Well… I’ll freely admit it: I hadn’t foreseen the notion that a single unqualified 34-year old federal employee-for-life would upend the nation’s air safety rules, in the face of an ongoing health emergency.
I had planned for today to be all about the coming of another (the 52nd, if memory serves!) Earth Day, this Friday… so we will now march toward that, but leave our masthead as is for a bit yet. Here’s just one of many — an archived story, from June of last year:
…[In] the journal Geology an international team describes how the largest remaining ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, has been stable for the past ~10,000 years.
The vast Larsen Ice Shelf, twice the size of Wales, attracted global media attention, after a 5,800-square-kilometer iceberg weighing more than a trillion tons calved in 2017. Last month (April) it broke up completely, following a three year journey drifting from the Antarctic Peninsula to the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia.
Over the past 25 years, several of the region’s ice shelves have collapsed, including the rapid disintegration of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002. The sequential breakup of ice shelves along the eastern Antarctic Peninsula is linked to warmer atmospheric temperatures which have gradually moved southward over the past 50 years. At the same time, warm ocean currents have also increased, weakening the region’s ice shelves from below….
“We now have a much clearer picture of the pattern and extent of ice shelf break-ups, both past and present. It starts in the north and progresses southward as the atmosphere and ocean warms. Should collapse of Larsen C happen, it would confirm that the magnitudes of ice loss along the eastern Antarctic Peninsula and underlying climate change are unprecedented during the past 10,000 years” says Smith….
I note this one, in large part to point out that Hinderaker, and his fellow Luddites apparently forgot that the unassailable geological record documents that the ice was receding 8,000 to 6,000 years ago, as we ended another ICE AGE. Yes, it fluctuates, in roughly ten to twenty thousand year cycles — but that was before. In the “before times”. The epoch when collectively, maybe under one million humans in total, all had were tiny campfires burning.
Every single modern household now adds more heat to the environmental sphere in a year, than an entire village did, in a century, in antiquity, when one factors in air travel, and all the related consumption we engender.
We humans have greatly accelerated the melt, by burning hydro-carbons on a scale that is about 1015th more rapid than our ancestors in the end of the last ice age. So, the ice melt threatens to hit a runaway / non-reversible threshold, if we don’t act. [The entire eastern seaboard as far inland as Patterson, New Jersey could be under six to twenty feet of salt water, in a century’s time.]
We must do better, for our children — and theirs. Truly, there really is no time left… to vacillate.
नमस्ते
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