More Alarming Warming

I might rename the blog, "OMG we're going to die." Or I might just stop reading articles titled "Another Ice Shelf Collapses."

"The most important thing to note about it in the big picture, these patches of unusual shelf ice have been there for 4,500 years, and they are choosing this year to break up and drift away," said Ted Scambos, an ice shelf scientist with the National Snow and Data Center who was not directly involved with Mueller's research. "That tells us that the events going on in the arctic are very unusual, at least in the space of the last few thousand years."

Seriously though, I told myself I was going to stop reading articles like this when I found an page on Wikipedia titled "Holocene extinction event" some years ago. --Basically it suggests that we're in the midst of the largest mass extinction event to date. Hooray.

A more credible article states, "As long ago as 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth is currently losing something on the order of 30,000 species per year — which breaks down to the even more daunting statistic of some three species per hour. (See "The Sixth Extinction", Niles Eldredge> and "How Will the Sixth Extinction Affect Evolution of Species," Norman Myers and Andrew Knoll.)

This seems to have been a topic several years ago. I haven't read much more on it recently. But really, you shouldn't measure extinction in species-per-hour. Of course, maybe they just have no idea what they're talking about. But here are the credentials of one scientist:

"Norman Myers is a Fellow at Green College, Oxford University, and has acted as scientific consultant and policy adviser to the White House, U.S. Departments of State and Defense, NASA, the World Bank, seven United Nations agencies, and the European Commission. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the World Academy of Art and Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Society of Arts. Dr. Myers is the originator of the biodiversity “hotspots” strategy, which has generated over $300 million for conservation activities."

Anyway, I told myself I wasn't going to read any more -- and that includes the wave of articles that comes out from the BBC about global warming. Every day it's something new. Ah heck. Let's journey over to the "Science" section and take a look tonight...

Not too bad tonight:

The Good
Sea level rise by 2100 'below 2m'
Germany leads 'clean coal' pilot

The Bad
Warming boosts strongest storms [[I think we knew this one.]]
More fish off the 'green' menu
Major ice-shelf loss for Canada

But anyway, you get the picture. I wasn't going to read any more, but I did. It's just hard to tune out some of those catchier headlines.

You know, I really don't like Palin. I know why McCain brought her on, but she's kind of a poop, and it is making it much hard for me to vote for him. That being said, she had some good things say about Alaska's place in an national energy policy:

"Alaska should be a leader in this plan because we have the conventional, the non-renewable supplies, the petroleum. We have them up here. Again, the hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of clean natural gas, the buildings of barrels of oil. We have the renewables also. We have the largest tides on the continent, we have the geothermal, we have the winds. We have all these alternative renewable source that all can be tapped into as we work collectively and comprehensively on an energy pan. We need to be doing everything, and people need to be realistic also."

I don't know how far you can send electricity without losing it all to attenuation, but Alaksa could be a powerhouse for alternative energy production.

But never mind all that, I need to read more Gizmodo and less, er, science news. Gizmodo makes me happy.