Last September, millions of you joined us for 24 Hours of Reality, when we connected the dots between the extreme weather events happening all over the world and the reality of the climate crisis. Together, we saw that we don't need to travel far to see the impacts of climate change. Most of us are already feeling those impacts close to home.
Yet the climate crisis is also causing momentous changes in remote regions far from major population centers, in places like Antarctica, Greenland and the North Polar Ice Cap. Some of the most dangerous changes in our climate system are the ones that often receive the least attention.
Consider that Antarctica, the massive continent at the southern tip of our planet, holds 90% of the Earth's ice. It is a frozen desert, covered in ice that at some points is two miles thick. What happens to the rest of the world as that frozen water is released, at ever increasing rates, as a result of the rising temperatures caused by climate change?
Even though Antarctica is thousands of miles distant from the rest of the world, the melting ice on this continent should be of paramount concern to all of us. As our planet's ice melts, sea levels are rising steadily. This increases the risk of storm surges, coastal floods, diminished supplies of drinking water for billions of people, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees.
I first traveled to Antarctica in 1988. At the time, it was already clear that our southernmost continent stood at the frontier of the global climate crisis. Scientists expected that as climate change accelerated, Antarctica would be one of the fastest warming areas of the planet. This prediction has proven true: Today, the West Antarctic Peninsula is warming about four times faster than the global average. In many ways, it is the biggest "canary in the coal mine," signaling one of the largest impacts of climate change for the entire world.
To better understand the changes taking place near the South Pole and the impacts those changes will have around the world, I will be returning to Antarctica this month with The Climate Reality Project. A large number of civic and business leaders, activists and concerned citizens from many countries on this voyage will be joined by many of the world's leading climate scientists and Antarctica experts to see firsthand and in real time how the climate crisis is unfolding in Antarctica.
In parallel with this expedition, we are encouraging our partners and supporters to organize their own expeditions closer to home. Over the next few weeks, The Climate Reality Project will document how the melting of the world's ice is impacting us everywhere from Brooklyn to Bangladesh and from Ecuador to the Arctic. To follow these expeditions, I encourage you to keep checking our website, Living on Thin Ice.
Since my first trip to Antarctica more than 22 years ago, much has changed. The rate of ice melting has increased. However, there are many positive changes as well: The solutions to this crisis -- clean energy technologies like wind and solar, and solutions for improving the efficiency of businesses and industry -- have become exponentially cheaper and more widely available than ever before. The science has become even more robust, and the impacts have become far more immediate and severe. What hasn't changed, however, is that many of our political leaders around the world still lack the courage to solve the defining crisis of our age. Most significantly, a global movement to build and sustain the political will necessary is growing stronger every day.
I hope you will join me and The Climate Reality Project as we explore how changes on a remote continent are part of our shared climate reality. And I hope you'll take the time to explore the impacts climate change is having on your own community, whether through one of our expeditions or through one of your own. I'll be updating this blog soon with observations from Antarctica, and I invite you to check back on this page for more.
Cross-posted from Al's Journal.
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Marshall Fine: Movie review: To the Arctic
The under estimated speed of climate change is the greatest danger of all.
Things are melting, drying, burning faster than the experts had warned.
Its time for the IPCC to level with us and tell us how bad its really going to be.
Anyone whose house gets destroyed by Climate Change should be compensated by those who denied it. But those under reported the situation are not guilt free either.
Lets put away the sugar coating and start talking about what is really going to happen.
Explain CYCLE-25.
What is it? And why are many of the worlds climate scientists now discussing the phenomenon embraced by this theory? What will it's impact be on both poles?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming--Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
An increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other changes in the climate system... There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.
No scientific body of national or international standing has maintained a dissenting opinion; the last was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which in 2007 updated its 1999 statement rejecting the likelihood of human influence on recent climate with its current non-committal position.
Political leaders aren't leading. They're following political winds + currents reduced to LowestCommonDenominator, mostly for personal aggrandizement.
Moral, philosophical, scientific, spiritual leaders onthewhole aren't making connections to people fast enough, in sufficient numbers, with necessary clarity + urgency as subject requires -- the wellbeing of humanity + survival of life on Earth. Masses of people, 99%, are stressed out living PaycheckToPaycheck, worrying what tommorrow might bring, onthewhole aren't connecting with climate crisis, certainly cannot connect with Antartic melting icefields.
I humbly suggest from intuitive observation a conscious deliberate effort to bring esoterical remote issue of melting ice to daily bread + butter issues of how it immediately relates to masses of people shuffling from daytoday, from hometoworktohome. It's not "dumbing down" issues, but popularization, "relevantization", demystification, and "feelgoodification" of icecold remote issue of Antartic melting icefields with doing good today for oneself, family and community.
It's fine bringing delegation of top scientists + opinion leaders to Antartica. When they see evidence and come home, scientific + moral truths observable from onsite evidence will take 10years to filter through and diffuse to 99% level at average home's dinnertable. Bythatime, climate crisis has moved onto next level of "TippingPoints" triggered in past 10years. Atthatrate, humanity will NEVER catchup with the urgent crisis.
Whatif ... you bring biggest rap stars, MelissaEtheridge, MerylStreep, ElizabethWarren, Hollywood + Bollywood superstars, ... to Antartica ? Wouldn't that change dynamics of Antartic melting icefields ?
What really are you "conserving"? Your own skin? Your disappearing "American Dream"? Your "reality gameshow political debates"? Your defacto bankrupt national debt and crashing economy? Your increasing planetary climate instability?
Thank the great spirits that Al Gore is who he is and leading the tireless global struggle to stir humanity to action to save posterity from the impending wraths of nature released by our collective lack of wisdom, foresight, humanity, our generational irresponsibility, our self-destructive myopia, our personal selfishness and individual stupidity and indifference.
Then why does he (Al Gorp) Jet all across the world all the time? Especially when he can 'Video Teleconference' most of his views.
Why does he own multiple huge homes and only 'went green' in Tennessee when a lot of pressure was placed upon him?
If you tell people that they should live a certain way then you better be living that way also.
Being rich enough to afford carbon offsets does not a green-person make.
Look up Ed Begley Jr. - Now there is a person I might not agree with politically but I respect him fully.
Petr Chylek
(Professor of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia)
Commenting on reports by other researchers that Greenland's glaciers are melting.
(Halifax Chronicle-Herald, August 22, 2001) (8)
Greenland's melting and receding (vast diminishing areas) of icefields have been irrefutably proven by extensive satellite photographs regularly over decades. For you to come here and start throwing up smoke and mirror is an ineffective juvenile device that discredits you and your sponsors, not the message about global warming, nor the credible climate scientists who stake their professional reputations and integrities on their truthful data and scientific findings.
former Vice President Al Gore
(now, chairman and co-founder of Generation Investment Management--
a London-based business that sells carbon credits)
(in interview with Grist Magazine May 9, 2006, concerning his book, An Inconvenient Truth)
What is the temperature at the outskirts of town compared to down town.
What is the temperature of your house comnpared to the outside temperature?
When you turn on a light it gets hot! The heat we create has to go some where!
For one to say humans are not warming up the planet is a complete fallacy!