Runaway Global Warming - Denial
By Bill Henderson
19 August, 2006
Countercurrents.orgThe scientific debate about human induced global warming is over but policy makers - let alone the happily shopping general public - still seem to not understand the scope of the impending tragedy. Global warming isn't just warmer temperatures, heat waves, melting ice and threatened polar bears. Scientific understanding increasingly points to runaway global warming leading to human extinction. If impossibly Draconian security measures are not immediately put in place to keep further emissions of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere we are looking at the death of billions, the end of civilization as we know it and in all probability the end of man's several million year old existence, along with the extinction of most flora and fauna beloved to man in the world we share.
Runaway global warming: there are 'carbon bombs': carbon in soils, carbon in warming temperate and boreal forests and in a drought struck Amazon, methane in Arctic peat bogs and in methane hydrates melting in warming ocean waters. For several decades it has been hypothesized that rising temperatures from increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to burning fossil fuels could be releasing some of and eventually all of these stored carbon stocks to add substantually more potent greenhouse gases to the atmosphere..
Given time lags of 30-50 years, we might have already put enough extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to have crossed a threshold to these bombs exploding, their released greenhouse gases leading to ever accelerating global warming with future global temperatures maybe tens of degrees higher than our norms of human habitation and therefor extinction or very near extinction of humanity.
"(T)he science is clear. We need not a 20% cut by 2020; not a 60% cut by 2050, but a 90% cut by 2030 (1). Only then do we stand a good chance of keeping carbon concentrations in the atmosphere below 430 parts per million, which means that only then do we stand a good chance of preventing some of the threatened positive feedbacks. If we let it get beyond that point there is nothing we can do. The biosphere takes over as the primary source of carbon. It is out of our hands."
George MonbiotTicking Time Bomb by John Atcheson , a geologist writing in the Baltimore Sun, is the best and almost only mainstream media explanation of runaway global warming and how close we are to extinction.
"There are enormous quantities of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern muds and at the bottom of the seas. These ices, called clathrates, contain 3,000 times as much methane as is in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide."
The recent alleged terror threat to bomb planes could have resulted in the deaths of approximately 3000 people - another 9/11 sized tragedy. This plot captured the headlines, untold amounts of newspaper space and uncounted hours of prime TV news time. This (perhaps orchestrated) news was common knowledge, on everybody's mind globally.
But as we drift over an unseen threshold most of you have never even heard of runaway global warming. Why?
