Tag: Global warming

Talk about ironic. Wise people stashed an emergency supply of seeds in a vault buried in permafrost within the Arctic Circle, in case humanity ever needed it. Only it turns out the permafrost isn’t perma. We done melted it.

It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.

The vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and contains almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an important food crop. When it was opened in 2008, the deep permafrost through which the vault was sunk was expected to provide “failsafe” protection against “the challenge of natural or man-made disasters”.

But since then we have learned just how damn fast permafrost can melt.

But soaring temperatures in the Arctic at the end of the world’s hottest ever recorded year led to melting and heavy rain, when light snow should have been falling. “It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,” said Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government, which owns the vault.

It never is in our plans. It was not in our plans to destroy the climate we evolved in by driving around in our awesome cars and flying around on our awesome planes, but it happened anyway. We clearly don’t know enough to live the way we do.

The meltwater didn’t actually reach the vault (this time), and the seeds are safe for now. But scary warning is scary.

But the breach has questioned the ability of the vault to survive as a lifeline for humanity if catastrophe strikes. “It was supposed to [operate] without the help of humans, but now we are watching the seed vault 24 hours a day,” Aschim said. “We must see what we can do to minimise all the risks and make sure the seed bank can take care of itself.”

They don’t know if last year’s high temperatures on Spitsbergen were a one-off or the new normal.

“The question is whether this is just happening now, or will it escalate?” said Aschim. The Svalbard archipelago, of which Spitsbergen is part, has warmed rapidly in recent decades, according to Ketil Isaksen, from Norway’s Meteorological Institute.

“The Arctic and especially Svalbard warms up faster than the rest of the world. The climate is changing dramatically and we are all amazed at how quickly it is going,” Isaksen told Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.

They’re digging trenches to divert meltwater away from the entrance tunnel, and…hoping for the best.

Over 400 is the new normal – and that’s not normal. USA Today:

Six months after 195 nations vowed tougher action to curb global warming, the problem has only grown worse, with higher accumulations of greenhouse gas emissions, record worldwide temperatures and widespread coral bleaching from hotter ocean waters.

On top of that, a new United Nations report documents increased pollution levels for the world’s cities.

The primary greenhouse gas that leaders at a global summit in Paris last December agreed to reduce — carbon dioxide (CO2) released from burning of fossil fuels — is now fixed above the historic milestone of 400 parts per million that was reached for the first time last year.

Less than 300 feet from the edge of the cliff.

In the planet’s Northern Hemisphere, where most of the world’s population lives and burns fossil fuels, a benchmark reading from the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii reached a monthly average of 407.42 parts per million in April. In the slightly cleaner Southern Hemisphere, readings from an Australian measuring station surpassed 400 parts per million last week, according to Australian scientists.

The rate of 400 parts per million is significant because the planet hasn’t seen that much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for millions of years.

“This is the new normal. This isn’t going away,” said Pieter Tans, chief greenhouse gas scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He said the warming of the planet will be steady and inevitable. “It’s like we just set the thermostat at a higher level.”

But we evolved at the lower level, so this isn’t going to work out well.

The coral reefs are going, rapidly.

The trend is not improving.

Fiona Harvey at the Guardian on new evidence that global warming is going to wallop poorer countries harder than the not-poor ones:

It has long been expected that poor people would bear the brunt of climate change, largely because so many more of the world’s poorest live in tropical latitudes whereas, wealthier people tend to live in more temperate regions.

This is inverse to the generally accepted responsibility for climate change, which falls mainly on rich countries that benefited early on from industry, and thus have historically high emissions, compared with poorer countries that have only begun catching up in the past few decades.

Heads we win tails they lose, innit. We got the accumulated wealth, and we won’t get drowned or starved as soon.

Those living in the poorest countries also have the most to lose, as so many depend on agriculture, which is likely to be badly affected by temperature rises and an increase in droughts, heatwaves and potential changes to rainfall that may lead to recurrent patterns of floods, droughts and higher intensity storms.

It’s going to be terrible…and we’re doing almost nothing to stop it or slow it. Our friend Bjarte Foshaug put it this way in a Facebook comment:

It’s as if we’re in a car heading towards the edge of a cliff that’s about 300 ft ahead. There’s some uncertainty about the road grip, the precise distance to the cliff etc. If we’re as lucky as one can possibly get, we might be able to stop as much as 30 ft before plunging into the abyss, provided that we start grinding to a halt at this very moment. If we’re unlucky, it may already be too late. But really none of that matters, because the idea of stopping after 300 ft is not even part of our public conversation. The only conversation that’s currently inside the Overton Window is whether we should aim to stand still after 1000 ft or 1500 ft.

Anybody got some mattresses?