Climate Change

It has snowed twice this week in Seattle. Snowed. Twice. When I was growing up here, this wouldn't have been that big of a deal, but in the intervening 20-odd years, Global Warming has kicked our climate in the nuts hard enough that a few snow flurries in the dead of winter is pretty much all we can expect. I'm frightened. We could be on the verge of the oceans reaching a critical desalinization point and ushering in the second ice age. OK, probably not. It is probably more like Two Days Before The Day After Tomorrow. We'll probably not be entombed in an icy wasteland by Superstorm Ice Hurricanes. But shit is going down in Antartica.

On Tuesday, it was discovered that the Wilkins Ice Shelf had begun to disintegrate. Well, at least Global Warming isn't real, right? I mean, it would really suck if our nation's leaders have been up there for the past, hrm, 8 years going on about how "Climate Change" is not scientific fact and we should wait until there's a consensus on the issue within the scientific community before altering policy that would have a detrimental effect on the economy, etc., etc.

Well guess what? It does suck like that. Far from being informed and honest about Global Warming, the Bush Administration has been either criminally dishonest, or criminally ignorant about the way science works. And common sense, for that matter, because common sense is really all that is required to understand what is happening with the melting of the ice caps.

The point at which the polar ice caps end is essentially just the equilibrium point between two forces acting in opposite directions: the freezing of the pole during winter and the melting of the pole during summer. Not that complicated when it really comes down to it, one season is entirely devoid of the warmth of the sun, the other comprised of nothing but. So much heat (A) during summer plus so much cold during winter (B) equals how much ice will survive through each summer and accumulate to become an ice shelf (C). A + B = C, where B is a negative number. The scientifically inclined will no doubt realize that this is a gross simplification, and that those variables are not even in the same units. But that's basically how it works.

This is a process that aggregates over thousands of years. The ice we're talking about is hundreds of meters thick, accumulated and compacted from thousands and thousands of feet of snow that fell on the mainland thousands of years ago. Some conservatives opine that the ice is so massive that a couple degrees difference one way or the other could not possibly affect it. Well, if you really think that you are either A. fucking retarded, or B. somewhat ignorant on the issue but will stop thinking that the second you become informed. I'm guessing that if you consider yourself conservative, vote republican, and maintain that "Climate Change" is the proper term rather than Global Warming, then you belong to group A and can just go fuck yourself.

Now that I've insulted the intelligence of conservatives everywhere, let's just go ahead and look at the proof of this. In 2002, the B-section of the Larson Ice shelf disintegrated. In THREE WEEKS. A hunk of ice shelf the size of Rhode Island and over 200 meters thick which had been stable during the entire period since the last ice age 12,000 years ago just up and crumbled away. Warming ocean currents under it had been eroding its underside, this was known beforehand. What was a surprise was way in which surface pools of meltwater were driving down through the shelf acting like huge wedges. A 100 meter column of water creates rather significant outward pressure.

So now, the Wilkins shelf has begun a similar process, and may disintegrate entirely during next summer. As a singular event, this is not a crisis, a fact upon which Idiotic Conservatives and other asshats love to focus. But its a canary in a mine. Polar ice melt is a process dramatically more sensitive to temperature trends than human memory. So if I'm sitting here in Seattle, occasionally waxing nostalgic about the colder winters of my youth, what the fuck would the ice caps be thinking? ...you know, if they were conscious and could think and whatnot. Something tells me it would be loud, filled with cursing of the human race, and very, very sad.

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