Message from the melting Arctic
source: http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/opinion/x2146285104/Holmes-Message-from-the-melting-Arctic
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- JanforGore
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Instead, turn your gaze northward. Climate change is most visible at the extremes, the top and bottom of the earth. And the people who watch the poles most closely are more worried than ever.
That would be the consortium of scientists known as International Polar Year. Its latest findings indicate that some of the dire predictions of climate scientists were off - in the wrong direction. Things are trending worse than the "worst case scenarios" envisioned in the most recent reports of the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The melting of Arctic sea ice has been evident for years in NASA satellite photos and eyewitness accounts. CIA photos, classified under the Bush administration but declassified under President Obama, are even more dramatic, showing slushy ice - or no ice at all - in areas frozen solid not long ago.
The IPY repeated the measurements taken by an Arctic expedition in 1893, finding that the ice cap, which was typically 12 feet thick a century ago, is now between one and three feet thick. Summer sea ice could disappear completely by 2020, researchers say.
That's ahead of the models in the IPCC's 2007 report, mostly because the IPCC assumed the world would have begun to slow the growth of carbon dioxide emissions. No such luck.
There's more bad news coming out of Greenland, where the IPCC low-balled estimates of glacial melting. New, more sophisticated measurements show Greenland is now losing 52 cubic miles of ice every year. Since Greenland is a land mass with ice on top, its melting glaciers cause sea levels to rise, unlike the floating Arctic ice. While the IPCC estimated sea levels would rise 16 inches this century, Sharon Begley reports in Newsweek that IPY scientists now project a rise of at least 39 inches.
Even more disturbing is the news on Arctic permafrost, which is rapidly melting. As it melts, the permafrost releases carbon into the atmosphere, making global warming worse. New calculations project that, at its peak, the melting will put between 1 billion and 2 billion tons a year into the atmosphere, Begley reports - or up to six times as much carbon as generated each year by American cars and light trucks.
Another recalculation triples the estimate of CO2 locked in the permafrost: Experts now say there is two times as much carbon in the permafrost as is currently in the atmosphere.
These new findings are a reminder that climate change is a moving target, that scientists can get things wrong, and that projections can be off - on either the good side or the bad side. While many have hoped the doom and gloom projections would prove exaggerations, new data shows they were over-optimistic.
end of excerpt
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- groups:
- Green, Water Is Life
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- tags:
- Climate Change, College, College_Current, Arctic, 11 more
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JanforGore
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Great analogy, and we are on the same wavelength as I just tried to explain this to someone the other day in this way: Think of your body as the Earth. Now think of how the human body is exposed to natural toxins in the Earth. Now if you know that and if you also know that exposing your body to even higher concentrations of those toxins by what you do with certain behaviors (smoking, drinking etc) would then exacerbate illness and possible death much sooner than you would have experienced had you not added the extra forcing of your own behavior on by adding those toxins, would you do it still? The person was honest and answered they might, but that they would 'moderate their behavior', and I said , bingo. So I then asked them, then why would you do it to your planet knowing it too could drive it towards a tipping point in climate? Well, they got it. That was one person I got across to so I think when explaining this I will continue to use that analogy as well, because in essence the Earth is a living organism and we as humans are making her very sick. The phrase, ' Physician heal thyself' comes to mind.
- 2 years ago
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JanforGore
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SeaJade
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A metaphor here: The human body and planet earth, both living organisms with intricate systems that work in amazing and miraculous ways.... When humans attain a fever, the body's system will go in overdrive and then create a chill at some point in the process, either to break it or as part of the chronic "illness" cycle, taking body temperatures from fever to chill and back again... or, ask a mature woman who is experiencing "hot flashes", after the heat and sweat, then comes the chill - the freeze as the body tries to adjust...
Or for those who cannot relate, realize it only takes a degree in temperature to bring you over the threshold of comfort from feeling normal to either feeling cold and chilled or too hot... surely your own bodies can give you a clue to what is going on here...
Or, for a seed to sprout, a degree of temperature, a shift in moisture level, on extremely subtle levels can make the difference between wether that seed sprouts and grows or not... If humans live in temperature controlled environments, I guess there is no way to really relate to this situation...Our planet earth, the mother, is not that much different to our human bodies in many ways... she is wigging out from the abuse! Relating my body to the planet's - I can't take the toxins anymore - we are collectively killing her (and ourselves) - slowly slowly, but remember, its always a straw that finally breaks the camel's back...
thank you again Jan for these posts!
- 2 years ago
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SeaJade
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JanforGore
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Another excerpt from this that I agree wholeheartedly with:
'This is serious business, and we ought to be talking about it, especially this August. The House narrowly approved a cap-and-trade bill in June that is the strongest step the United States has taken to respond to the climate emergency, but still a pale shadow of what the emergency demands.
The Democrats planned to get a bill through the Senate this fall. That would give President Barack Obama something to bring to the December negotiations in Copenhagen on a successor agreement to the Kyoto treaty.
Instead, we've been arguing about misdemeanor arrests in Harvard Square and shouting at town hall health care meetings. And the extension of the health care debate probably means the Senate won't get to cap-and-trade this year.
And when we do talk about climate change, we don't face squarely the melting of the Arctic. We aren't facing the most difficult question: How much energy should we spend trying to stop changes that increasingly seem inevitable and how much do we spend preparing for the deluge to come? Instead, we get distracted by trivial politics, narrow economic interests and short-term thinking.'
- 2 years ago
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JanforGore
