Impending cataclysm for all of us in 10 years
Nope, not kidding. Cataclysm of Biblical proportions here. Here’s the info from CNET:
We have 10 years, folks. And then it’s man the lifeboats, or head for the hills. That’s the conclusion of James Hansen and five other scientists. They’ve just published a paper with the Royal Society in England. It says melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic could soon reach a point of no return. The team even says the recent reports from the United Nations’ global warming conferences are too conservative in their projections of what could happen. Source: Possible cataclysm due to melting ice | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
I’m not going to get into why I think this is true, or what I think can be done, I want to look at why we reach a point of no return.
The reason is that temperature is only part of the picture for ice melt. Once the ice starts melting the ice front begins weakening and more ocean water gets in. It’s like when you start pushing something downhill, it takes a good bit of effort to get it going, but once it is going, it takes more effort to stop it. The more ice that falls the more surface area exposed, which begins to melt faster …
The scary thing is if (when?) the Ross Ice Shelf, which is grounded below sea level, loses its protective barrier..imagine dropping a large ice cube from about a foot high into a full glass of pop.
So … let’s start to take this seriously, eh?
June 28th, 2007 at 9:22 am
[…] week I talked about how we could be looking at a disaster of Biblical proportions (think Noah) if some of the major ice shee…, now comes word that the largest of the world’s ice sheets, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, is […]