Is it the day after tomorrow yet?
I was just browsing through some web sites and I ran into this in the UK guaridian. I think it’s particularily troubling that the is all happening faster than predicted by scientists in the 90’s.
A vast hunk of floating ice has broken away from the Antarctic peninsula, threatening the collapse of a much larger ice shelf behind it, in a development that has shocked climate scientists.
Satellite images show that about 160 square miles of the Wilkins ice shelf has been lost since the end of February, leaving the ice interior now “hanging by a thread”.
The collapsing shelf suggests that climate change could be forcing change much more quickly than scientists had predicted.
“The ice shelf is hanging by a thread,” said Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). “We’ll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be.”
The Wilkins shelf covers an area of 5,600 square miles (14,500 sq km). It is now protected by just a thin thread of ice between two islands.
Vaughan was a member of the team that predicted in 1993 that global warming could cause the Wilkins shelf to collapse within 30 years.
The article goes on to say:
“I didn’t expect to see things happen this quickly. We predicted it would happen, but it’s happened twice as fast as we predicted.”
The retreat of the shelf was first spotted from satellite data by Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado.
He alerted the BAS, which sent an aircraft to assess the extent of the damage.
Jim Elliott, who filmed part of the breakup, said: “It was awesome. We flew along the main crack and observed the sheer scale of movement from the breakage. Big chunks of ice, the size of small houses, look as though they’ve been thrown around like rubble — it’s like an explosion.”
The Antarctic peninsula, which stretches north from the frozen continent towards South America, has experienced unprecedented warming over the past 50 years.
What do you think, have we waited too long to begin to do anything, have we dragged our asses long enough to have reached the point of no return. If not now, when and how soon will that point be reached.
I wonder how bad it will have to get, how much will the earth have to rumble and shake before the human inhabitants take notice in a serious way. Oceans dying, droughts in one location, floods, winds, tornados in another.
Here is socal we are having unseasonably hot weather, in mid 90’s the other day. Officials are wondering how we will make it through the summer, will the grids and transformers hold up, will there be enough electicity to go around.
I am feeling pretty distressed about all of this, but there is a bright spot from none other than Dean Kamen, inventor of the “segway” and yeah the one you ride on, lol. I happened to watch Stephen colbert’s show the other day when his guest was Dean and he demonstrated this most wonderful machine, and I’m thinking places like Socal better start investigating this possibility, the machine can even use ocean water or any kind of horrible waste water and render it perfectly pure.
<a href="San Francisco – Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, is puzzling over a new equation these days. An estimated 1.1 billion people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 1.6 billion don’t have electricity. Those figures add up to a big problem for the world—and an equally big opportunity for entrepreneurs.
To solve the problem, he’s invented two devices, each about the size of a washing machine that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.
“Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water,” says Kamen. “The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don’t care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.”
So what do you folks think, should we be worried and should we be getting busy right now and start working on all these things. This machine of Dean’s is pretty uncomplicated to hear him describe it so it could easily be put into production all over the world and I’m sure be made bigger to provide water to cities or communities. This is the kind of thing we should be working on all over the world.
