I warn, this report may be shocking to those who don't closely follow the Climate Change issue. Many of us from the Climate movement community have been trying to sound the alarms and raise awareness, but the public's urgency to fight for our lives is not there yet.
http://www.slate.com/...
The study—written by James Hansen, NASA’s former lead climate scientist, and 16 co-authors, many of whom are considered among the top in their fields—concludes that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt 10 times faster than previous consensus estimates, resulting in sea level rise of at least 10 feet in as little as 50 years.
The study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, brings new importance to a feedback loop in the ocean near Antarctica that results in cooler freshwater from melting glaciers forcing warmer, saltier water underneath the ice sheets, speeding up the melting rate. Hansen, who is known for being alarmist and also right, acknowledges that his study implies change far beyond previous consensus estimates.
Hansen’s study does not attempt to predict the precise timing of the feedback loop, only that it is “likely” to occur this century. The implications are mindboggling: In the study’s likely scenario, New York City—and every other coastal city on the planet—may only have a few more decades of habitability left. That dire prediction, in Hansen’s view, requires “emergency cooperation among nations.”
"We conclude that continued high emissions will make multi-meter sea level rise practically unavoidable and likely to occur this century. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization."
Additional links:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
http://thinkprogress.org/...
http://www.nationalobserver.com/...
The science of ice melt rates is advancing so fast, scientists have generally been reluctant to put a number to what is essentially an unpredictable, non-linear response of ice sheets to a steadily warming ocean. With Hansen’s new study, that changes in a dramatic way. One of the study’s co-authors is Eric Rignot, whose own study last year found that glacial melt from West Antarctica now appears to be “unstoppable.” Chris Mooney, writing for Mother Jones, called that study a “holy shit” moment for the climate.
In 2013, Hansen left his post at NASA to become a climate activist because, in his words, “as a government employee, you can’t testify against the government.” In a wide-ranging December 2013 study, conducted to support Our Children’s Trust, a group advancing legal challenges to lax greenhouse gas emissions policies on behalf of minors, Hansen called for a “human tipping point”—essentially, a social revolution—as one of the most effective ways of combating climate change, though he still favors a bi-lateral carbon tax agreed upon by the United States and China as the best near-term climate policy. In the new study, Hansen writes, "there is no morally defensible excuse to delay phase-out of fossil fuel emissions as rapidly as possible."
Our lack of action on climate, which includes President Obama's symbolic gestures, is directly tied to the cancerous billionaires pushing our environemental, economic, and social systems into crisis. All our supposed action has merely amounted to a reduction in the acceleration of our carbon emissions, while we continue to subsidize fossil fuel extraction by the trillions. We need a real revolution to reach the 6% carbon reduction per year that this report lays out, or we are f*cked.
Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who has been fighting with the climate community for years, and like the Pope he grasps the urgency of our crisis. Hillary is still busy hiring fossil fuel lobbyists, and was a shill for the fossil fuel industry as SOS, pushing fracking across the world.
I realize Climate Change may not yet be the #1 issue for many of you, but as a human being I am compelled to sound the alarm as loud I can. We have to decide: Do we remain Saudi America, or do we finally take necessary action for our not-so-distant future?