Jakobshavn Glacier, Greenland NASA creative commons
The title quote comes from climate scientist, glaciologist and kossack
Dr. Jason Box from the new
Rolling Stone piece
Greenland's Melting Ice Sheets: Climate Change's Disastrous Effects. In this excellent article
Jeff Goodell interviews Jason Box about his unorthodox methods and how he is trying to shake up the scientific community to get them to deal with climate change in a more urgent and responsive manner.
A few weeks ago, on a blue-sky day on the west coast of Greenland, our helicopter swooped along the calving front of the Jakobshavn glacier, flying dangerously close to a 400-foot-high wall of ancient melting ice that stretches for about six miles across Disko Bay. Jakobshavn is the fastest-moving glacier in the world, and it is sliding into the sea at a top speed of 170 feet a day. How quickly this giant slab of ice and snow – and hundreds like it across the North and South Poles – disappears is the biggest uncertainty in the world of climate science. The faster these glaciers melt, the faster seas will rise, inundating cities throughout the world, and the more unpredictable the world’s weather system is likely to become. Our future is written in ice.
Welcome to the epicenter of global warming
Last summer, Box was in a New York airport on his way to Greenland when he saw the first video images of the massive wildfires in Colorado. “It’s a strange feeling, watching your home state burn on TV,” says Box. But it gave him an idea. “Jason called me and said, ‘Do you think soot from wildfires might be affecting ice melt in Greenland?’ ” recalls NASA’s Painter. “I told him that I didn’t know if soot particles were landing there, but it was certainly conceivable, given the circulatory patterns of the Earth’s atmosphere.” A few weeks later, the case for this grew stronger when Box was scanning laser satellite images of Greenland and discovered a cloud of smoke – possibly drifting soot from a wildfire – over the ice.
[...]
The idea that soot can have a powerful effect on the melt rate of snow and ice is not new. The godfather of global-warming science, James Hansen, explored the idea in a paper published in 2003, arguing that if soot reduced the reflectivity of Arctic ice by just two percent, it had the same effect on the melt rate of the glacier as a doubling of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. What is new is Box’s attempt to link last summer’s Colorado and Canadian wildfires directly with the 2012 meltdown in Greenland – to make a direct connection between a particular fire and a particular melting event.
This is not news to us here at Daily Kos as I have been
writing about the short-lived climate pollutants including black carbon (soot) for several years. It's good to know that the scientific community is catching up with us. The importance of the
"Dark Snow Project" is that we now have the technology to determine exactly where in the world soot on Greenland is coming from and can target reductions based on that information. So the research that Dr. Box and his team gathers is vital to determining the solutions to mitigating a near term solution to climate change.
Dr. Jason Box talking about "Dark Snow Project" the first crowd-sourced scientific research to mitigate climate change
Back to the title of this piece and to the question of what does Dr. Box intend to do with two and a half million dollars? According to the article Dr. Box has a dream of forming a Climate Delta Force, funded by philanthropists, which could be dispatched to study climate catastrophes in real time.
Want to save the world? Any takers? Visit the Dark Snow Project here.