Water World: Slipping Toward Climate Catastrophe

from monbiot.com, via AlterNet:


Water World: Slipping Toward Climate Catastrophe

By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com. Posted July 12, 2007.



New reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change might be absurdly optimistic about the pace of melting ice caps and rising sea levels.

Editor's Note: George Monbiot is a British journalist and author whose expertise is on climate change and other environmental issues. Monbiot's article reveals that government ineptitude in the face of increasingly frightening scientific data on climate change is not limited to the United States: The UK government is dangerously negligent on energy and climate issues even though it knows better.

Reading a scientific paper on the train this weekend, I found, to my amazement, that my hands were shaking. This has never happened to me before, but nor have I ever read anything like it. Published by a team led by James Hansen at NASA, it suggests that the grim reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could be absurdly optimistic.

The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59 centimeters this century. Hansen's paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn't fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees Celsius above today's level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 cm but by 25 meters. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature.

We now have a pretty good idea of why ice sheets collapse. The buttresses that prevent them from sliding into the sea break up; meltwater trickles down to their base, causing them suddenly to slip; and pools of water form on the surface, making the ice darker so that it absorbs more heat. These processes are already taking place in Greenland and West Antarctica.

Rather than taking thousands of years to melt, as the IPCC predicts, Hansen and his team find it "implausible" that the expected warming before 2100 "would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive even for a century." As well as drowning most of the world's centers of population, a sudden disintegration could lead to much higher rises in global temperature, because less ice means less heat reflected back into space. The new paper suggests that the temperature could therefore be twice as sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than the IPCC assumes. "Civilization developed," Hansen writes, "during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end."

I looked up from the paper, almost expecting to see crowds stampeding through the streets. I saw people chatting outside a riverside pub. The other passengers on the train snoozed over their newspapers or played on their mobile phones. Unaware of the causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from their likely termination, we drift into catastrophe. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/56125/

do it almost every day except for when I need to go get supplies at Smart & Final or Target or Petsmart......

Seems almost pointless and rather silly with everybody else in this town wasting gas as fast as they can pump it......

Seems almost pointless and rather silly with everybody else in this town wasting gas as fast as they can pump it......

Often makes me wonder just how much my little bit is doing. Yet, I can't NOT do it, you know? :)

I do notice more people walking on the sidewalk with a bag of whatever from shopping at a nearby store.......

But cyclists here are rare - you see the weekend bike club crowd out for road work, but essentially no commuters.........sad. And on the buses all you see are poor Mexicans and such......

The decline of the Red Line after WWII do to the expansion of the freeway. Even as late as WWII most people took the Streetcar in LA for it had one of the best lines ever built. The builder made one error, he did all of his intersections with Roads at grade level. This lead to a decline in Service, as more and more people drove cars, do to delays at such crossings.

From the 1930s onward No one thought of what would happen when oil started to run out. We are NOW about to pay that price. Mass transit and bicycles are the wave of the Future (With a probable detour into "Moped land" as people try to keep their homes in the suburbs AND still get to work).

For more see my paper on the Rise of the Suburbs (I need to re-write it but the points are still good):
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=266&topic_id=203

A paper on the OLD LA Streetcar System"
http://webhome.idirect.com/~chessie/pe/2nd%20Home.htm



As a sub thread I did some comments on LA Streetcar line, and if anyone asks I HAVE NOT REWRITTEN THE COMMENT SO I HAVE NOT INTEGRATED MY LATER COMMENTS (which are in the thread) INTO MY PAPER. The map is from a reference point in a sub thread to my paper.

so much so that it has affected my dreams. I've posted about it in other threads but it bears repeating here:

I had this dream that I was in the breakroom of my job one morning before the start of my shift, when suddenly the televisions all cut to a major breaking news story. A large chunk of ice, perhaps 100 square miles or maybe a bit more, had literally slid off of either Greenland or Antarctica all at once. The result was a rise in sea levels of around a foot, BUT there were global tsunamis powerful enough to wipe out EVERY coastal city before everything settled. I have never woke up in a panic state as bad as the one I was in from that dream. This was about 2 or 3 months ago now but it seemed so real that I keep having to remind myself it hasn't happened... yet.

There are far more pleasurable fixations that drive people nuts. Why do I have to be stuck on this? :(

Because there's a good chance it will happen.

I'm just going to evolve like kevin costner did in water world and grow gills.

I'm sooooo set.