No, not in a hundred years. Not in 70 or 80. Much sooner. I'm willing to bet many of you haven't a clue how bad it is yet. One has to really dig to get the information from the scientists who are studying all the influences. The media is concentrating on TFG ("The Former Guy", not to be encouraged by acknowledging him by name despite the hopefulness of his araignment and arrest) to the point of covering his plane from Mara Lago to New York and motorcades on either end non-stop the last couple days, with refreshers today just in case anybody with usable electricity may have missed it, on top of nonstop coverage of the closed courtroom door. So they're not going to give the latest climate news many headlines.
But they are available from reliable sources. Not just the headlines, but the in depth explanations of how conclusions were reached, sometimes way over my head, sometimes explained for the ordinary non-science expert. If you think you can still deny this "extinction level event", start informing yourself and see if you still believe that.
You may think you're informed by paying attention to the weather anomalies in recent months. You may even remind yourself of the caveat that weather isn't climate. Perhaps right now it makes you feel better to do that. Fifty tornadoes in a day, repeated several days later, and coming much earlier in the season than usual, isn't climate. Record snowfall, melting and flooding rivers and eroding banks with the spectacle of our seeing homes destroyed, that isn't climate either. Nor are the expansions of droughts around the world, especially how easily one can discount them with any particular rainfall.
All that is true. But climate change is the runaway engine driving all of it. Climate changes are becoming more extreme in the direction of higher methane and CO2 in the atmosphere in amounts never measured on this planet before. They are producing changes in clouds. Never heard about that one, right? Those changes are reducing the depth of our atmosphere. Never heard that one either I bet.
You have probably heard that glaciers are shrinking, even disappearing or soon about to be. "Soon" is nebulously defined of course. So you think you have decades left to act, to continue as normal. It's so easy to do when they are so far away that you may never have seen them. You will likely have heard that sea levels will rise when glaciers go away, and all sorts of people with a voice in the media will have poo-poohed the effect of that on sea levels. The ocean is so big, after all. You remind yourself that even the hugest of icebergs is still already 7/8ths under water, so how much effect can it have when it melts? It's easy to ignore how much on-land ice this planet has, thinking that it's not going anywhere fast. But huge ice shelves are collapsing, allowing glaciers to descend more swiftly. We are only now seeing how much their under-glacier rivers are carving them out from the bottom up.
Even more sinister than higher sea levels, the deep ocean currents are slowing down due to less cold water input. Those currents bring nutrients to feed the microscopic organisms at the bottom of the food chains. Without those, plankton dies, and without plankton, all that feed on it die, and so on all the way up. We are at the top of that food chain.
Glaciers melting ties in with permafrost thawing. Permafrost is a great carbon sink, and an even better methane sink, so long as it stays frozen. Now that it is thawing both of those greenhouse gasses are rising at unrelenting rates. Winters in either hemisphere are not refreezing at a level able to slow the process, much the less stop or reverse it. It is only speeding up.
You keep getting news about climate change these days that is nowhere near as grim as I'm talking about. Scientists report threats against their careers if they tell the full truth. Petroleum industry moguls are doing all they can to hide the truth or at least minimize it. (Profit motive, anybody?) A recent study of air quality near rigs in the Gulf found CO2 levels twice as high as what the companies were reporting. Much of the science getting reported is not in details easily understood by non experts. The whole field needs its version of Carl Sagan to make it understandable to us lay folks. You think one could get the needed air time?
There are sources out there, people who collect the information, and do their best to distribute it in easy to comprehend yet comprehensive versions. They don't get picked up in the mainstream media, although some there are starting to state climate change as a fact, finally. But the loud official voices are busy looking way out ahead, putting the tipping point into the next century. We respond by ignoring it pretty much. We don't see the need to change our consumption, slow our breeding, because we still believe it's wayyyyyyy out there. Too many experts are starting to tell us we've passed it.
I've been following this closely for months now. Mostly it's been on a website called "Daily KOS". It's prime focus is liberal politics. There are a lot of sub-groups with other interests like science advances, gardening, photography, etc. A couple specific members have been collecting climate news, and if you wish, you can go over there even without signing in and read what is posted. (You won't be able to comment or post your own content until you join.) Two I follow regularly are Pakalolo and Meteor Blades. Pakalolo in particular has posted so much that the recent ones typically contain a bunch of links to other relevant posts. Cawfeemug is a frequent contributor to the discussions and posted a compilation on his own site with Medium. It is a great quick summary of most of the recent factual information - along with some personal reaction - and lots of links for those looking for more in depth information. I strongly recommend this as a starting place, both for you and for anybody you want to pass this along to:
https://gilbertweaversatchell.medium.com/urgent-warning-f2ae93919c86
No comments:
Post a Comment