The
words that come to mind are HOW CONVENIENT!
The
Washington Post headline actually captures it although I am posting
Robertscribbler’s article.
“The
loss of these sensors means the loss of a key piece of infrastructure
—one that is critical to our climate resiliency”
intones Mr. Fanny.
What
“climate resilience” is he talking about?
I
find this this American liberal claptrap frankly naueating.
The
Arctic is melting – and scientists just lost a key tool to observe
it
To read the article GO
HERE
Republican Climate Change Denial is Blinding Our Ability to Observe the Arctic
Denial.
It’s
all-too-often what happens to the powerful when they are confronted
with the consequences of their own bad actions. It can best be said
that denial is blindness — the willful inability to open one’s
eyes to the tough reality of the world. In literature, we can see
denial in the tragic sin of hubris and in the metaphor of Oedipus the
King gouging his own eyes out as a result of his failure to come to
terms with the warnings of prophecy.
In
the psychological sense, denial involves the inability to cope with
reality such that a person will act in an irrational fashion to the
point of generating fantasies that the object of said denial does not
exist. Behaviorally, this results in an increasing degradation of a
person’s ability to confront or cope with the object of denial —
to the point of ardent, irrational, and possibly destructive
outbursts when faced with it.
Arctic
sea ice loss.
Ever
since 1979 an array of satellite sensors has allowed our scientists
to directly observe the sea ice in the Arctic. Since that time, and
as a human-forced warming of the world ramped up, the area which that
ice covers has dramatically shrunken. So much so that by this year,
2016, there’s a risk that not only will a new all-time record low
be reached, but that by the end of this summer almost all the ice in
the Arctic Ocean will be melted out entirely. A risk that a new
climate change related event will start to take shape in the Arctic.
The blue ocean events.
(Arctic
sea ice area as measured by observational satellites and most
recently by F17.
The bottom line of the graph measures days of the year. The left side
of the graph measures sea ice area. The corresponding intersections
determine sea ice area on any given day of a year in the record. The
up and downward swoop of each line on the graph shows the seasonal
variation of sea ice area for that given year. The blue line on the
graph represents 1980 sea ice area. The dark gray line represents the
1979 to 2000 average. The red line represents the 2012 record low
year. 2016, in black, shows a squiggle as F17 begins to fail in early
March of this year — a year that could significantly beat 2012 as
the worst melt year on record. The sensor is failing because it is
old and needs replacement. A replacement that is now sitting in a
warehouse due to republican-led satellite research funding cuts. Data
source: NSIDC.Image
source: Pogoda
i Klimt.)
We
will know whether or not such an event took place because there are
satellites giving us an accurate picture of this critical and
sensitive part of our world in real-time. In effect, these satellites
grant us the gifts of sight, of foresight, and of forewarning too.
They give us the ability to catch a glimpse of what waits over the
horizon and affords us with the opportunity to act to avoid an
ever-worsening catastrophe — should we have the wisdom to choose to
do so.
Willful
Blindness
Where
does denial meet with Arctic sea ice loss? In the form of climate
change denying republicans attempting again and again to cut and
with-hold funding to NASA and NSIDC instruments that track what is an
unprecedented and historic melt now ongoing. For
ever since their coming to power in Congress in 2010, republicans
have done everything they can to remove funding for the devices that
provide a direct observation of the changes coming as a result of a
human-forced warming of our world.
You
can read about the recent history of republican attempts to blind the
satellite eyes of science here in
this comprehensive article by The
Atlantic.
Attempts that have finally played out in
the increasing degradation of the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s
ability to track sea ice area and extent during this crucial year.
For as the critical Arctic sea ice observation sensor called F 17
begins to fail, a
sensor that could replace it sits grounded —
lacking funding to operate or launch it during a year in which the
Arctic is likely to experience historic and wrenching changes. A year
that has already experienced both record Arctic heat and record low
sea ice coverage throughout both Winter and Spring with more records
likely on the way.
What’s
happened now, due to republican ties to fossil fuel industry and
a related push to obliviate climate science that observes changes in
the Earth,
the atmosphere, the world’s ice and the oceans, is a degradation of
climate and weather disaster preparedness. For the fossil fuel
industry — which has come to completely dominate republican
policy-making since at
least the years of the Bush administration and
which is the cause of pretty much all the harmful changes we now see
in the world due to human-forced warming — the degradation of these
sensors may help confuse the science and perhaps allow these dirty
and dangerous interests to dump carbon into the atmosphere for a few
more years or decades. Extending dirty industry profits and what has
been a deleterious and corrupting political influence for a little
while longer.
(Beaufort
sea ice in the Arctic is now melting and breaking up at least one
month faster than it does during a typical year. Republicans and
their fossil fuel allies may not want to hear or see this happening
as it’s direct observational proof that the policies they’ve been
pushing — drilling, fracking, coal burning, and suppression of
renewable energy — are resulting in increasingly dramatic and
dangerous changes to the Earth system and environment. So much so
that they want to shut off the satellites that provide us with such
critical observational data of what’s happening to our Earth and
oceans in real time. Image source:LANCE
MODIS.)
For
the rest of us, the loss of these sensors means the loss of a key
piece of infrastructure —one
that is critical to our climate resiliency.
For if we cannot observe and predict trends in the Arctic, then we
will come to be more and more at the mercy of dangerous changes now
going on there. We will be increasingly caught by surprise by the
changes that are now almost certainly bound to happen. And a growing
number of us will fall into risk of being caught off guard. Of
suffering from loss of property and, perhaps, injury or loss of life.
Willful
and destructive blindness. That’s what happens when hubris rules in
Washington. And for too long now we’ve suffered this republican
climate change denial and its all-too-related fossil fuel based
hubris. A plague that is now not only wrecking the world’s climate,
but is degrading our ability to observe and respond to the dangerous
and Earth-altering changes that are now taking place.
Links:
Hat
Tip to Redsky
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