“Global warming results in further global warming…”
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Posted on June 4, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Greenhouse gas emissions, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Wanted to bring your attention to a new report from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Global Outlook for Ice and Snow. I have a couple of links for you: an article from the BBC about it, and then another to the press release from the UNEP.
The release of the report comes in conjunction with the June 7 World Environment Day.
This is an interesting and unique vantage point from which to view our planetary climate crisis. As you will read here, 40% of the world’s population will be effected by the loss of the snow and glaciers of Asia. Sometimes it takes a moment to absorb info like this — again, FORTY percent of the world’s population will be affected. Millions upon millions of people will lose their only source of fresh water for their personal needs and the food they produce.
Meanwhile, as the ice and snow melts, so does the permafrost. Permafrost holds trapped within it billions of tons of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO2. As the permafrost melts, the gas is being released — so much gas, as this reports describes, 
that you can see it bubbling from holes in the land surface even during the most frozen times of winter.
We have written of this before. This evidence, along with the cracking towns, villages and roads of Alaska as the permafrost melts up there, is not only a local catastrophe. 
This process will greatly accelerate the rate of global warming from a double whammy: first, from the methane being released; second, from the loss of ice surface since ice reflects sunlight back out away from the Earth, while water and exposed land absorbs it — again, acclerating the rate of warming.
The report also says that 145 million people will be at risking of flooding from sea level rise as the polar ice sheets melt and waters grow warmer.
Norway’s Environment Minister, Helen Bjoernoey, told BBC that the study presents “a bleak prognosis. ”
To me, it is particularly alarming to realise climate change can be a reinforcing process - global warming results in further global warming.
Well, we are not lacking in studies to show us how serious a threat global warming and climate change really is — and how imminent it is. Given the projected impact on the world’s peoples and ecosystems, and the atmosphere that supports life at all, it is hard to believe that this is not the most important issue of our times.
That, and ecological overshoot, the two feeding on each other to present a planetary crisis without precedent.
Puts in perspective the grave moral failure of people like George Bush and NASA administrator Michael Griffin.
Why are these not the the most important issues of our time? Because the changes required to save life on the planet are more than many of us want to bear; because no politician or university administrator or institutional religious leader or mainstream media outlet or profit-making corporation and even many environmental organizations want to deal with the huge alterations in our lifestyles that addressing the crisis adequately require.
At least none that I can find — maybe a few voices in the wilderness.
The changes that could have saved us from a great deal of upheaval and suffering should have begun decades ago. Then they would not have needed to be so abrupt and drastic. For all the personal changes people are calling us to — different light bulbs, more efficient cars and appliances, more recycling — none of this will be enough. Much of this is to find more energy efficient and cleaner ways to continue our upper middle class and wealthy lifestyles. It is also intended to put the weight of responsibility on the personal behavior of the individual rather than on the economic, corporate, and government institutions that created the crisis to begin with. Meanwhile, all we do is put off the day of reckoning.
As said in these articles — it is policy that has to change at a local, national and global level. It is the lifestyle of the rich countries, especially the 8 sitting down to their summit this week in Germany, that has to change. It is the assumption of the exceptionalism of this US affluence — that in our case, it’s okay — that has to change. It is our sense of what we need, what is important, our frameworks of meaning — all of that is what has to change.
You can download the entire UNEP here.
Technorati Tags: United Nations Environment Program, UNEP, World Environment Day, Global Outlook for Ice and Snow, affluent lifestyles, Siberian permafrost, methane
Photo credits: (each link has more info)
Black Soot and Snow: a Warmer Combination, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Dec. 22, 2003
Methane bubbles, AP/Nature, Katey Walter, found in: Scientists Find New Global Warming ‘Time Bomb’, Common Dreams, Sept. 7, 2006
Cracked building, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), found in Earth’s permafrost starts to squelch, BBC, Dec. 29, 2004
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