Things are getting bad. Will Steger is an arctic explorer who’s been around for quite awhile. He’s seen the arctic decline before his eyes, he kayaked the Yukon river when he was 17. I haven’t found a posted age, but he got his bachelors in 1966, which gives an idea. He’s been around a good long time.
He gave a talk at tonight along with a scientist for Minnesotans for an Energy Efficient Economy about how bad things have gotten, and how they’re only going to get worse without some massive change on out part.
The thing that gets me is just the scale of how fucked up things are. Greenland is melting. Ice shelves the size of Minnesota are breaking off from Antarctica. Polar Ice that Alaskan polar bears try and swim out to to hunt seal and walrus has receded from 40 to 240 miles (and polar bears in the north of alaska are drowning in record numbers because of it). Global temperatures are at an unheard of level.
Steger had some great slides showing the rise in temperature, and fall ice coverage. 90% of the worlds freshwater is frozen in the form of antarctica, from which large shelves of ice are beginning to splinter. 500 Billion tons of ice broke off within a period of 1 month in 2002.
So things are bad? yessir. The talk on what we’re going to have to do to go about fixing things was less then impressive. There’s a bill in the MN house to implement a Renewable Energy Standard, that would mandate that 20% of MN’s power is generated from renewables by 2020. The presenter admitted that that will hardly make a difference, but we’ve got to start somewhere. Ouch.
I guess all I can say is that I’m personally looking forward to burning to death thanks to solar radiation.
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