http://counterpunch.com/rhames05082009.htmlGive Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Flotation Devices
It was a beautiful early summer day in May. I joined a few boardmembers from our local land trust as we car-pooled to Brunswick for Maine’s annual land conservation conference. We disappeared into the bowels of the large high school for a day of presentations, workshops, and “networking.”
-snip-
The last workshop series offered various topics including, “The Land Conservation Response to Climate Change: Adaptation Strategies.” The small group attending heard Andrew Whitman of the Manomet Center discuss the recent (un-newsworthy) University of Maine climate report. But Mr. Whitman signaled that he might know more than he was letting on, especially with his repeated references to the “five stages of grief.” This so-called “Kubler-Ross” syndrome describing personal adaptation to “terminal illness or catastrophic loss” punctuated the talk as Whitman gently acknowledged that there appeared to be no going back to the familiar climate regime underwriting the development of human society.
Beyond tacit expressions of personal grief, there were no alarms, no stark warning of cataclysms to come. Yet, based on the emphatic, though largely unreported urgings of NASA’s James Hansen and the increasingly unnerving wave of new evidence showing climate events rapidly outpacing earlier predictions, I wondered aloud whether a less moderate presentation might be warranted. After all, trust organizations are chartered, in part, as having an educational mission. And if things were getting as dire as Hansen and others who understood the primary science were lamenting, shouldn’t we be talking openly about that?
-snip-
Ward, who toiled for decades inside major national enviro outfits, told me today that he was booked at Tufts University to give a short talk --- the usual Power Point deal --- as part of a panel on climate change. But, he said, “I’ve been giving 20 minute talks for 20 years,” to little effect. Driven by the emerging bad news, he chucked the canned presentation and offered a bracing and candid appraisal.
He spoke the unspeakable, telling the assembled, “I am essentially saying what everybody really kinda knows (or many people kinda know). But we have no way of saying that in public because our leadership, and our organizations, and our structure is based on raising money and being “positive" and optimistic. And we have a whole set of polls going back 20 years that say if we tell people the truth it will bum them out. So we don't tell the truth. So as a result nobody knows what's going on and we're f**ked.”
-snip-
University of South Florida academic Martin Schonfeld describes the increasingly unstable ice sheet regime as “poised to lurch.” He notes the cascading sea level-rise (SLR) effects of melting the main planetary ice sheets: “West Antarctica = 19ft SLR, Greenland = 24ft SLR, East Antarctica = 170ft SLR.”
Losing all three ice shields, Schonfeld calculates, takes the oceans up 213 feet: “Think Statue of Liberty up to her neck in water.”
Can we talk?
---------------------------
Obama seems to be taking baby steps instead of the giant steps that is needed.
if the truth told to the people of the world freaks them out, so be it. they will ajust or not. it has to be done.
it is too late to stop climate change, now all we can do is survive it or not.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
