Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Perfect Storm: New Global Ground Zero

Potential source for an Arctic Tsunami
Global warming induced climate change has caused and is causing changes to lifestyle around the globe.

This includes activities from extracting the pollution generating oil from under the Earth, to burning it and thereby releasing green house gases into the atmosphere.

When those green house gases then block release of heat back into space they thereby cause the heating up of the globe as more and more heat is trapped to disturb climate patterns in all nations.

The Dredd Blog System, for some time now, has mentioned that the flora and fauna are on the move:
Vegetation around the world is on the move, and climate change is the culprit, according to a new analysis of global vegetation shifts led by a University of California, Berkeley, ecologist in collaboration with researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

In a paper published June 7 in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, researchers present evidence that over the past century, vegetation has been gradually moving toward the poles and up mountain slopes, where temperatures are cooler, as well as toward the equator, where rainfall is greater.
(Ents & The Entities Become Nomadic). The same is now also true for the undersea creatures as it is for land inhabiting species:
Narsaq’s largest employer, a shrimp factory, closed a few years ago after the crustaceans fled north to cooler water. Where once there were eight commercial fishing vessels, there is now one.

As a result, the population here, one of southern Greenland’s major towns, has been halved to 1,500 in just a decade. Suicides are up.
(Greenland Changing Due To Warming). The phenomenon is developing at coastal areas of human civilization too:
Mann says the Pacific islands, which are only 4.6 metres above sea level at their highest point, are facing the imminent prospect of flooding, with salt water intrusion destroying fresh water supplies and increased erosion.

Suggesting evacuations would accelerate a change in public consciousness around the issue of climate change, he said: "Thousands of years of culture is at risk of disappearing as the populations of vulnerable island states have no place to go.

"For these people, current sea levels are already representative of dangerous anthropogenic interference because they will lose their world far before the rest of us suffer.

"I think it is an example, one of a number, where the impacts are playing out in real time. It is not an abstract prediction about the future or about far off exotic creatures like polar bears. We are talking about people potentially having to evacuate from places like Tvulu or the Arctic's Kivalina, another low lying island which is already feeling the detrimental impacts of sea level rise."
(Guardian). Perhaps that could also mean mass migrations caused by food and water scarcity:
The Persian Gulf, Libya, and Pakistan are at high risk of food insecurity in coming decades because climate change and ocean acidification are destroying fisheries, according to a report released on Monday.

The report from the campaign group Oceana warns of growing food insecurity, especially for poorer people, from the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic to the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, Eritrea, Guyana, Indonesia, Kuwait and Singapore.

Some of the countries at highest risk were in oil-rich – and politically volatile – regions.

"The Persian Gulf is actually expected to be one of the hardest-hit regions. In terms of fish catch they are supposed to lose over 50% of their fisheries," said Matt Huelsenbeck, an Oceana marine scientist and author of the report.

The report put Iran, Libya, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates among the top 10 countries most at risk because of the decline in fish stocks due to climate change.
(Food Scarcity Mid-East, emphasis added). There are new dangers from volatile conditions also beginning to appear, from permafrost melt to undersea tsunami events:
Another important question is how all this methane gas affects the stability of the seafloor. When methane hydrates warm up and release methane gas, the gas takes up much more space than the solid hydrate, putting pressure on the surrounding sediments. Similarly, the decomposition of either methane hydrate or permafrost can reduce the mechanical strength of the surrounding sediment. Either process could make the seafloor more susceptible to submarine landslides.

Undersea landslides are common along the continental slope of the Beaufort Sea, but researchers do not yet know when or how they form. However, decomposing methane hydrates are believed to have triggered major landslides in other deep-sea areas. Such landslides could potentially destabilize oil platforms, pipelines, or other equipment on the seafloor, and have the potential to generate tsunamis.
(Tsunami / Hydrate Release / Methane, emphasis added). Another team that has been researching the Arctic for decades had some stern observations too:
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.
(New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 5) One has to wonder sometimes why the 18th Century mentality that is running all things mythical believes this is the economical way to do things:
More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday.
...
It calculated that five million deaths occur each year from air pollution, hunger and disease as a result of climate change and carbon-intensive economies, and that toll would likely rise to six million a year by 2030 if current patterns of fossil fuel use continue.
(Reuters, emphasis added). The equivalent of one holocaust dying each year now is not something to procrastinate about any longer, this is about the end of civilization as we know it.

It appears that the human species on this planet is not the brightest bulb in the celestial chandelier.

1 comment:

  1. "One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic." -Joseph Stalin

    ReplyDelete