This is a note I just wrote to a teenaged Conservative Republican who is our neighbor and said I definitely do believe that action should be taken to mitigate the effects of global warming through a political consensus of conservatives, libertarians, and liberals in order to solve this problem over the course of the next century. So I said - I wish we had 100 years. We need to act now. In fact it may be too late, but we must do what we can. We are on the verge of creating an extinction event that will eliminate almost all life on the Planet as surely as the extinction at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago. It took 100 million years for the planet to recover from that warming event. This is not a political issue, it is a matter of survival of the human species. Here is the problem. Because the ice sheet covering the Arctic is reduced by 75% from the 1970s due to CO2 in the atmosphere, and is going to be gone entirely in a few years, the shallow Arctic ocean is warming swiftly. skepticalscience/feb-2013-sea-ice-spiral.html This means that the ocean is more turbulent since there is no ice cover to keep it still. This roils the bottom and transfers heat to the ocean floor. It also means that the albedo or reflectivity of the ice is gone, and that the 90% of heat that used to be redirected back into space is now being captured by the dark surface of the Arctic Ocean. So we have a warmer, lighter and more turbulent Arctic sea than ever before in at least millions of years, since long before humans existed. The additional heating in the oceans of the World is not trivial. It is indeed equal to 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs every second of additional heat and it is going on day and night on whatever part of the Planet is facing the Sun. The Arctic faces the Sun 23 hours per day all summer and it is warming faster by far than anywhere else on Earth. This means the permafrost layer on the bottom of the Arctic ocean (and other oceans as well) is melting. But that is just the smallest piece of the problem. Even bigger is the release of methane clathrates in massive chimneys of methane at unprecedented levels, such as to heat the planet by tens of degrees Centigrade and to obliterate first all ice anywhere and eventually all life on land and most life in the oceans. planetextinction/planet_extinction_clathrates.htm This is now predicted to possibly occur in your lifetime. This new information is in addition to the news just a few years ago that the methane captured for millennia in the peat bogs and permafrost of Siberia and Alaska and Northern Canada is being released at an unprecedented rate. Methane is 24 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. To say we are doomed is not an understatement. I know you are bright and can understand this. That is why I am taking the time to give you all this information. My grandfather, who raised me, was a Republican US Congressman for three terms. At a certain point in my life I had to reevaluate my world view based on what I was able to learn from my colleagues at Cornell and Berkeley, and I had to chuck out my Grandfathers agenda. Please do the research and think for yourself, but think like a scientist, not like a political operative working for someone elses agenda. If you come around on these issues and can begin to think for yourself I can direct you to groups here in Central Florida where you can find other people your age who are thinking deeply and acting responsibly toward the Planet with a perspective of decades or centuries, not just with the next election in mind. Think about it.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 17:03:53 +0000
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