I started this topic over two years ago, soon after joining the Forum. For most of 2013 i was a very prolific poster on the forum. Then significant events in my personal life superseded my ability to devote the daily hours to this Forum, however, there has seldom been a day that I have not looked at a few charts on the ASIB and read a few relevant comments on this Forum. For the many friends,
("cohorts in crime"), I've made on this Forum my absence was due neither to serious health or family issues. However, I was extremely disheartened and more than a bit depressed when my fellow Americans voted to place the Republicans in charge of the US Senate again, which gave Senator Inhofe control of the Committee which controls all Environmental actions by the Senate.
Now back to the reason for this addendum to this topic. Little did I realize two years ago how successful Neven's Forum would become, nor did I imagine the plethora of topics that would be spawned covering every scientific aspect of declining Arctic Sea Ice, Glaciology, Climatology and Meteorology as well as discussions on government actions/inactions, societal response to Climate Change, recommended mitigation and/or adaptation strategies, the need for a complete revamping of the world's economic systems and finally a new system of international governance.
I'm taking the liberty of re-posting the hypothetical chart (see below) that I developed several years ago to set the framework for this topic. The horizontal axis depicts stage of Arctic Sea ice Extent followed by incremental rises in Global Mean Sea Level Rise (SLR). The chart, as I designed it, almost implies that I was projecting the course of events that would occur during the 21
st century. However I would venture a guess that SLR will not exceed 3 meters before 2080 and quite possibly by 2120.
After watching and reading about what is happening globally due to Climate Change I believe that I was being far too conservative when I implied that the most calamitous impacts, socially and economically would not occur until sometime after mid-century. I am now convinced that the world will reach a crisis state far sooner than that. I am also factoring in issues other than Climate Change, such as over-population and finite resource depletion as well as the current state of societal unrest in many regions of the world.
Secondly, my hypothetical chart linked every event to the decline of Arctic Sea Ice. While the warming of the Arctic certainly plays a role in changing weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, we can't attribute heatwaves in Australia, the current drought in Brazil and the rapidly collapsing of the West Antarctic Ice Shelf to events in the Arctic. However, if Dr. Jennifer Francis is to be believed, the current extreme drought conditions in California are quite probably due to the changes to the Jet Stream which have been caused by the warming of the Arctic. We can not also forget the slowing of the Gulf Stream which is also quite possibly due to the warming of the Arctic.
We are witnessing the earth's largest scientific laboratory experiment. However, mankind did not write the test plan, just provided excess GHGs and too many people with no plans to conserve water or other critical finite resources.
At the age of almost 69, I won't be around when the final results of this global laboratory experiment are written, but I'm willing to bet than the test will not be consider a success by any standards of sustainability for a biosphere that is fit for human habitation on a large enough scale to prosper spiritually, socially and economically.