What would your answer be? Just stay with that for a moment. We’ll come to the shocking answer later (and the mindset that goes with it).

A recent episode of Spooks, a spy drama in which the British Government is almost always at least as bad as the “baddies”, involved London being threatened with “climate terrorism“. One line in the show that really struck us was spoken by a climate expert:

“The world is living in a state of wilful ignorance.”

But what could we be wilfully ignorant of? The answer, it seems, is just how fast things are beginning to move, how big the changes are likely to be and how significant the implications are. We hear daily that we should wait for others, wait for reports, wait to be sure, wait for things to get better, perhaps. Taking urgent and necessary action is characterised, hysterically, as “rushing“.

We are wilfully ignorant of the fact that while, if governments act decisively and immediately, people’s livelihoods will be lost in some cases and there will be pain, nevertheless if we delay acting immediately many, many more livelihoods will be lost and entire economies will collapse, the jobs we save will be meaningless and there will be far greater pain for everyone.

That is, if global warming is real.

So let’s look at some possible evidence.

“… Quite Suddenly …”

Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.

Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.

Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.

[ ... ]

“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC.

“So given that fact, you can argue that maybe our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”

[ ... ]

Professor Peter Wadhams from Cambridge University, UK, is an expert on Arctic ice. He has used sonar data collected by Royal Navy submarines to show that the volume loss is outstripping even area withdrawal, which is in agreement with the model result of Professor Maslowski.

“In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly. “

If you would like to play with some models you can compare computer images of the arctic sea ice for any two dates 1979-present…

or look at a variety of other imaging options here.

In other Arctic news, a team of Russian researchers has been forced to abandon its research post on an ice floe because at the rate it has melted it has dwindled from a piece of ice several kilometres long to just a few hundred metres. They were forced to abandon the base three months earlier than planned.

From the Scientific American:

Global warming forces Russian scientists to abandon the ice.

The early rescue is yet another sign that the Arctic sea ice is rapidly disappearing. It worries climate scientists because the impacts of the North Pole melting are unknown. They could include changes in the amount of rainfall and snow across the northern hemisphere. Still, it is of a piece with U.S. ice experts’ predictions that the Arctic could be ice-free as early as September of this year—a situation unknown in recorded human history—thanks to an early start to the melting season and a record retreat last year that left weaker ice in its wake. Russian scientists’ ability to go with the floe in future may be in doubt.

“The observed rates of change have far outstripped what we projected,” senior research scientist Mark Serreze of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center told me last year. “We seem to melt a little more each summer.”

From Russia’s ItarTASS newsagency:

The research crew landed in early September 2007 on the 1.2- by 2.5-mile [2km x 4km] floe near the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago. During its westward drift of more than 1,550 miles, the floe shrank to just 1,000 by 2,000 feet [about 300 x 600 metres].

You can find a little more about the disappearance of Arctic sea ice at BBCNews. This is how it looked about this time last year.

And how about those cute Polar Bears? When the ice goes, where will they go? Where will the walruses go? And the seals? If climate change is really happening, there is an ecological calamity occurring right now.

So much for the Arctic.

“…Runaway Collapse…”

In Antarctica the big news is the runaway collapse of the enormous Wilkins Ice Shelf. The collapse itself isn’t the big news. The Big News is that it is collapsing – as you read this – in the middle of winter.

“Which One Do You Save?”
(…the climate, or your career?)

So here is the punchline to the Dilbert cartoon, as mashed by “Denis Hancock, now at mydilbertmashups. We think it’s funnier than the original because of the shock of truth.



^{ht: Nicholas Gruen at clubtroppo}

Action to deal with climate change is being debated by some people – especially politicians -whose moral compass is broken: it points directly and always at themselves. They will exploit any opportunity for personal aggrandisement. They obsessively seek and grasp at any opportunity for power, position and influence and are willing to do so at whatever cost to the rest of humanity. Probably they see this as striking an appropriate balance.

Malcolm Turnbull complained recently about this carbon tax thingy that it was rushed, rushed, rushed. We should take our time:

I think for them to rush this for political reasons causes a great risk of economic harm to all Australians.
[ ... ]
What I am complaining about is, because of Mr Rudd’s political agenda to rush this, he is asking for submissions on the green paper to be in by September, when the economic model from the Treasury won’t be available until October.

That was just after he had said:

This is all a consequence of Kevin Rudd‘s political vanity.

Pardon us for suggesting that if you want to know the character of politicians, just listen to the evils they ascribe to their competition. If there is any one politician in Canberra today who is vanity personified, we think it is Malcolm Turnbull. We also think he is incredibly irresponsible, placing his own political future above our planet’s future. Perhaps he thinks it doesn’t matter so much. Perhaps he believes there is heaps of time.

He appears to want “rational consideration of the options” in “the best interests of Australians”.

Let’s recall that Turnbull, as Minister for the Environment, shortly before the November election allocated $10M of taxpayers’ money to a crackpot rainmaking scheme, without a tested and peer-reviewed scientific basis, whose chief beneficiary was to be a key member of Turnbull’s fundraising committee, the Wentworth Forum. Matt Handbury, Rupert Murdoch‘s wealthy nephew, chairman and propietor of Murdoch Books was (is?) part owner of “Australian Rain Corporation” which would receive a significant share of the $10M. Rational? Not, we think, in terms of the reality of rainmaking. Would the spending of this money have been in “the best interests of Australians”? Certainly it would have been in the interests of at least one or two who are already very rich.

The line of the Coalition as a whole is that “we shouldn’t be first”, we should wait and see how it turns out elsewhere. But the fact is that we are already latecomers. Europe has had such schemes operating for years.

Turnbull and Brendan Nelson seem to imagine that it’s all just a political game and that if we delay it won’t make much, if any, difference. Nelson will say just about anything he can think of to retain his tenuous hold on the Liberal leadership. Turnbull, we suspect, thinks it is all about him and the leadership of the Liberal Party (to which he is so entitled).

Last November Australia voted for the Labor Party largely because we knew that something had to be done quickly about global warming and the Liberals had done nothing for 12 years. We knew then that it would cause pain but we knew the pain was necessary. We acted maturely, you might think, considering the long term. The Liberals are appealing to infantile fears and short-term gratification. There is evidence that we have grown as a nation somewhat beyond that. It’s like getting root canal therapy – as an adult you know it has to be done and you know it will hurt like hell but you want it to be fixed as soon as possible.

Australians have said that they don’t want to wait. We like to be first. We are proud of our reputation as pioneers, innovators and doers. It will take courage. We are fiercely proud of our legendary Aussie character as a nation which is courageous in battle. The battle we face will take that courage and more. And what a battle and a half it will be! But we have said we are ready for the challenge and ready for the pain.

So let’s get to it.

 

^{Post inspired by Russell McK.}

 

 

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