State of the Climate – It’s Alarming!
Photo by Akuppa John Wigham | CC BY 2.0
Stuart Scott of Climate Matters.TV recently interviewed Dr. Peter Wadhams, emeritus professor, Polar Ocean Physics, Cambridge University and author of the acclaimed highly recommended: A Farewell To Ice (Oxford University Press, 2017).
In response to the question “what’s your assessment of the state of the climate,” Dr. Wadhams replied: “Well, first of all, what I see is an acceleration of global warming because, for instance, the rate of rise of CO2 in the atmosphere is unprecedented. Not only are we not reducing emissions to the point where CO2 is stabilized, but the CO2 level is rising exponentially; it’s going faster than its ever gone before… and then there’s [sic] the extreme weather events, which certainly have hit people in Europe….”
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”) concern about CO2 is decisive: “Today’s rate of increase is more than 100 times faster than the increase that occurred when the last ice age ended.” One hundred times anything is big.
That is an unprecedented rate of growth with profound and nasty negative consequences for temperature, climate, ecosystems, and species on land and in the oceans, nothing good. In fact, it could unexpectedly turn ugly to an extreme; a dour fact few people want to face. Further to that point, nobody believes the worst case, but that’s why society is always blindsided by catastrophes.
Significantly, and extremely important for the optics of climate change, the commencement/start of disastrous climate change happens where nobody lives (nobody sees it), for example, the Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland, Himalayan glaciers (headwaters for major rivers), Andes’s glaciers (headwaters for major rivers), the oceans, Patagonia. Nobody lives where climate change is most pronounced and clearly evident. Hence and therefore, it is difficult for people to accept, realize, and deal with the impending danger hidden away from society, until it is too late.
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