Melt With You

I don't want to be an alarmist here, but this whole global warming thing is getting out of hand. It seems that every week some new study is released detailing another frightening statistic or doomsday scenario. Today, for example, it was announced that Greenland's glaciers are dumping twice as much ice into the ocean as 5 years ago - meaning existing estimates of future sea level rise are all too low. The ice may be 2 miles thick, but 36 cubic miles of it is pouring into the Atlantic a year, compared with just 12 cubic miles 10 years ago.

Now, I recognize that the planet is a dynamic system and has undergone periodic shifts in temperatures and climates in the past. So this hardly represents the end of the world (except perhaps as we know it). Change is nothing new; life will go on and organisms will adapt. There's recent evidence (taken, coincidentally, from the very Greenland ice sheet which is now melting) that some of the past shifts happened far faster than anyone suspected: 100s of years instead of millennia. I'll even admit that there's a small twisted part of me that's fascinated by it all and curious to see how things will turn out. I mean, we could see some of the most dramatic climatological shifts of human history - the sort that helped shape human evolution in the first place. Isn't that kinda neat? And we might bear witness to the sort of mass extinction we can otherwise only infer from the fossil record.

What freaks me the hell out about all this, however, is the likelihood that this is all happening as a fairly direct result of human activity; that the train has already left the station and has enough momentum to continue even if we began applying the brakes now; and that it'll happen so rapidly as to cause chaos of both the social as well as environmental sort - shifting crop zones, extensive droughts, flooded cities, migrating populations, emergent diseases. Plus, there's the tragedy of losing what we know and love; it's depressing that someday soon we could have walruses and caribou only in zoos, beetles could destroy the evergreen forests of the Rockies, the Alps could be ice-free, and the coral reefs of the Caribbean and Pacific could be sterile and lifeless.

I'll really miss the polar bears.