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I deleted one sentence in the Editor's note (it contained a partial - but
obvious) expletive -
Sandy


Editor's note:  The subject matter
here is also the basis of the new NBC television special report narrated
by Tom Brokaw, "Global Warming: What You Need to Know."  The difference
between Brokaw's approach and the following report is that NBC says there
is a centuries-long process, such that there is time to get our act
together; whereas, Bates points out that sea level rise of several feet
can happen in one season - a sudden, catastrophic change.  This article is
being printed in the next issue of The Permaculture Activist magazine,
Fall 2006.
- Jan Lundberg, July 16, 2006

Between the ice and ocean: The rising tide

by Albert Bates

In Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,
there is an oft-quoted tale of the early Greenland settlers.  For whatever
religious or cultural reasons, they simply refused to adapt their European
customs of food, habitation and land use to either the traditions of the
well-adjusted and resourceful native populations or the necessities
brought about by sudden climate change.  Instead, they went extinct.

Ironically, the early Greenlanders went extinct because they could not
tame their land to match their ways of living.  They died and the ice
prevailed.  Today, it is the ice that is dying and the humans who are
seeming to prevail.  I say "seeming," because the ice is not really going
very far.  It is becoming ocean.  We might beat some ice.  We won’t beat
the ocean.

There is an unseen edge at the phase change that freshwater goes through
on millennial timescales.  Until now that edge hasn't been particularly
important to humans because it was invisible, and because its change was
so, well, glacial.  Both of those attributes are disappearing and our
science is only just coming to grips with what that means.  For the one
billion humans and the many more wild creatures who inhabit coastal plains
and shorelines, the importance of far-away ice, it seems, will be very
significant indeed.

The Greenland ice sheet is two miles thick and about the expanse of
Mexico.  Deep in its core are memories of snowfalls a quarter million
years ago, including the ice record of 20 sudden climate changes in the
past 110,000 years.  To say that Greenland holds the key to the climate of
Europe is not an understatement.  The freshwater resource entombed in
Greenland's snows, if loosed into the North Atlantic, could slow the deep
ocean conveyor that regulates weather for much of the world.

The snows of Greenland have been compacted into ice so thick that its
weight compresses the bedrock below, pushing it below sea level in some
interior valleys.  But that weight is now lifting.  [to read remainder of
this report and get valuable links, go to
<http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=64&Itemid=2#cont>;
- make sure all the address is pasted into browser.]

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