Hooray, the Arctic is melting! Say WHAT?
By Thomas Gaulkin, Raymond Pierrehumbert | June 25, 2019
It’s officially summer. Time for a swim, a cold beer, and a new slew of catastrophic climate changes…
- Temperatures in Greenland were 40 degrees above normal in June, causing 2 billion tons of ice to melt away in a single day. That’s the equivalent of 800,000 Olympic swimming pools.
- Scientists observed that the Arctic permafrost has begun to thaw a full 70 years before they expected it to—indicating the climate is warmer than it has been in at least 5,000 years—and potentially unearthing vast quantities of greenhouse gases trapped underground.
- Arctic sea ice coverage neared record lows this spring. Loss of arctic ice threatens plant and animal life, indigenous communities, and leads to extreme weather in other parts of the world.
It’s all alarming. But to officials in the Trump administration, it represents just another golden opportunity to profit. In April, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke to the Arctic Council—that’s the governmental group that gathers countries with territory in the Arctic region and indigenous peoples to cooperate on “issues of sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic.” Pompeo didn’t seem concerned about sticking to the council’s formal mission statement; he could barely contain his excitement about the new waterways and resources opening up due to the accelerating sea ice melt.
“The Secretary is looking at this with blinders on,” says Ray Pierrehumbert, Halley Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and lead author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report. For the latest installment of Say WHAT?—the Bulletin’s video series that casts a wry eye at wrongheaded policy—we watched the Arctic Council speech with Pierrehumbert and captured his reaction to some of Pompeo’s most flabbergasting statements.
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Topics: Climate Change, Multimedia, Say What?
Thomas Gaulkin
Thomas Gaulkin is multimedia editor at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Prior to joining the Bulletin in 2018, he spent the... Read More
Raymond Pierrehumbert
Former Bulletin Science and Security Board member Pierrehumbert is Halley Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. He was a lead... Read More
More of the shock doctrine (as defined by Naomi Klein).
The current condition of the Arctic is like watching someone who is sick & weak, that is badly needing help
That is not the time to be exploited!
The severity of the whole situation will probably take some people far too long to catch on …or maybe they simply just do not care!
This article states it’s as warm as it was in at least 5000 years. So what exactly was making the arctic “sick and weak” 5000 years ago?
Unlike today, it was due to natural forces:
“In summary, the mid-Holocene, roughly 6,000 years ago, was generally warmer than today during summer in the Northern Hemisphere. In some locations, this could be true for winter as well. Moreover, we clearly know the cause of this natural warming, and we know without doubt that this proven “astronomical” climate forcing mechanism cannot be responsible for the warming over the last 100 years.”
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming/mid-holocene-warm-period
The question is: Is it too late to fix it?
Please save the Arctic and stop everything that is causing the ice to melt so quickly because we need the ice for the polar bears in the North and the Penguins in the south as well as any other Arctic or Antarctic animal because we are not going to allow sea level rise.
Pathological greed drives creatures like mouthpiece Pompeo.
what about the large amounts of methane trapped in glacial ice? will that not kill us all when the ice melts and is released into the atmosphere, contributing further to global warming?
That will bring about abrupt global warming…then self-absorbed, V8-driving, meat gobblers can kiss their lives of excess luxury goodbye.
And the American people do nothing. COWARDS!!!