CommentsCLIMATE POLITICS-Fasten your seat belt…global warming is on a rampage.
As a consequence, many ecosystems may be on the verge of total collapse. In fact, recent activity in the hinterlands surely looks that way. Over time, the backlash for civilized society where people live in comfort could be severe, meaning extreme discomfort.
But still, nobody knows when or how bad it’ll get. As it happens, an ongoing climate catastrophe, like the show-stopping catastrophic collapse of permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic (more on this later) is hard evidence that climate scientists have been way too conservative for far too long. Evidently, they never expected climate change to hit with the force of a lightening bolt.
Still in all, and in fairness, climate scientists have been warning about the dangers of global warming for decades. Now, it’s happening, in spades. It should be noted that America’s politicians are guilty of ignoring warnings by their own scientists. Those warnings officially started 31 years ago when Dr. James Hansen, then head of NASA Institute for Space Studies, testified before the Senate, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.” (NY Times d/d June 24, 1988.)
The NYT article of 31 years ago went on to say: “If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit from the year 2025 to 2050, according to these projections. This rise in temperature is not expected to be uniform around the globe but to be greater in the higher latitudes.” Hmm, that’s where the permafrost is located.
Global warming is prominent throughout the North. Ergo, climate news doesn’t get much worse (well actually, it could, and will) than the collapse of permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic’s extreme coldest region:
“Observed maximum thaw depths at our sites are already exceeding those projected to occur by 2090.” (Source: Louise M. Farquharson et al, Climate Change Drives Widespread and Rapid Thermokarst Development in Very Cold Permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic, Geophysical Research Letters, June 10, 2019).
That’s chilling!
The aforementioned study, from 2003-2016, found permafrost melt up to 240% more than previous years. In geological terms, that’s like winning the Indy 500, hands down. That permafrost had been frozen solid for “thousands of years.” Accordingly, scientists predicted the permafrost “wouldn’t melt for another 70 years.” Yet, the landscape has already collapsed by up to three feet.
Not only is permafrost collapsing, it’s reported that houses are “sinking into the earth” in parts of Alaska, Canada, and Russia. Alaska’s 92-mile road for Alaska’s Denali National Park is moving off center by the forces of slip-sliding land.
Not only that, but bad news often times begets more bad news. Here’s the bold-faced truth about the global warming dilemma: The world is not braced for a turbo-charged climate and collapsing ecosystems and burn off of agriculture in mid latitudes. Remarkably, even though “global warming” is one of the most recognized terms in the world today, nobody is prepared for the onset.
Scandalously, America’s role in the crisis is akin to (actually, a carbon copy of) the extreme arrogant smugness of General George Custer’s leadership changing directly, headfirst into one of the world’s most celebrated mass slaughters.
For additional evidence of out of control crazy, zany global warming, a photo (see above) of sled dogs traipsing thru water up to their stomachs on Greenland’s icy surface recently went viral, as Steffen Olsen, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute, led his team to retrieve equipment at a weather station. But the normal icy freeze-up wasn’t normal any longer.
William Colgan, a senior researcher at the institute, commented: “It’s very unusual to have this much melt so early in the season… it takes very rare conditions but they’re becoming increasingly common.” (Source: BBC News.) Rare climate conditions that “increasingly become common” define dangerous, disruptive climate change.
Bottom line, the top 25% of the Northern Hemisphere, where permafrost is ubiquitous, is coming apart at the seams, and climate scientists are behind the eight ball while America’s politicians deny the legitimacy of science and openly spit on the underlying thesis of anthropogenic global warming.
What can be done about that? After all, America’s political system is on trial before a world community that fully embraced Paris ’15 to restrain global warming as it watches ecosystems in America’s Alaska collapse and emit more carbon into the atmosphere (based upon two-years of airborne measurements) than all U.S. commercial CO2 emissions biannually, which of course merely serves as supporting evidence for the absolutely shocking “drop-to-your-knees news” about the “70-yr too early permafrost collapse.”
These instances of collapsing permafrost are deafening bell-ringers and exactly the type of awful news that presages Runaway Global Warming (RGW).
In point of fact, Farquharson’s “70-yr too early permafrost collapse” makes the onset of RGW look like a dead-ringer, but when? Still, nobody really knows for sure how horrible it will be for society at large, but it’s 100% guaranteed to upend capitalism’s rampant growth machine. Functioning ecosystems and roughshod capitalism that willy-nilly consumes ecosystems, punctuated by the advent of plutocracy, don’t jive very well. Maybe a change is in order.
There’s no getting around the fact that ecosystems are collapsing. The evidence is too palpable to ignore. It’s serious; it’s deadly, and it could be too late to do much to stop it, other than a last-ditch WWII Marshall Plan Worldwide Consortium dedicated to converting the world to renewable energy, and forcing removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. Yet those solutions take years and years of planning, setup, construction, and billions upon billions of funding. It’s not happening.
Meanwhile, carbon that has been trapped in and under permafrost over eons readies to escape to turbo-charge an already oversaturated turbo-charged climate. It’s literally happening right now. The waiting room is already full. Farquharson’s study proves it, and Alaska’s permafrost carbon emissions that compete with U.S. commercial CO2 emissions prove it, as sled dogs wade through it.
It’s postulated that Runaway Global Warming, which could wipe out huge swaths of civilized society, starts in the North, where few people live. Egad! They’re already seeing it.
(Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and is a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at [email protected]. This piece originally appeared on CounterPunch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
