Human Biodeath Crisis
For those of you who still aren’t convinced of the impending doom, I highly recommend you read Time’s Cover Story – Polar Ice Caps Are Melting Faster Than Ever… More And More Land Is Being Devastated By Drought… Rising Waters Are Drowning Low-Lying Communities… By Any Measure, Earth Is At … The Tipping Point
Here, my friends, are a few choice quotes:
“What few people reckoned on was 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.”
“Polar ice is so reflective that 90% of the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking much of its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90% of the energy it receives. The more energy it retains, the warmer it gets, with the result that each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that preceded it.”
“There will be no polar ice by 2060,” says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. “Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out.”
“We did not so much march toward the environmental precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the scientific scolds who told us we had a problem.”
Good grief.
Boo. The earth has seen infinitely greater climactic swings in the last 10,000 years, ice ages and all, and somehow things always sort themselves out. That TIME magazine cover is one of the most egregious examples of cheap journalistic fearmongering I’ve ever seen.
Also: keep in mind that people like Larry Schweiger have a vested interest in scaring the crap out of the public. Their jobs depend on it.
The question isn’t whether things will sort themselves out, over time, as great pendulum swings back to next ice age. Although whether the earth has seen “infinitely greater climactic swings” in the period referred to by other Sean is a bit of an open question.
In the meantime the trend is gonna be a reduction in biodiversity, potable water, crop yield, and so on. All fearmongering aside.