When the ice melts: the catastrophe of vanishing glaciers. By Dahr Jamail // Katharine Hayhoe: 'A thermometer is not liberal or conservative
As global temperatures
rise, shrivelling glaciers and thawing permafrost threaten yet more climate
disruption. How should we confront what is happening to our world?
The fall lasts long enough that I have time to
watch the blue ice race upward, aeons of time compressed into glacial ice,
flashing by in fractions of seconds. I assume I’ve fallen far enough that I’ve
pulled my climbing partner, Sean, into the crevasse with me. This is what it’s
like to die in the mountains, a voice in my head tells me. Just as my mind
completes that thought, the rope wrenches my climbing harness up. I bounce
languidly up and down as the dynamic physics inherent in the rope play
themselves out. Somehow Sean has checked my fall while still on the surface of
the glacier.
I brush the snow and
chunks of ice from my hair, arms and chest and pull down the sleeves of my
shirt. Finding my glacier glasses hanging from the pocket of my climbing bib, I
tuck them away. I check myself for injuries and, incredibly, find none. Assessing
my situation, I find there’s no ice shelf nearby to ease the tension from the
rope, so Sean will not be able to begin setting up a pulley system to extract
me. I look down. Nothing
but blackness. I look at the wall of blue ice directly in front of me, take a
deep breath and peer up at the tiny hole I made when I fell through the snow
bridge spanning the crevasse – the same bridge Sean had crossed without
incident as we made our way up Alaska’s Matanuska Glacier towards Mount Marcus
Baker in the Chugach Range.
“You get to look down
one more time, then that’s it,” I tell myself out loud. Again, there’s only
the black void yawning beneath me, swallowing everything, even sound. My
stomach clenches. I remind myself to breathe. “Sean, are you OK?” I
yell as I clamp my mechanical ascenders to the rope in preparation to climb up. “Yeah, I’m all right,
but I’m right on the edge,” he calls back. “I can’t set up an anchor, so we’re
just going to have to wait for the other guys to catch up.” Time passes. The onset
of hypothermia means I can’t control my body from periodically shaking. To
ignore my fear of dying, I gaze meditatively at the ice a few feet in front of
me as I dangle... read more:https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jan/08/when-the-ice-melts-the-catastrophe-of-vanishing-glaciers
Katharine Hayhoe: 'A thermometer is not liberal or conservative
The award-winning
atmospheric scientist on the urgency of the climate crisis and why people are
her biggest hope. Katharine Hayhoe is
an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas
Tech University. She has contributed to more than 125 scientific papers and won
numerous prizes for her science communication work. In 2018 she was a
contributor to the US National Climate Assessment and was awarded the Stephen H Schneider award for outstanding climate science communication.
In 2018, we have
seen forest fires in the Arctic circle; record high temperatures in
parts of Australia, Africa and the US; floods in India; and devastating droughts in South Africa and
Argentina. Is this a turning point?
This year has hit home how climate change loads the dice against us by taking naturally occurring weather events and amplifying them. We now have attribution studies that show how much more likely or stronger extreme weather events have become as a result of human emissions. For example, wildfires in the western US now burn nearly twice the area they would without climate change, and almost 40% more rain fell during Hurricane Harvey than would have otherwise. So we are really feeling the impacts and know how much humanity is responsible.
This year has hit home how climate change loads the dice against us by taking naturally occurring weather events and amplifying them. We now have attribution studies that show how much more likely or stronger extreme weather events have become as a result of human emissions. For example, wildfires in the western US now burn nearly twice the area they would without climate change, and almost 40% more rain fell during Hurricane Harvey than would have otherwise. So we are really feeling the impacts and know how much humanity is responsible.
The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 1.5C report in October. A
month later, the US federal government’s climate assessment – to which
you contributed – came out. How did these two massive studies move
our understanding along?
These assessments are important because there is a Schrödinger’s Cat element to studying climate impacts. The act of observing affects the outcome. If people aren’t aware of what is happening, why would anyone change? Assessments like these provide us with a vision of the future if we continue on our current pathway, and by doing so they address the most widespread and dangerous myth that the largest number of us have bought into: not that the science isn’t real, but rather that climate change doesn’t matter to me personally... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jan/06/katharine-hayhoe-interview-climate-change-scientist-crisis-hope
These assessments are important because there is a Schrödinger’s Cat element to studying climate impacts. The act of observing affects the outcome. If people aren’t aware of what is happening, why would anyone change? Assessments like these provide us with a vision of the future if we continue on our current pathway, and by doing so they address the most widespread and dangerous myth that the largest number of us have bought into: not that the science isn’t real, but rather that climate change doesn’t matter to me personally... read more:
