I am 69 years old.
We are now 45% less than the average ice coverage from 1979-2000.
Our ice volume is down 75% from the average from 1979-2000.
I am in fairly good health, so I can probably count on reaching 80 years of age, or 11 more years from now.
Peter Wadhams, who heads the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge and who has been measuring Arctic Ocean ice thickness from British Navy submarines, says that earlier calculations about Arctic sea ice loss have grossly underestimated how rapidly the ice is disappearing. He believes that the Arctic is likely to become ice-free before 2020 and possibly as early as 2015 or 2016 — decades ahead of projections made just a few years ago.
In 2020, 8 years from now, I will should still be around, so there is a fair chance that I will live to see the end of ice in the arctic.
What can I tell future generations, even my own children, much less my grand children, that i did to slow the climate collapse? My understanding is that the climate collapse no longer can be stopped.
I can recount the collapse of the Republican party with their empty chair. But when the arctic ice is gone and the climate is even more erratic than now, my ancestors can only ask how could mankind be so stupid?
Our whole politics operates at an infantile level compared to the challenge facing the earth with the slow moving climate collapse. How many thousands of years will it take to get arctic ice back once it is gone?
Here is the link to the quotation above.
http://www.commondreams.org/...
How much more is needed?
Our politics, culture, technology and "progress" over the last few hundred years have brought us to the edge of the cliff. Some of us have been deeply concerned about this for decades but the corporate media and political theater driven by fear have won the day so far.
A political scientist and environmentalist describes below how difficult a challenge we face.
Note that the author does not just say the collapse of the USA, but the collapse of civilization itself.
If we intend to preserve civilization, the inescapable conclusion is that we need a more fundamental economic transformation, and that means three things that presently appear to be utterly impossible. (1) a change in priorities to facilitate a transition from economic growth (creation of more stuff) to development that genuinely improves the life of everyone, first in wealthy nations and eventually everywhere; (2) the transformation of the consumer economy into one oriented first and foremost to needs, not wants, and the hardest of all, (3) summoning the compassion and wisdom to fairly distribute wealth, opportunity and risk. the fact that these three seem wholly inconceivable to most leaders and most of us indicates the scale of the challenge ahead and the necessity of a different way of thinking." (page 197, italics in the original)
The title of the book is "Down To The Wire: Confronting The Climate Collapse." The author, David K. Orr, is doing a hands on demonstration project in Oberlin Ohio of a carbon neutral city that involves Oberlin University.