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Climate Crisis Quickens, Dramatic Action Warranted
Arctic melting leading to methane release [ark | moreark] -- a major climate change feedback -- has kicked in again after an eight year hiatus, indicating a major quickening of the climate crisis. A global study in Geophysical Research Letters found a major increase in methane levels of about 28 million tonnes since mid-2006 due to release of gas in and near the Arctic. Methane is responsible for some 20% of global warming -- and Arctic warming is melting permafrost, leading to increased bacterial emissions from wetland areas. Indications are frozen methane clathrates found on the ocean floors [search] are also melting .The finding comes as research published in Nature Geoscience found solid evidence that temperatures are rising in Antarctica [ark] as well, and that climate change there and in the Arctic was conclusively caused by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gas.Humanity is at a dramatic juncture. We can continue careening wildly towards global ecological collapse including abandoning collapsed ecosystems [ark], with token feel-good efforts to appear like we are doing something, or we can commit immediately to dramatic ecologically sufficient policy responses. These include rigorous voluntary incentives to reduce human population [search] and consumption [search], immediately ending ancient forest logging [search] and coal use [search], urgently embracing energy efficiency [search], conservation [search] and renewable energy [search], and fully protecting remaining intact ecosystems while beginning the ecological restoration of entire regions [search]. Less rigorous ecological proposals acquiesce to the inevitability of global ecological collapse and are just as guilty as the industrial growth machine's destroyers in ensuring the demise of being. It is well past time for each of us to embrace both a personal and social revolutionary spirit of action -- as we both reduce our own environmental impact, and join with those intensifying global ecological protest [ark]. Shared survival depends upon successfully demanding these and other ecologically sufficient measures are swiftly adopted.
Source: ClimateArk