of global warming decades before we feel them. Living in the corridor of humanity that makes up the northeast makes us a bit more vulnerable, check out the heat signature put out by the urban centers of the Mid-Atlantic States (image courtesy of predictions by NASA'S Land Information System [LIS] in June 2001, processed by NASA World Wind). Simply by showing the tempurature difference between the radically different environments of farmland vs. urban centers shows us a problem of vital concern to New Jersey, home of the highest population in America
- Local pollution - The concept of the Superfund site was created in New York, at Love Canal, in 1980. Some 30 years later, there are more Superfund sites in New Jersey than in any other state. These sites provide a far more immediate and chilling impact than the more gradual negative effects of warming. The air in central New Jersey, especially in close proximity to the chemical industries along the Raritan Bay, is filled with nasty stuff like toluene, xylene and MTBE. Not only have these chemicals proven to be hazardous, they've also not been fully studied, though it doesn't take a chemical engineer to deduce that breathing carcinogens on a regular basis is less than ideal for a normal person.
