Greenland ice sheet melt ‘off the charts’
Phys.org has a article on the rapid melt of Greenland.
Greenland ice sheet melt ‘off the charts’ compared with past four centuries
“Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet has gone into overdrive. As a result, Greenland melt is adding to sea level more than any time during the last three and a half centuries, if not thousands of years,” said Luke Trusel, a glaciologist at Rowan University’s School of Earth & Environment and former post-doctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and lead author of the study. “And increasing melt began around the same time as we started altering the atmosphere in the mid-1800s.”
“From a historical perspective, today’s melt rates are off the charts, and this study provides the evidence to prove this” said Sarah Das, a glaciologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and co-author of the study. “We found a fifty percent increase in total ice sheet meltwater runoff versus the start of the industrial era, and a thirty percent increase since the 20th century alone.”
Of course, I do not think for a moment that this will gain any of the necessary attention that it deserves within political circles. It’s just another data point demonstrating that rapid dangerous climate change is unfolding faster and faster. There are a lot of these data points. And none have made any real difference in the overall attitude and behavior of the species (ours).
Part of the problem is the dishonesty that continues to permeate the media. Take this for example: Recycle your old mobile phone to save gorilla populations
Ostentatiously, if you recycle your cell phone – you’ll help save the gorilla population. Except nobody actually knows that. In other words, this is more propaganda. There is a paper that studied this here.
Intuitively, I think we all know that many of the claims made in both articles and headlines are dishonest. I’ve made many of these same mistakes here myself. This tends to lend to the disbelief and disinterest issues like this are trying to expose. Nobody knows for certain how gorillas are going to fare in the future – cell phones or not. Habitat destruction takes many forms, as does disease, depredation, hunting and so on. But if we really all wanted to save the gorillas – we’d do something far, far more effective. Like make the entire region non-human (all activity). No more half-assed attempts. No more bogus claims and empty promises.
The topic of climate change definitely falls into this same arena of propaganda. If we all really wanted to solve this – we’d be pulling out all the stops, instead of these half-assed, ill-conceived and most pretty much guaranteed-not-to-work ideas. We’d be re-engineering our civilization right now, from the ground up and the top down. But of course, we’re not. So the Greenland ice will continue to accelerates it’s melt and sea levels will rise and the gorilla’s will all eventually die out.
Of course, it’s going to be much, much worse then that. While this may seem pessimistic, it’s also the truth.
