One Day, My Son, This Will All Be Underwater // Published on Aug 23, 2016
The last time the Earth was this warm, global sea levels were 6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) higher.
In Earth history, sea level has varied from about 120 meters (400 feet) lower to about 70 meters (240 feet) higher.
If Greenland and Antarctica ice cap melt rates continue to double every 7 years or so (exponentially) then I calculate that we will see 7 meters (24 feet) of rise by 2070.
Surely, we must not less this happen. We must apply the three-legged stool to prevent this, and stabilize our climate.
Paul Beckwith, Climate System Scientist 
Paul, I disagree. I contend that one of the ways to cutoff seabed methane release is to increase the depth of the oceans (SLR) commensurate with the co2 in the atmosphere. Our real rapidly accumulating problem is that SLR is lagging too far behind. The lag between co2 and SLR is the window of opportunity for the self reinforcing feed back loop of seabed methane release to either take us to Venus or at the very least complete the 6th Extinction. Mankind at the seashores will flee to higher ground to avoid SLR, messy, unorganized, painful, deaths possibly in the millions. But it should ward off Venus and it should ward off a Sixth Extinction if accompanied by other well thought out measures. However, unquenched self reinforcing methane release is a game ender, period.
I would rather the world suffer a couple of drowned mega cities and have the human race realize just how serious this situation is than to slow SLR and lose a planet for eons.
I am certain that I am alone in this idea. But I am a respiratory therapist and temperatures and pressures and gases are our baliwick. I know that there is some amount of justification for my position.
Again my position would be to accelerate ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica as quickly as possible, migrate inland, replace any power facilities lost with wind and solar sources, implement your other ideas about co2 sequestration, implement ocean destratification strategies, etc.
Appreciate any consideration you might give to this idea.
One last thought. Patient has gangrene in the left little toe. Amputation and treatment could save the other toes, the foot, the lower leg, the upper leg, the patient’s life. Every delay will cost more tissue, do nothing and the patient is dead. In spite of the global symptoms (record droughts, record floods, record fires, wild life die-off, oceanic de-evolution towards jellyfish and slimes and molds) we now have gangrene in just our little toe…
BAU and we and the planet dies for a long long time, perhaps never to rebound. Be proactive, off with the toe–accelerate SLR, and we suffer minor damage but have a chance to beat this thing. Keep hiking down the same path and over the cliff we go.
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The situation is a bit more complex than a toe amputation can fix but the idea could be used to shake the trees of human thought into awareness if let’s say code were rewritten ~ shore of Sea.
Retreat of line of amputation to that of Gangrene advance before operation complete to Paul’s specs… The Line of Bar Stool hysteresis w a gag order on population entering region of Danger Tap Oracle o Value App for That with Green antibiotic writ 2C at quantum mechanics’ hospital Real
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Agree Dale. I meant toe amputation to be the first necessary and painful step (no stride impeded pun intended) towards getting a beginning handle (quenching methane release and it’s deadly self reinforcing feedback mechanism) on the situation, NOT a complete fix.
Mechanically speaking, combining deliberately enhanced SLR, retreat to new soon to be shorelines, engaging The Barstool’s three legs simultaneously, could be very promising.
Practically speaking, how that could ever be done given current political climate of uncooperation on every possible issue, given that the ox of the fossil fuel boys would be terminally gored, given that the ideas of capitalism and infinite growth would have to be overcome, given that some form of population control would have to be implemented, etc etc, is completely beyond me.
My real feeling is that if ACC is real (and I think it is) then we are doomed. Way too little time left (sooner than expected will be our epitaph), way too much disagreement going on, WAY too many changes needed–political, economic, philosophical, governmental, environmental, lifestyle,energy production, and more.
I fear that we will die due to our inability to change our minds, not our lack of ability to physically and technically deal with what is at our very doorstep.
Thanks for your attention to my original content.
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” Practically speaking, how that could ever be done given current political climate of uncooperation on every possible issue, given that the ox of the fossil fuel boys would be terminally gored, given that the ideas of capitalism and infinite growth would have to be overcome, given that some form of population control would have to be implemented”
The really simple problem is this:
Money rules the world, not reason.
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Sorry for double post!
When I search for “corruption” on google, I get 139.000.000 results 🙂 :
https://www.google.de/?client=firefox-b#q=corruption&gfe_rd=cr
No, that’s not the way we can achieve any reasonable change 🙂
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Yes, almost exactly. The correct quote is “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Which is very strange. U.S.A. considers itself a Christian oriented country, yet it totally disregards what is probably the seminal truth of the entire Bible. I say seminal because if violation of that truth results in the extincition of the human race and 6Th and possibly last Extinction of the Planet Earth then that would be the most primal and basic truth extent within the total presentation.
I say totally disregards because the worship of the golden calf of Capitalism is blasphemy without argument. Jesus never said, “here is a quick way to make a buck at the expense of indigenous peoples, at the expense of everyone’s future, at the expense of the loss of all potable water upon the planet, at the expense of the planet’s future, at the expense of every creature that walked, crawled, or slithered upon the Ark.”
Yet if you follow sociopathic Capitalism to its logical conclusion, there you are. And that is just one thought system to be challenged, defeated, restructured before we can move forward. There is not enough time left to repeat this process through the other paradigms, we are clever but far too slow to learn to survive all this. Thinking is hard painful work. Difficult, distasteful, contrary (everything in the system encourages us to “get along”), paradigm changing is near impossible.
Paradigms are monuments to Not Thinking. Acceptance of the ideas and situations of the circumstances that we are born into. Thinking, going against the flow, reinventing the wheel again and again, is exhausting and fraught with ridicule and failure.
And yet a world not based on reason and knowledge will not survive. Faith in failing ideas and broken paradigms may feel comfortable and reassuring momentarily but reality is a cruel taskmaster.
We are soon to be brought to task.
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@Robert Schmidt
Thanks for your comment, you nail it down perfectly:
” Yet if you follow sociopathic Capitalism to its logical conclusion, there you are. And that is just one thought system to be challenged, defeated, restructured before we can move forward. There is not enough time left to repeat this process through the other paradigms, we are clever but far too slow to learn to survive all this. Thinking is hard painful work. Difficult, distasteful, contrary (everything in the system encourages us to “get along”), paradigm changing is near impossible.”
In more scientific detail:
” A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption
ABSTRACT
The peculiar features of the climate change problem pose substantial obstacles to our ability to make the hard choices necessary to address it. Climate change involves the convergence of a set of global, intergenerational and theoretical problems. This convergence justifies calling it a ‘perfect moral storm’. One consequence of this storm is that, even if the other difficult ethical questions surrounding climate change could be answered, we might still find it difficult to act. For the storm makes us extremely vulnerable to moral corruption.”
Click to access gardiner-perfect-moral-storm.pdf
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Sorry, original comment, not orginal content.
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