Antarctica Joins the Quiet Crisis

One of the few specific issues Barack Obama mentioned in his Inaugural Address was the Climate Crisis. That's important, because as a relatively quiet crisis--partly because we don't recognize many of its manifestations as being evidence of global heating--much louder problems always drown out concerns over what is the greatest crisis of all, because it's the biggest in scale, and the greatest threat to human civilization.

Yet there is news nearly every day that it is real, and even that it is getting worse faster than many scientists expected.

There were two very hot summers at the end of the 1980s in the eastern half of the U.S., and those also happened to be the years that a number of books and television documentaries as well as magazine and newspaper reports began to really sound the alarm about the reality and possible dimensions of what was then called the greenhouse effect or global warming.

Now temperature data for the past year of 2008 is complete, and without a lot of fanfare or anyone noticing it much, it was the eighth hottest year on record. But here's the statistic that got to me: all ten of the hottest years on record have occurred since 1997. That's even though the preceding decade also broke temperature records.

These government figures are supported by university studies which show that our seasons are starting earlier. Winters are warmer, and combined with earlier seasonal change, even small differences can have an impact on many species as well as the water supplies of vast human cities.

In their increasingly desperate attempts to justify their delusions, Climate Crisis deniers like to point to Antarctica, where evidence of heating was mixed. Now new data shows that all of Anarctica is warming. The massive Wilkins ice shelf is collapsing, hanging by less than a thread. The Climate Crisis is already affecting all seven continents, as well as the oceans.

Wilkins will be the tenth Antarctic ice shelf to vanish into the sea in half a century. Some had been in place for 10,000 years. Most climate scientists say the new Antarctic research is just the latest sign that global warming is happening more severely - and quickly - than many thought.

Human civilization as we know it is only about 10,000 years old--as long as these ice shelves have existed. Scientists know they are important to the climate we've had for those centuries. Their disappearance alone should tell us: this is a crisis. The test of our civilization will be whether we can attend to this crisis, even if louder and flashier ones appear and disappear to grab our attention. It's not a good time for a society to wallow in attention deficit disorder. It's time to be smart for a change.