Disaster at Hand

Bad news for us young folks. I've been reading this morning about a few recent revelations about climate change and it's downright terrifying. As in, it actually makes me feel scared. The first thing that got me was the fact that the U.S. Geological Survey just reported that 2/3 of the entire population of polar bears will likely be gone by 2050. I'll be 70 years old.

The second item I came across was about an island off the coast of Greenland that's being called "Warming Island." It was previously thought to be part of mainland Greeland, but now that the glaciers have retreated, it's apparent that it's a freestanding island. Here's an excerpt from the article in the New York Times, about how melting ice could change the shape of continents as we know them.

Until recently, the consensus of climate scientists was that the impact of melting polar ice sheets would be negligible over the next 100 years. Ice sheets were thought to be extremely slow in reacting to atmospheric warming. The 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely considered to be an authoritative scientific statement on the potential impacts of global warming, based its conclusions about sea-level rise on a computer model that predicted a slow onset of melting in Greenland.

“When you look at the ice sheet, the models didn’t work, which puts us on shaky ground,” said Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University.

There is no consensus on how much Greenland’s ice will melt in the near future, Dr. Alley said, and no computer model that can accurately predict the future of the ice sheet. Yet given the acceleration of tidewater-glacier melting, a sea-level rise of a foot or two in the coming decades is entirely possible, he said. That bodes ill for island nations and those who live near the coast.

“Even a foot rise is a pretty horrible scenario,” said Stephen P. Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University in Miami.

On low-lying and gently sloping land like coastal river deltas, a sea-level rise of just one foot would send water thousands of feet inland. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide make their homes in such deltas; virtually all of coastal Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Ganges River. Over the long term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.

Is that freaky or what?

And while I was reading that article, I glanced over to the "Most Emailed Articles" column on the Times page, and saw that today's #1 story was about how despite reports that sea level rise should be our biggest global warming concern, the evaporation of freshwater could have even more severe consequences. http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”

Sheesh. It's inconceivable really--that the same planet that is responsible for the beautiful northern California day I'm experiencing--birds tweeting, cat stretched out in the sunshine--might self-destruct in my lifetime. Or, in a slightly less extreme scenario, that it might destroy a good number of us humans.