The Long Crisis

Posts Tagged ‘Antarctic Ice Shelf’

While the headline news for the past few months has been about the worldwide economic crisis a crisis of another even more life threatening sort for millions of people is accelerating.

U.S. and British government researchers reported on Friday that one Antarctic ice shelf has quickly vanished, another is disappearing and glaciers are melting faster than anyone thought possible due to climate change.

Scientists say that the Wordie Ice Shelf, which had been disintegrating since the 1960s, is gone and the northern part of the Larsen Ice Shelf no longer exists. More than 3,200 square miles (8,300 square km) have broken off from the Larsen shelf since 1986.

“The rapid retreat of glaciers there demonstrates once again the profound effects our planet is already experiencing — more rapidly than previously known — as a consequence of climate change,” U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement.

“This continued and often significant glacier retreat is a wake up call that change is happening … and we need to be prepared,” USGS glaciologist Jane Ferrigno, who led the Antarctica study, said in a statement.

“Antarctica is of special interest because it holds an estimated 91 percent of the Earth’s glacier volume, and change anywhere in the ice sheet poses significant hazards to society,” she said.

In addition, scientists report that glaciers and ice sheets are melting in the Arctic at an unexpected fast rate. The process of climate change is now thought by some scientists as irreversible. Renowned British scientist James Lovelock states that “The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years”. Lovelock is certain that the positive feedback loop for an acceleration of climate change has already been established.

And what does that mean for you and me? Briefly the world is going to become a good bit warmer over the next 50 years or so. How we will be effected depends greatly upon our age. If you are 60 years old during your lifetime you probably will not notice too much difference except for increased drought in some parts of the world and increased flooding in other regions. If you live in regions that are subject to hurricanes, tornadoes, or typhoons you will probably witness increasingly powerful storms across many areas of the earth.

If you are now 25 years old during your lifetime you will likely witness entire coastal areas being abandoned due to raising sea levels. Low laying coastal areas will disappear beneath the sea. Almost certainly you will witness great increases in disease and starvation in what are now temperate climate zones as a temperature rise of only a degree or two will destroy crop yields and extend the range of tropical diseases.

As grim as the current financial crisis is and may become another challenge faces all of mankind that must be soon confronted with massive action if several billions of humans are going to avoid mass extinction. President Obama is most certainly right about one thing. He as well as the rest of us will have to be able to multi task and learn to deal with converging crisis or not many humans will be on this earth even one hundred years from now.

The long crisis is more than just a crisis in financial engineering. The sooner we realize this fact and start planning for ways to cope with climate change the better chance we and especially future generations will have for survival..

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