Moving Day

*

The staff at the Energy Bulletin has put together three stories today. The first one is the James Lovelock story in the Post that came out last weekend.

"Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean."

There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock says.

"Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover." ..Lovelock acknowledges the moral conundrum.

But he sees no we-are-the-world solutions. The heat waves that kill millions, the powerful typhoons, the droughts that suffocate cities, will force a retreat to nationalism... "

The next one is this story from The Observer

"The frozen bogs of Siberia are melting, and the thaw could have devastating consequences for the planet, scientists have discovered.

They have found that Arctic permafrost, which is starting to melt due to global warming, is releasing five times more methane gas than their calculations had predicted.

That level of emission is alarming because methane itself is a greenhouse gas. Increased amounts will therefore accelerate warming, cause more melting of Siberian bogs and Arctic wasteland, and so release even more.

'It's a slow-motion time bomb,' said climate expert Professor Ted Schuur, of the University of Florida."

And then there is this story from The New Scientist:

"Katey Walter at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and her colleagues developed a new technique to measure the amount of methane bubbling out of two lakes in northern Siberia.

In autumn, when the lakes froze over, they identified regions where methane was being released by searching for gas bubbles pushing through the ice. They then placed umbrella-shaped bubble traps over the hotspots and measured emissions daily for one year.

At both lakes, the gas flux was five times as high as previously estimated. Walter's team also got similar figures from smaller studies on more than 100 other lakes in the region (Nature, vol 443, p 71)"

I don't how anyone can read these stories and not be moved.

But I'm sure every one of us will find a way.

You see, its just too hard to comprehend this.

We really can't imagine that we have "screwed the pooch" this bad.

We just want to go on with our lives.

We just want to keep paying the bills.

We just want to get our kids through school.

So they can be what?

Overcome by a tsunami of woes?

We are lying to ourselves and to our children.

All of the politics, all of the worry about the road to 9/11

is dandruff on a carcinoma.

If we don't take climate change and resource depletion seriously,

the Fascist will prevail, no matter what party wins.

Unless we all are planning on moving to the North Pole in 20 years,

Perhaps we should get moving down the river on this.

Today


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*George Caleb Bingham (1811-79) "Raftsmen Playing Cards,"