Alarms bells at the poles — time to wake up
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Posted on January 14, 2008
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Each time I look at some new data, I am astonished.
How many times we have seen comments like that from scientists. I know I have copied them into blog posts before.
It’s like our alarm clarks — they go off early in the morning waking us from a deep sleep. We don’t want to wake up, so we hit the button that gives us another five minutes. Another alarm, we hit the button — please, just a few more minutes of blissful sleep, blissful unconsciousness. We hit the button, five minutes later… And then, what do you know, we’re late for work, late for life.
This time, the quote is from Eric Rignot, a scientist involved in a new study showing that ice in Antarctica is melting at rates far beyond earlier predictions. 
The article appeared in the journal Nature Geoscience, and the research was covered in an article today in the Washington Post, Escalating Ice Loss Found in Antarctica: Sheets Melting in an Area Once Thought to Be Unaffected by Global Warming, by Marc Kaufman.
The Post also did a live online discussion with Kaufman and Rignot, in which I participated. It’s ongoing as I write this, and you can find it or read it later at this link.
One of the questions I asked was about how these scary predictions of ocean level rise threaten the inundation of coastal communities, and does science have a role in calling for retreat from the coasts, or at least challenging coastal development. Kaufman answered my question in pretty grim terms:
I’m not sure it’s up to scientists to come up with a long-term plan for pulling back from coastal areas — that’s far more a political, social and economic issue. The grim truth is that a huge proportion of human activity occures within 100 miles of a coastline, and a large percentage of humans live in that region. So my guess is that nobody will do much until we are forced to by a number of tragedies like Katrina. There is just too much human and economic capital invested along coasts, and not enough certitude about the nature of the risk. But this said, it certainly seems to me that it’s time for government to look seriously at limiting new development along coastal areas, and to do more about restoring coastal wetlands.
Sounds like me. Regular blog readers know I can get pretty bleak about our future. (Oops, what was that sound? the sound of millions of us hitting that little button on our alarm clocks? ‘Please, not now, I just need a little more sleep.’)
Here’s what else greeted my morning newspaper reading, an AP article printed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about how one of our premier glacier scientists, Lonnie Thompson, and his wife and research partner, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, are headed up to the tropical glaciers of Puncak Jaya in New Guinea to document the geological history of glacial melt before these magnificent glaciers disappear altogether. To view, go to: Scientist racing to tap glaciers: ancient ice at top of New Guinea mountain is vanishing quickly, by Charles J. Hanley, who covers these issues for AP.
Tropical glaciers are rapidly disappearing all across the planet, dramatic evidence of global warming. Part of the problem here is that millions upon millions of people depend on glacier melt for fresh water, so we are talking here about a potential human crisis of unimaginable proportions.
You think we have a human migration problem now…
Meanwhile, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is heading down to Antarctica next week with a Norwegian delegation. Will be interesting to see how he responds.
Here’s the truly scary scenario, once the stuff of near science fiction, that which no scientist wanted to believe would happen, and so soon: both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting and adding water to the oceans. These two phenomena combined could raise ocean levels by several meters above those predicted by the IPCC in their reports released last year, and this over the next one-to-two centuries, not the thousands of years once believed.
Okay, let’s do the drill again — it is an election year, and this, my friends, is one of the gravest issues of our time. So, given my question and Kaufman’s response, here are a few questions for presidential and other national and state office candidates. Since global warming is already happening, and since a certain amount of ocean level rise is now inevitable, which means coastal cities and towns will, in fact, be flooding over the next generation, what are their plans to; 1) drastically reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions; 2) stop coastal development; 3) restore coastal wetlands; 4) begin thinking about how to withdraw from the coast, especially from areas that are at or below sea level.
It would be truly interesting to hear their answers, much more interesting than contentless speeches about hope, or who has the most ‘experience,’ or cutting taxes for the rich, or who is tough enough, or likeable enough, and on and on.
Folks, raising the level of discourse to the level of the seriousness of the many crises we face, is up to us. Let’s not allow hope to be drowned in the melting waters of the world’s glaciers and polar ice sheets.
Technorati Tags: Antarctica ice sheet loss, Nature Geoscience, melting tropical glaciers, Eric Rignot, Marc Kaufman, Lonnie Thompson, inundation of coastal areas, coastal development, Rajendra Pachauri, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Photos credits:
Antartica ice melt graph: NASA/Goddard
West Antarctic ice melt image, NASA
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