Miles Of Ice Collapsing Into the Sea
Cool articles (no pun intended) – Miles of Ice Collapsing Into the Sea
Graphic representation showing just how much and how incredible the amount of ice flow really is in Antarctica.
Unstoppable disintegration. And rising seas, world wide.
Oh, and there’s this – Doomsday Glacier
Catchy title. Won’t mean a thing to the distracted people of this planet. But it should. I don’t even think an imminent asteroid strike would raise much interest.
I’ve finally waded through half of Kim Robertson’s 2140 novel and found this a near-impossible read (don’t waste your money). It’s 600 pages or so, and I’ve hit page 300. What could have been written in one chapter (so far) has taken 300 pages of tedious and useless narrative. I’ll finish the damned thing, most likely, but wish I had something else on the shelf.
Robertson gets is massively wrong about the financial future and the fate of the world and especially New York. What else would you expect from a fiction writer who does not grasp the fundamentals of climate science or the essentials of living?
I don’t think it would really be that hard to depict what the world can expect from significant sea-level rise. It’s been pretty widely discussed, and it sure as shit won’t be what Robertson wrote. But fiction sells, reality doesn’t.
I’ve deliberately refrained from publishing more reality here. It’s a no-go these daze. You can’t write the truth anymore. It’s unpopular, it’s unsupported and not appreciated. Fiction really does sell better. Take a look at American politics for that reality check. The fiction sold to the American people has once again, proven to be very strange indeed. I’m not even going to waste your time or my time on it.
Acres, if you want a few good reads, there’s Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael, The Story of B, After Dachau, and a number of other novels. Unless you’ve already read his stuff?
One of my favorite novels of all time is Shibumi by Tevanian:
“But at least neither of us ended up as hired killers.”
“Rubbish. Any man is a killer who works for a company that pollutes, strip-mines, and contaminates the air and water. The fact that you and your unlamented brother killed from institutional and patriotic ambush doesn’t mean you’re not killers—it only means you’re cowards.”
There you go. That’s the novel for you: Shibumi.
Just my opinion; Arctic warming will be a dramatic issue soon, when it’s ice free the wind patterns will shift. Agricultural collapse would rev up as the jet stream progressively meanders. The key issue is the atmospheric carbon. Humanity can’t remove it (net). Even if humanity stopped it’s GHGE’s, the self reinforcing feedback loops would trigger runaway warming. SRM and marine cloud brightening can have a cooling effect but it’s still a Band-Aid, cause reflecting solar radiation tends to trigger droughts.
But if half of the world’s super computers were to take a break from their weather predicting and other tasks they could focus on finding an innovative way to get the carbon out of the atmosphere. If they have a break through they could stabilize the CO2 at 300ppm. This is a Hail Mary pass as it’s removing hundreds of billions of tones of carbon. But there are super-computers that can process over 90 quadrillion units of info per second. This intelligence and analysis hasn’t been applied to CDR engineering yet.
The marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson suggested a billion dollar prize to whoever finds this solution. Maybe a 10 billion dollar prize is more appropriate, (if it’s ever solved) maybe funded by philanthropic corporations who benefited from the carbon party.
And yes I love agroforestry, permaculture, bio-char, low tech living, etc. It’s just not enough in 2017.
If this solution is found it is still just the first step in making this civilization anywhere near “sustainable”. But without it I think the biosphere will die (clathrate release and nuclear meltdowns).