Has the Right Come to Grips With its Climate Folly


Back about a decade ago on this blog, the comment pages were crowded with sarcastic and dismissive comments about Antartica. At that time, and even now to a certain extent, there were doubts about whether climate change was actually happening. One of the tricks national conservative columnists were making back then was stating that snow depth on Antartica was increasing. If it was increasing, the climate was cooling, not warming they said. This bit of evidence was a slam dunk they thought. They made jokes about it.

In my blog back then I referred to scientists who explained the deeper snow in Antartica was, in fact, evidence of warming. The snow was heavier there because the water was warmer, pumping more moisture into the air which consolidated and fell as snow. These scientists had been tracking the water temperature and monitoring the underside of the Antarctic ice shelf. That ice shelf is called the Thwaites. Thwaites has been renamed "The Doomsday Glacier."

Thwaites is sloughing off billions of tons of ice each year into the sea. The artic ship the Nathaniel B. Plamer takes tourists, journalists and scientists to the Thwaites regularly. On trip recently, the Thwaites sloughed off a piece of ice 25 miles wide and six times deeper than the Titanic. The shelf itself is so huge that when is crashes in its entirety it is predicted to raise sea levels by several feet in a short period of time. When will this happen? The time is predicted at less than five years. No one doubts it is coming. 

The Thwaites is but one of the glaciers now melting but its size and resulting warmer water is predicted to hasten melting elsewhere. There is really very little preparation being done for sea level increases. The low-lying city of Miami Beach is raising streets and buildings. Scientists say it will be swamped. The same for millions of miles of beach property around the world. 

The time is up for doing nothing about the coming rise in sea levels. While a lot of coming damage can simply be dumped to private owners who made bad debts, a lot of issues will spill over to inland properties and states. These are issues of roads, sewers, tax valuations and insurance. 

Conservative may have laughed ten years ago. Now the laughing is at them.

 

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