Bush talks about global warming as if it is something that may or may not happen sometime in the distant future so there is no need to address it now. My local newsman says the current heat wave is not evidence of global warming today, just summertime. Well, evidence shows that global warming TODAY impacts not just our surface land, air, water and climate, but also the very crust of our earth, and thus seismic activity of earthquakes and volcanoes. And, thanks to humans killing the woolly mammoth 10,000 years ago, TODAY is woolly payback time which will hasten global warming.
The big picture is that there are 2 primary ice sheets which influence world weather, the Greenland and Antarctica. If all of the Greenland ice sheet — which is 2 miles thick and around the size of Mexico — thawed, the meltwater would increase sea level by 21 feet. By the end of the century, many of the world’s largest coastal cities (Bangkok, London, Miami and New York) where a billion people live, may be wiped out by high floods. However, glacier meltwater will affect more than 100 million people when there is only a 3-foot increase in sea level. And, the impact of rising sea levels is not just flooding: It also causes higher tides that generate more powerful storm surges and alter ocean currents, which then affect the global climate.
* TODAY, Greenland’s glaciers are “melting twice as fast as they were five years ago” and Antarctica’s ice sheets are shrinking. This means that the melting process has coincidentally worsened during Bush’s administration. TODAY, glaciers in Alaska, Switzerland, Norway and around the world are melting. TODAY, “beaches, islands and even continents are shrinking as ocean levels rise ever higher due to the accelerating meltdown of the world’s glaciers and polar ice due to climate change.” TODAY, rising sea levels are a present danger causing “unprecedented tidal flooding” forcing thousands of people to evacuate, arable land is now contaminated by salt and beaches washed away.
TODAY, storm surges produce record-breaking flooding, eroding shorelines and “moving the coastline inland as much as 12 metres per storm.” Katrina caused an 8-metre surge that killed 1,400 people and caused 200 billion dollars of damages.
* TODAY, the 500 million people living in desert cities — from Phoenix to the Middle East — will find life unbearable as the usually high temperatures now soar even higher, available water supply is depleted or becomes salty and undrinkable because climate change today has a greater impact on desert regions related to decreased rainfall.
* Hot temperatures TODAY are transforming arable and habitable land into deserts, known as the process of “creeping desertification.” While man has contributed to desertification, increased temperatures increase evaporation and dust storms, which expand the land size of deserts. The problems related to increased heat and decreased rainfall are exacerbated because the melting glaciers remove a water source needed to sustain life in deserts. In southwestern US, and many parts of the world, farming is sustained from water supplied by rivers flowing down from snow-covered mountains. Creeping desertification affects every 5th person in the world and may, by 2020 force 60 million people to relocate to Europe from Africa. Global desertification “directly affects the lives of more than 250 million people and threatens another 1.2 billion in 110 countries.”
* TODAY, the world’s tropical zones have widened by 140 miles since 1979 in a global warming movement that is occurring over both hemispheres. The land areas just outside the tropic — which includes “China, North India, the Middle East, North Africa, Florida and the US Gulf Coast, and through Australia, Southern Africa and Argentina – are warming particularly fast.” Scientists believe this tropical shift may explain the recent droughts in Europe and the southwestern US.
* TODAY, “global warming accounted for around half of the extra hurricane-fueling warmth in the waters of the tropical North Atlantic in 2005, while natural cycles were only a minor factor.” In other words, Bush’s failure to acknowledge and address the human component of global warming is partially responsible for Americans who are victimized by extreme weather hurricanes.
* Global warming is changing the earth’s crust, which will cause more earthquakes and volcanoes. Think about that. Global warming affects not just air and water and land surface but the crust of the earth. When the glaciers “melt and the water runs off, it is literally a weight off Earth’s crust. The crust and mantle therefore bounce back, immediately as well as over thousands of years.” That bounce back or “isostatic rebound” can “make the planet’s seismic plates slip catastrophically, and cause magma chambers that feed volcanoes to act like bottles of shaken seltzer.” In other words, the melting glaciers add mass on top of the oceanic plates which destablizes the planet’s crust. History shows that retreating ice sheets 10,000 years ago caused a surge in volcanic eruptions around the world, including California, and triggered a wave of powerful earthquakes. Moreover, these isostatic rebounds continue “for thousands of years” and may still be contributing to quakes TODAY.
There is also evidence of earthquake activity TODAY from melting glaciers:
“In southwest Alaska, where the Pacific plate thrusts under the continental plate, the immense mass of glacial ice counters the tendency of the plates to slip catastrophically. As global warming melts the glaciers, however, the ice load is diminishing. As a result, Earth is springing back there, too, removing the check on seismic activity. The magnitude 7.2 temblor that shook the area in 1979 is linked to a bounce-back of the crust, conclude geoscientists Jeanne Sauber of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Bruce Molina of the U.S. Geological Survey….Alaska isn’t the only place where glacial retreat due to the current warming coincides with active faults. It does so in the Andes, the Swiss Alps, the New Zealand southern Alps, the Rocky Mountains, the Himalayas and the edges of Greenland (where scientists recently reported that the melting of the ice sheet has accelerated).”
What is Bush’s response, other than ignoring and lying about reality? Bush is canning satellites because they provide additional evidence to prove global warming or that Bush is wrong. However, canning the satellites also means that scientists will lose a key tool to predict climate disasters — such as droughts, floods and hurricanes — which will now occur more often and be more severe due to global warming. Eliminating the evidence used to predict disasters will then permit Bush to parse words after the next disaster, saying that no one could have predicted such a disaster.
What does all of this have to do with the woolly mammoth referenced in the title? IT will soon get hotter because “ancient woolly mammoth bones and grasslands locked in the Siberian permafrost are starting to thaw and could potentially unleash billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming, a team of Russian and American scientists has concluded.” While some today disagree, biologists often point the finger at people causing the extinction of the woolly mammoth by over-hunting. Or, in words that Bush may understand: You reap what you sow or isn’t payback a bitch. Humans were stupid 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age when they killed off the woolly and now it is time for woolly CO payback to hasten global warming. One can only imagine the gravity of the payback to come from all that Bush sows now.
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