Watch The Ice Shelves - 4

[photo missing here is the caption: "What was the real danger then and still is now? When a nation is invaded by an exterior force, there are areas which tend to be invaded first."]

That is also true when our civilization invades the natural global climate system by damaging it with pollution; it inevitably turns on us (The Damaged Global Climate System, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

Concerning the reaction to our attack on it, one subsystem which we call "the Cryosphere" (the realm of ice) in the polar regions, in effect is automatically turned against us in response the growing anthropogenic warming.

This warming, of course, causes the ice there to melt, which in general ends up being a counter-invasion (Greenland & Antarctica Invade The United States, 2, 3, 4).

So, in this series I have been pointing out that the first wave of the counter-invasion will be caused by the impact on the ice shelves (Watch The Ice Shelves, 2, 3).

The ice shelves are robust impediments to the ice sheets' ability to freely flow into the oceans unabated.

But, once those ice shelves are weakened during attacks by warmer waters and warmer winds, they will melt to the point of becoming structurally unsound.

Eventually, in addition to melting, they will also break up into icebergs which will float away to later melt elsewhere.

The main invasion damage then abruptly takes place, which is that the ice sheets will then accelerate their invasive flow into the oceans.

That will continually accelerate rising sea levels, which is the main wave of the natural counter invasion to our damage we have done to the global climate system  (Why Sea Level Rise May Be The Greatest Threat To Civilization, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Typically, there are no class preferences to such invasions, which tends to be equal-opportunity destruction taking place first in coastal regions (The 1% May Face The Wrath of Sea Level Rise First).

There are no military means which can resist such an invasion (Why The Military Can't Defend Against The Invasion).

We do see cognitive "defenses" developing, however, (as a response to the global climate system's counter-invasion) such as the spread of mass denial:

"In 1973, Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist cross-trained in philosophy, sociology, and psychiatry, invoked consciousness of self and the inevitability of death as the primary sources of human anxiety and repression. He proposed that the psychological basis of cooperation, competition, and emotional and mental health is a tendency to hold tightly to anxiety-buffering cultural world views or "immortality projects" that serve as the basis for self-esteem and meaning. Although he focused mainly on social and political outcomes like war, torture, and genocide, he was increasingly aware that materialism, denial of nature, and immortality-striving efforts to control, rather than sanctify, the natural world were problems whose severity was increasing. In this paper I review Becker's ideas and suggest ways in which they illuminate human response to global climate change. Because immortality projects range from belief in technology and materialism to reverence for nature or belief in a celestial god, they act both as barriers to and facilitators of sustainable practices. I propose that Becker’s cross-disciplinary "science of man," and the predictions it generates for proximate-level determinants of social behavior, add significantly to our understanding of and potential for managing the people paradox, i.e., that the very things that bring us symbolic immortality often conflict with our prospects for survival. Analysis of immortality projects as one of the proximate barriers to addressing climate change is both cautionary and hopeful, providing insights that should be included in the cross-disciplinary quest to uncover new pathways toward rational, social change."

(Dickinson, J. L. 2009). This type of response to a counter-invasion is ill advised and ineffective, according to military and psychology experts (Will Elections Cure The Disease? - 3).

Ironically, our invasion against nature began with the belief that an industrial revolution was a savior of sorts, but that has ended up being the beginning of The 6th Mass Extinction, an extinction scenario that now includes human vertebrates (Vertebrate Extinction Began @ Industrial Revolution).

That development is Earth-shaking news in more ways than one (Climate change will shake the Earth, Waking The Sleeping Giant - by Professor McGuire).

BTW, Dr. McGuire's Waking The Sleeping Giant, made #5 on one journalist's top-10-best eco-books list:

5. Waking the Giant by Bill McGuire

Just out, and dreadfully alarming. Bill McGuire, a distinguished geologist and brilliant science writer, charts how changing climate may trigger not just wild weather but also volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis. Perhaps it already is. The last time that ice caps were melting and sea levels were rising, geology was in overdrive. Faults shuddered, magma melted and mayhem followed. As McGuire persuasively shows, it could be kicking off again. This is science so scary that even the climate scientists widely dismissed as alarmists do not dare speak of it.

(Fred Pierce's Top Ten). The increase in that type of earthquake has been covered by Dredd Blog for several years (Is A New Age Of Pressure Upon Us?, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).

If that is not enough evidence for you, also check out "The biggest threat to the world is still ourselves", also by Prof. McGuire, which reminds us that we are the alien aggressors who invaded the Earth' Global Climate System first.

The state of the global climate system's counter-invasion, as it turns out, is getting more and more dire, even as the denial does the same (When You Are Governed By Psychopaths - 6).

For example:

The Totten Glacier drains more ice than any other glacier in the EAIS and contains a volume of marine-based ice above flotation equivalent to at least 3.5 m [equivalent to ~11.5 ft.] of global sea-level rise.
...
Several approaches have been used to estimate basal melt rates at the Totten Glacier. Flux gate calculations using satellite data indicated steady-state net basal melt rates ... equivalent to area-average melt rates of 10.5 ± 0.7 and 9.89 ± 1.92 m year−1, respectively [9 - 10.5 m yr is equivalent to about 29 - 34 ft. of ice shelf height melting away each year].

(Totten Glacier Ice Shelf Melting, Science Advances, 12/16/2016). That would seem to be a clear signal for civilization to get with the program.

If nothing else, just to see just what our civilization and all the nations within it really are facing now.

Nevertheless, the U.S. government has seemingly gone from bad to worse on this issue (Trump Declares All-Out War on Environment).

This official denialism may very well further threaten the fate and future of scientists who are already under siege:

My Penn State colleagues looked with horror at the police tape across my office door.

I had been opening mail at my desk that afternoon in August 2010 when a dusting of white powder fell from the folds of a letter. I dropped the letter, held my breath and slipped out the door as swiftly as I could, shutting it behind me. First I went to the bathroom to scrub my hands. Then I called the police.

It turned out to be only cornstarch. And it was just one in a long series of threats I've received since the late 1990s, when my research illustrated the unprecedented nature of global warming, producing an upward-trending temperature

I've faced hostile investigations by politicians, demands for me to be fired from my job, threats against my life and even threats against my family. Those threats have diminished in recent years, as man-made climate change has become recognized as the overwhelming scientific consensus and as climate science has received the support of the federal government. But with the coming Trump administration, my colleagues and I are bracing for a renewed onslaught of intimidation, from inside and outside government. It would be bad for our work and bad for our planet.

(Scientific Freedom). Denial can be a deadly disease, yes, an extinction-event causing disease.

To conclude this episode with a surprise, this attitude of civilization is shocking --but typical of those civilizations that went down prior to ours (Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).

The previous post in this series is here.

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This is not fringe science that I am talking about ... - Dr. Rob Davies

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