Be worried, be very worried ..... The climate is crashing

[RedEarth]

Be worried, be very worried
The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame

Editor's note: The following is a summary of this week's Time magazine cover story.

(Time.com) -- No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth.

Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.

From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us.

The problem -- as scientists suspected but few others appreciated -- is that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. That's just what's happening now.

It's at the north and south poles -- where ice cover is crumbling to slush -- that the crisis is being felt the most acutely.

Late last year, for example, researchers analyzed data from Canadian and European satellites and found that the Greenland ice sheet is not only melting, but doing so faster and faster, with 53 cubic miles draining away into the sea last year alone, compared to 23 cubic miles in 1996.

One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating is that as the poles' bright white surface disappears it changes the relationship of the Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that 90 percent of the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90 percent of the light and heat it receives, meaning that each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that preceded it.





http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/26/coverstory/


Another link to the Time article .... more indepth

http://gristmill.grist.org/comments/2006/3/26/14338/8641/2#2

[Ron Green]

1. Just wait until China really starts to buy cars.

:scared:

[BlueEyedSon]

2. And heat/cool/light up their McMansions

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[Viking12]

12. Well that's a red herring of the 1st order.....

keep that up and people might begin to think you're a troll.....

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[Strelnikov_]

32. ..

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[BlueEyedSon]

23. I'm sorry, I thought we were discussing global energy issues

and a biggie is the desire of 1 billion Chinese and 800 million Indians to have a US lifestyle complete with profligate energy use

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[BlueEyedSon]

26. did i mention any political party?

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[JohnWxy]

3. also, they are building beaucoeu coal plants.

[JohnWxy]

4. also, they are building beaucoeu coal plants.

[havocmom]

5. Re-thinking retirement to the sunbelt

Might stay up north and let the warm weather come to me. I hate packing anyway.

We are noticing migratory birds are getting here much earlier than usual. Doves showed up about 6 -8 weeks ahead of their usual arrival this year. THAT got some attention! More and more geese aren't bothering to leave at all in fall/winter. There were always a few who would stay in areas where there were wheat fields near rivers, but this year... huge flocks of them all over those fields.

bushco can edit and censor scientists, but they can't control the birds and animals. We are also full of snowy owls, which we don't see in decades here, if even in a lifetime. The lemmings way up north must have had a big die off this year. Desperate polar bears and Arctic fox?

[phantom power]

7. I'd think twice about moving to the south-west.

We're on the hairy edge of running out of water. All the indications are that we're in for years of continued drought. The reservoir system allows us to continue pretending this isn't a problem, right up until the last of them runs dry. Then bad things will happen.

I'd think twice about moving to the south-east, too. It will be ground down by hurricanes. And then submerged.

I really think that the Candian Shield is the least-unsafe place to be for the coming century. Of course, you'll have to fend off the rest of us environmental refugees who try to squat there.

[htuttle]

8. We're planning on fencing off the Great Lakes

Make your reservations now before the rush.

[havocmom]

11. I know, Lived in AZ for a long time

I know the bit about pretending water is fine so the developers can keep on raking in the bucks while the aquifers are going dry. Have watched cottonwoods die and riparian areas turn to desert in just a few years.

The developers are ALREADY coming up north from AZ and building their McMansion neighborhoods. That's a sure fire sign there is trouble coming sooner than those in power want us to believe. The money is already pulling out. That is as good a proof to me as what I have seen of the birds.

The can edit the scientists all they want. The evidence is piling up faster than they can censor.

[ramapo]

16. We all use too much water

Even here in the wetter Northeast, we have our bouts with drought. Vast amounts of water are poured onto our lawns in order to have green grass. Our aquifers are also being drawn down

[bottomofthehill]

6. Tax Cuts for Hummers

Good thing the Bush Administration and the Republican COngress (House & Senate)gave tax cuts for the big gas guzzling
"pigs of the road" instead of promoting fuel efficiency.

[Name removed]

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[ramapo]

14. Bingo...

Get the Bushies to nuke a volcano or two. Hell, a little dose of nuclear winter (remember that one kids?) is all that we need.

[Name removed]

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[kestrel91316]

19. Science is virtually unanimous wrt climate change (it IS happening

and WILL be extreme) and that man's hand is behind it. Bushco is in full denial because they benefit financially (for the time) from maintaining the status quo.

Yes, it takes a long time for the wheel to start turning, but once the momentum builds up, LOOK OUT. We are approaching the tipping point.

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[hatrack]

21. We already had that - remember Mt. Pinatubo?

That big cooling didn't seem to last, now did it?

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[hatrack]

28. Please, tell me more about the various types of volcanic explosions.

If a massive explosive stratovolcanic eruption isn't the right kind, what kind is?

Perhaps a basaltic eruption a la Kilauea?

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[megatherium]

31. I seem to recall Pinatubo was the biggest volcanic event

in the 20th century, and it lowered world temperatures by half a degree C for a year or so. To really cool our climate, we would need a far larger volcanic event. Something along the lines of Tambora (a once in a thousand years event), but I don't think that would cool things off for more than a decade or so (were it to happen today). The "supervolcano" caldera-building events are capable of triggering ice-ages, so I have read. The last one of these was 70,000 years ago and coincides with genetic bottlenecks found in some species, such as humans. (These species have a lack of genetic diversity consistent their population being reduced to a very small number, thousands, at that time.) My memory is porous here, so take this with a grain of salt.

[hatrack]

33. Second-biggest, actually - the biggest was Novarupta/Katmai

The Valley of 10,000 Smokes doesn't smoke much these days, but there was a really good reason for all that smoke.

http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/north_america/alaska/katami.html

And the volcano you're thinking of - Toba - was the biggie. It was very nearly an ELE for our species. Pinatubo put up about 5 cubic kilometers of ejecta - Toba did 2,800.

[megatherium]

37. Thanks for the clarification.

I couldn't quite bring the name Toba back to mind.

[ramapo]

13. The Terror angle doesn't sell magazines any longer???

The gleen is off the Terra, Terra, Terra angle. After nearly five years, Americans have grown tired and bored with it. So the media needs its own shock and awe. Notice the increase in global warming/artic melting articles over the past couple of weeks.

Now Time has gone big time with climate change. I'll have to pick up a copy as I let my subscriptions to the two weekly rags lapse because of my disgust with their ignorance.

Now I can't wait to read what, if anything, is proposed as a course of action. Will it be to cease burning of coal along with the associated wholesale destruction of large swaths of West Virginia and neighboring areas?

Since the collective we don't believe in conservation, what will make up the difference?

Windmills? NIMBY or should I say, NIMVofO (Not In My View of the Ocean).

Nuclear? This, I'm surprised to hear myself say, might make sense but NIMBY. Plus the whole waste issue will never be resolved since we can't even agree that putting all this crap in the middle of the desert where it could at least be somewhat secure is a sensible idea. Plus moronic Americans fight tooth and nail to stop cell towers from going up in their neighborhood because of the "radiation" danger. Of course, these same titans of logical thought have no qualms about themselves, or their kids, holding a radiation source next to their brain for hours on end.

Hydro? Most good sites are taken not to mention the ecological havoc the large dams cause.

Hmm...how about shale extraction and tar sands. Who cares that vast amounts of energy and water are required.

The current state of affairs would be very sad if not for the fact that certain events in the 1960s and early 1970s provided fair warning that would've perhaps allowed an intelligent people to use its incredible technological capacity to avoid the fate that we now face. But no....we selected a leader who believed trees cause pollution and all that alternative energy nonsense was somehow unAmerican.

So best case...the media wakes up the slumbering American mind. What will be the course of action?

[Ron Green]

34. The course of action is inescapable - it's gotta be a smaller footprint,

both collectively and individually. We need a President Moonbeam to clearly and firmly lead us, and the world, to simpler living, decentralized consumption, and sustainability as an organizing principle for all public policy.

[ramapo]

35. Who?

I agree. We need a strong, electable leader. Somebody not afraid to be honest and open and not sugarcoat their message. Oops...there goes the electable part. If there's one thing true about Americans, they don't like bad news, or news in general. They much prefer TV.

I digress...who might this person be? A reinvigorated Al Gore, ready to finally be his own man and live by his own book? Would such a being survive the inevitable Republican onslaught?

Certainly not Hillary. Wesley Clark? A big maybe..

Other nominations? Somebody who is now off the radar????

[pitohui]

36. what difference does our leader make?

1 billion chinese and 1 billion indians are going to want their day in the sun where they get to own and operate their own automobiles too and have nice middle class housing too, and i don't see how we can reasonably deny them

nothing the usa can do will make a bit of difference long term on this issue, we don't have the numbers nor do we have the right to tell other populations they can't aspire to our quality of life

[Ron Green]

38. Our "quality of life"

is basically bullshit. It's based on the idea that fossil fuel is inexhaustible and burns without penalty. The one thing we could do as a nation to redeem our last 60 years of believing in and acting on this bad idea is to turn our own selves around in such a way that our sustainability becomes a beacon for the world, just as our ravenous middle-class ways have been emulated up to now. And a true leader could help effect such a turn-around.

However, I'm not so naive as to think the greed-and-fear-driven market won't prevail, as long as public policy allows no controls upon it. If Americans can learn how to use their bicycles, Chinese certainly can remember how to use theirs.

[ramapo]

39. How unfortunate

that the Chinese and Indian societies show no signs of having learned anything from our mistakes. They're bent on competing to see who can pollute and ravage the planet while engaging in inane development instead of really showing the rest of the world what the next level of technology and innovation could mean.