You can't stop global warming in a day but you can clear the skies over a city in just a few days, amazingly.
Anybody interested in making some changes? I bet there will be more than a few that will.
They will open Venice again and the canals will become foul, no doubt, but I don't think that dismal reversal will be as easy as it sounds.
The lessons learn from this global movement are many and broad. We learn how to inform and motivate a global population to united action, we learn how the Earth responds and to what degree the the movement of the human populace affects it, we learn how to reorganize a large scale economy and make some fundamental changes to how we live our daily lives, we learn how easy or hard it is and how much it costs to do something like this.
This mass movement is on a par with the great wonders of the world like the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Egypt, the Transcontinental Railroad and the Panama Canal. Large groups of people brought together at great expense to perform a task of immense scale with a vision of success at doing the impossible.
I would say we are learning a great deal about ourselves and the environment in which we live. If it takes but a few weeks for the smog to clear over the most polluted cities in the world, how long until the "greenhouse" gases return to normal levels? At that point, if the climate scientists are right, the temperatures should return to normal too. When the temperatures return to normal, the ice caps return to normal. I don't see this taking time. Temperatures should follow the atmospheric composition by days, not years. It would take time to rebuild the ice caps, but what kind of time? I'm speculating a single year, because that should contain a full cycle of evaporation and snowfall and the full cooling of sea ice sufficient to equal past norms.
Maybe it will take longer. We seem to witness, time after time, nature returning to its norm after desaster at an astonishing rate. Oil spills disperse and skys and rivers and lakes clear much faster than predicted. It takes constant maintenance to keep the World dirty. We work our little tushies off to get to where we are at. As soon as we slow down, Gaia goes right back to her own business.
My hope is that this dynamic rectification encourages us to let her be. "See how easy it is to clean up?" But my fear is this knowledge will just allow us to take her for granted even more.
-Will (Dragonfly)
