Editor's note: This disturbing report by a climate-change authority elicited this response at Culture Change: "Oh F_ _ _!" The subject matter here is also the basis of the new NBC/Discovery Channel television special report narrated by Tom Brokaw, "Global Warming: What You Need to Know." The difference between Brokaw's approach and the following report is that NBC says there is a centuries-long process, such that there is time to get our act together; whereas, Bates points out that sea level rise of several feet can happen in one season - a sudden, catastrophic change. This article is being printed in the next issue of The Permaculture Activist magazine, Fall 2006. - Jan Lundberg, July 16, 2006
Between the Ice and Ocean
In Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, there is an oft-quoted tale of the early Greenland settlers. For whatever religious or cultural reasons, they simply refused to adapt their European customs of food, habitation and land use to either the traditions of the well-adjusted and resourceful native populations or the necessities brought about by sudden climate change. Instead, they went extinct.
Ironically, the early Greenlanders went extinct because they could not tame their land to match their ways of living. They died and the ice prevailed. Today, it is the ice that is dying and the humans who are seeming to prevail. I say “seeming,” because the ice is not really going very far. It is becoming ocean. We might beat some ice. We won’t beat the ocean.
There is an unseen edge at the phase change that freshwater goes through on millennial timescales. Until now that edge hasn’t been particularly important to humans because it was invisible, and because its change was so, well, glacial. Both of those attributes are disappearing and our science is only just coming to grips with what that means. For the one billion humans and the many more wild creatures who inhabit coastal plains and shorelines, the importance of far-away ice, it seems, will be very significant indeed.
The Greenland ice sheet is two miles thick and about the expanse of Mexico. Deep in its core are memories of snowfalls a quarter million years ago, including the ice record of 20 sudden climate changes in the past 110,000 years. To say that Greenland holds the key to the climate of Europe is not an understatement. The freshwater resource entombed in Greenland’s snows, if loosed into the North Atlantic, could slow the deep ocean conveyor that regulates weather for much of the world.
The snows of Greenland have been compacted into ice so thick that its weight compresses the bedrock below, pushing it below sea level in some interior valleys. But that weight is now lifting.
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