New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 5

Government Dirty-Oil Policy

The original Dredd Blog post in this series, in 2009, was picked up on other blogs around the blogosphere, such as here.

In that post doubt was expressed about government's sincerity, and therefore ability, to effectively deal with the narrowing path, in the direction of Ecocide, in which world governments are taking their populations.

Sad to say, Dredd Blog cannot represent that things have changed for the better in the United States, and in fact, the opposite is the case.

Since that time elections have taken place wherein the House of Representatives was taken over by right-wing global warming deniers, while at the same time, serious discoveries have revealed an alarming acceleration of warming at the poles, even as McTell News covers the ongoing climate catastrophe less and less.

The Movie 2012 - Truth and Fiction

The movie "2012" is utterly unscientific, in terms of the science of the Sun and the Earth, however, it is quite accurate in terms of political science.

In that movie, the elites of the plutocracy (the 1%) saved themselves while letting the hoi polloi (99%) die off en masse.

Have you read about all the "undisclosed locations", "hardened sites", and "bunkers deep inside mountains", where the elites will go when trouble arises?

Scientific Models vs. Observation

While models that scientists have used to deal with polar warming have heretofore indicated that the poles were expected to warm faster than the rest of the planet, those models  have now been shown to have been in error about the degree of increase in the acceleration of the warming at the poles.

Thus, what long-time scientists now see happening is "astonishing" to those who are keeping an eye on the Earth's melting ice sheets at the poles:

Researchers completed a map of ice flow in Antarctica, and were somewhat surprised to find that ice flows like slow rivers from deep in the interior regions of the continent, not just at the coasts (Science Daily).

This is significant, because it means that because the ice is sliding or flowing toward the oceans, as ice falls off into the ocean and melts, more of the same will continue to happen because of the replenishing flow from the vast interior.

(Thin Ice). For decades it was oft repeated that the Eastern Ice Sheet of Antarctica would take centuries to melt, but that model was in error, as was the model for the Arctic methane:

It is an ugly, deadly addiction that requires extraordinary effort to resist, which our government is not taking seriously enough, and an extraordinary addiction that our government is not resisting well at all:

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region. The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years. In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the 8th joint US-Russia cruise of the East Siberian Arctic seas, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

(Independent, 12-13-11, emphasis added). Not only that, now methane has been discovered being released from cracks in the arctic ice:

The researchers found significant amounts of methane being released from the ocean into the atmosphere through cracks in the melting sea ice. They said the quantities could be large enough to affect the global climate. Previous observations have pointed to large methane plumes being released from the seabed in the relatively shallow sea off the northern coast of Siberia but the latest findings were made far away from land in the deep, open ocean where the surface is usually capped by ice.

Eric Kort of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that he and his colleagues were surprised to see methane levels rise so dramatically each time their research aircraft flew over cracks in the sea ice.

"When we flew over completely solid sea ice, we didn't see anything in terms of methane. But when we flew over areas were the sea ice had melted, or where there were cracks in the ice, we saw the methane levels increase," Dr Kort said. "We were surprised to see these enhanced methane levels at these high latitudes. Our observations really point to the ocean surface as the source, which was not what we had expected," he said.

"Other scientists had seen high concentrations of methane in the sea surface but nobody had expected to see it being released into the atmosphere in this way," he added.

(Independent, 4-23-12, emphasis added). Surprises are not very good sometimes, and this is one of those times.

(Deepwater Horizon). The words "dramatic and unprecedented" included along with "has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years" should shock governments out of their ecocidal dementia!

In closing, recently the following was said about the ongoing half-hearted government efforts:

But excellent as [removal of soot, methane, hydrofluorocarbons is], the world's soaring carbon dioxide emissions remain the elephant in the atmosphere. They are the single biggest contributor to rising temperatures, will remain in the atmosphere for 100 years, and unless drastic action is taken to mitigate them, costly and dangerous climate change will not be averted.

(The Economist). The ongoing denial and depression cause lethargy that will only exacerbate the underlying problem, which is hidden in plain sight.

The previous post in this series is here, the next post in this series is here.

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The following presentation was given at the Pentagon in November of 2010. It makes some of the same points and uses the same humorous examples that Dredd Blog had been using for years prior to the presentation. See if you can pick them out:

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