We are in trouble. As I watched Rachel reading a list of previous "unbelievable" episodes of people going postal I wondered what about all the episodes of road rage that don't get counted because they aren't gun crimes and nobody famous got killed and the body count is smaller.
When I was a kid we may have had soldiers and teenagers committing suicide in record numbers, domestic abuse skyrocketing, home invasions, carjackings, kidnapping, torture, murder, assassinations, rape and violence, at epidemic levels but we certainly didn't hear of it.
Our doomsday scenario was nuclear holocaust, kids were taught to take cover under their desks and do it yourselfer's built bomb shelters in the backyard.
Too many people doing too many things in too small a geographical area can have Malthusian consequences. As the 24/7 coverage of Gabby begins to taper off and go back to the really important things like how much market share the iphone is going to keep and people like Jon Stewart still have hope and encourage us to look for the good that's out there somewhere, I wonder if the real problem is most of us are just happier not knowing what is coming down.
My personal perspective tends to be more along the lines that our planet is infected with a parasitic species which like a fungus is expanding to fill all the available niches and crowd out every form of life.
We recognize what we are seeing if its starfish on the barrier reef or Carp making their way into the Great Lakes, or Republican special interests taking over the House and attempting to castrate the EPA, but somehow we are still missing the big picture.
If and when I see Republicans and somebody on Fox other than Shepard Smith start talking about Pine Island Glacier and somebody somewhere evaluating how we are doing on some basis that recognizes money, jobs and the economy are not incompatible with mediating climate change and ceasing to fight resource wars, I will have more hope that Jon is right.
The future of Pine Island Glacier
Pine Island Glacier is a giant, an outlet glacier draining about 160,000 km2 of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. It is the focus of intense current concern because the area near its grounding line, where it feeds a floating ice shelf, has exhibited rapidly increasing rates of thinning and concurrent retreat of the grounding line. With its neighbours along the coast of the Amundsen Sea, it is now contributing something like 0.15 to 0.30 mm per year to a total rate of sea-level rise of about 2.5 to 3.2 mm/yr.
Twenty years ago the IPCC was projecting sea level rise at 1 mm/yr so the if the rate of increase continues to increase at an increasing rate by the time the next report comes out in 2014 projections may be at 5mm/yr.
It is natural to be rattled by these observations. There is no immediately obvious reason why the rate of ice loss should not continue to increase. Indeed, the recent observations might presage even faster acceleration, perhaps involving the discharge of a substantial fraction of the 1500 mm of sea-level equivalent still stored in Pine Island Glacier and its neighbours. And we have a serious enough problem even if Pine Island Glacier simply maintains its present rate of loss.
15 m of sea level equivalent in a condition which some say is most closely modeled by the cork exploding out of a champagne bottle.
Knowing what they know and what they don’t know, "alarmist" is therefore not a label about which glaciologists need to be embarrassed. But they also know that alarmist projections have a way of turning out to be exaggerated.
I'd love to see us talking about climate change and how to get out of Afghanistan or how to get alternative energy out of the prototype stage before gas prices get back up to $5/gallon instead of how to prevent our rhetoric from translating into gunfire, but that is just one of many changes that have snuck up on us while we were staring at a monitor and typing away instead of actually doing something.