Tag Archives: icebergs

The Lodgepole Pine Moment of Addressing Climate Breakdown

So a chunk of floating ice separated from Greenland last week. The ice cube is bigger than Manhattan.

No big deal, it seems. How many people sold their cars because of that, or the BP negligent disaster, or the Endbridge pipeline leak.

I don’t know how many times an Antarctic ice shelf breaks off a piece or which of the last few years the Beaufort Sea ice melted in the summer or if Greenland will send another iceberg into the Titanic shipping lanes. Are they watershed moments sufficient to cause change? Not really.

I think about forest fire season and constantly go back to the symbolism of the lodgepole pine. Its pine cones need tremendous heat to release the seeds. Before we tried to domesticate our forests and before climate change gave the pine beetle complete license to kill, forests burned about ever 200 years. Good for the lodgepole pine.

But now, what kind of intense heat will wake enough of us up to drastically alter our lives to change everything we do to avert climate breakdown?

Our society is the Titanic, too arrogant to care about mere ice bergs, even ones bitter than Manhattan. What will it take for us to take a reality check and change our ways?

2010 Already Beats 2007 in Arctic Sea Ice Melt

Working from the premise that we [the collaborative society of humans] aren’t actually too stupid to avert climate breakdown, let’s look at the new bad news on Arctic Ocean sea ice melt.

This year’s sea ice meltdown is well ahead of 2007 in loss of both area and thickness. The ice is failing at a record pace, in part, because it is at a record low thickness for the date. This ice is thinning at a record rate because of warm air temperatures above and because of melting from below.

via Daily Kos: Arctic Sea Ice Meltdown Accelerates: DK Greenroots.

See http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2010/060810.html

Here’s what I get from this graph:

  • 30 years of general decline
  • 2007 really sucked
  • 2010 looks like it will be far worse than 2007 and it’s only early July
  • Anomalous  years affect the line of best fit and normalize outlier behaviour

What does this mean? Continue reading 2010 Already Beats 2007 in Arctic Sea Ice Melt