(Also see “Manhattan-Size Ice Island Cracks in Half.”)

The crevasse stretches 19 miles (30 kilometers) long and up to 260 feet (80 meters) wide, as shown in a picture taken by NASA’s Terra satellite in October and featured this week as a NASA Image of the Day.

Snaking across the floating tongue of the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, the crack is expected to create an iceberg 350 square miles (907 square kilometers)—versus 303 square miles (785 square kilometers) for Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx combined, according to NASA.

As for when the iceberg might shove off, “that is very difficult to predict,” said oceanographer Eric Rignot of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “but in the coming months for sure.”

Glacier “Contributing Most to Sea Level”

Usually there’s nothing extraordinary about a glacier calving, said glaciologist Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.

Glaciers that flow into the sea, like the Pine Island Glacier, go through a normal cycle in which the floating section grows, stresses mount, and an iceberg breaks off, Scambos said.

“That is nothing unusual in most cases.”

But when the pattern deviates, glaciologists take notice. In this case, the crack is forming significantly farther “upstream” than has previously been the case. That “signifies that there are changes in the ice,” he said.

When “that point of rifting starts to climb upstream, generally you see some acceleration of the glacier.” That means that the ice will flow into the ocean at a faster rate, contributing even more to sea level rise.

(Related: “Hundreds of Glaciers Melting Faster in Antarctica.”)

 Such an acceleration is of particular concern at the Pine Island Glacier, because, among Antarctic glaciers, it’s “the one that’s contributing the most to sea level rise.”

In fact, he said, ice flows from that glacier alone account for a quarter to a third of Antarctica’s total contribution to sea level rise.

“It’s moving at about three kilometers [almost two miles] per year,” Scambos said. And, he noted, “it’s been accelerating quite a bit.”

(Pictures: Antarctica Warming.)

Cracking Glacier “Really Important”

As far as sea levels are concerned, changes in the Pine Island Glacier and other West Antarctic glaciers are far more important than shifts among the continent’s other glaciers, such as East Antarctica’s Mertz Glacier—despite Mertz’s much publicized release of a Luxembourg-size iceberg in early 2010.

That’s because the “Luxembourg” iceberg came from a glacial ice tongue that had just been “sitting there,” said oceanographer Doug Martinson of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

By contrast, “West Antarctica has ice streams, of which Pine Island is one. Those are fast-flowing streams of ice,” said Martinson, who specializes in polar oceans.

When ice breaks off the Pine Island Glacier, he said, more ice can flow in faster from the mountains above—ice that will eventually wind up contributing to sea level rise.

“This glacier,” NSIDC’s Scambos added, “is really important.”

Source National Geographic

The map, along with an associated animation (below) developed by NASA, reveals that ice is flowing fastest in coastal ice shelves and their tributaries, shown in this illustration in bright purple and blue. Though it’s ice that’s moving, not water, “you can imagine it like a river system,” says Bernd Scheuchl, one of the map’s creators. The fastest ice flows out to sea at a rate of a few kilometers a year. Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers on the west coast are the most active.

The team was surprised by how far inland they found fast-moving ice, Scheuchl says. So, if Antarctica loses a great deal of its coastal ice to climate change in the coming decades, large quantities of interior ice could follow. “That’s critical knowledge for predicting future sea level rise,” NASA polar scientist Thomas Wagner said in a prepared statement.

To create this view of Antarctic ice flow, the UC Irvine researchers relied on data from satellites operated by Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency. Flow was tracked from 2007 to 2009 during a period of intense scientific monitoring of Earth’s poles that researchers all over the world had agreed to do. A report on the map was published online August 18 in Science.

Source Scientific America

New University of Washington research shows that rising sea surface temperatures in the area of the Pacific Ocean along the equator and near the International Date Line drive atmospheric circulation that has caused some of the largest shifts in Antarctic climate in recent decades.

The warmer water generates rising air that creates a large wave structure in the atmosphere called a Rossby wave train, which brings warmer temperatures to West Antarctica during winter and spring.

Antarctica is somewhat isolated by the vast Southern Ocean, but the new results “show that it is still affected by climate changes elsewhere on the planet,” said Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences and director of the UW Quaternary Research Center.

Steig is the corresponding author of a paper documenting the findings that is being published April 10 in the journal Nature Geoscience. The lead author is Qinghua Ding, a postdoctoral researcher in the UW Quaternary Research Center. Co-authors are David Battisti, a UW atmospheric sciences professor, and Marcel Küttel, a former UW postdoctoral researcher now working in Switzerland.

The scientists used surface and satellite temperature observations to show a strong statistical connection between warmer temperatures in Antarctica, largely brought by westerly winds associated with high pressure over the Amundsen Sea adjacent to West Antarctica, and sea surface temperatures in the central tropical Pacific Ocean.

They found a strong relationship between central Pacific sea-surface readings and Antarctic temperatures during winter months, June through August. Though not as pronounced, the effect also appeared in the spring months of September through November.

The observed circulation changes are in the form of a series of high- and low-pressure cells that follow an arcing path from the tropical Pacific to West Antarctica. That is characteristic of a textbook Rossby wave train pattern, Ding said, and the same pattern is consistently produced in climate models, at least during winter.

Using observed changes in tropical sea surface temperatures, the researchers found they could account for half to all of the observed winter temperature changes in West Antarctica, depending on which observations are used for comparison.

“This is distinct from El Niño,” Steig said. That climate phenomenon, which affects weather patterns worldwide, primarily influences sea-surface temperatures farther east in the Pacific, nearer to South America. It can be, but isn’t always, associated with strong warming in the central Pacific.

Steig noted that the influence of Rossby waves on West Antarctic climate is not a new idea, but this is the first time such waves have been shown to be associated with long-term changes in Antarctic temperature.

The findings also could have implications for understanding the causes behind the thinning of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains about 10 percent of all the ice in Antarctica.

Steig noted that the westerly winds created by the high pressure over the Amundsen Sea pushes cold water away from the edge of the ice sheet and out into the open ocean. It is then replaced by warmer water from deeper in the ocean, which is melting the seaward edge of the ice sheet from below.

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Source Science Daily

We are entering a new era, one of rapid and often unpredictable climate change. In fact, the new climate norm is change. The 25 warmest years on record have come since 1980. And the 10 warmest years since global recordkeeping began in 1880 have come since 1998.

The effects of rising temperature are pervasive. Higher temperatures diminish crop yields, melt the mountain glaciers that feed rivers, generate more-destructive storms, increase the severity of flooding, intensify drought, cause more-frequent and destructive wildfires, and alter ecosystems everywhere. We are altering the earth’s climate, setting in motion trends we do not always understand with consequences we cannot anticipate.

Crop-withering heat waves have lowered grain harvests in key food-producing regions in recent years. One with a profoundly direct human impact was the searing heat wave that broke temperature records across Europe in 2003. The intense heat, which contributed to the world grain harvest falling short of consumption by 90 million tons, also claimed more than 52,000 lives.

There has also been a dramatic increase in the land area affected by drought in recent decades. A team of scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that the area of the globe experiencing very dry conditions expanded from less than 15 percent in the 1970s to roughly 30 percent by 2002. The scientists attribute part of the change to a rise in temperature and part to reduced precipitation, with high temperatures becoming progressively more important during the latter part of the period. A 2009 report published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reinforces these findings. It concludes that if atmospheric CO2 climbs to 450–600 ppm, the world will face irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions of the world. The study likened the conditions to those of the U.S. Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.

The warming is caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping “greenhouse” gases and other pollutants in the atmosphere. Of the greenhouse gases, CO2 accounts for 63 percent of the recent warming trend, methane 18 percent, and nitrous oxide 6 percent, with several lesser gases accounting for the remaining 13 percent. Carbon dioxide comes mostly from electricity generation, heating, transportation, and industry. In contrast, human-caused methane and nitrous oxide emissions come largely from agriculture—methane from rice paddies and cattle and nitrous oxide from the use of nitrogenous fertilizer.

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the principal driver of climate change, have climbed from nearly 280 parts per million (ppm) when the Industrial Revolution began around 1760 to 387 ppm in 2009. The annual rise in atmospheric CO2 level, now one of the world’s most predictable environmental trends, results from emissions on a scale that is overwhelming nature’s capacity to absorb carbon. In 2008, some 7.9 billion tons of carbon were emitted from the burning of fossil fuels and 1.5 billion tons were emitted from deforestation, for a total of 9.4 billion tons. But since nature has been absorbing only about 5 billion tons per year in oceans, soils, and vegetation, nearly half of those emissions stay in the atmosphere, pushing up CO2 levels.

Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is produced when organic matter is broken down under anaerobic conditions, including the decomposition of plant material in bogs, organic materials in landfills, or forage in a cow’s stomach. Methane can also be released with the thawing of permafrost, the frozen ground underlying the tundra that covers nearly 9 million square miles in the northern latitudes. All together, Arctic soils contain more carbon than currently resides in the atmosphere, which is a worry considering that permafrost is now melting in Alaska, northern Canada, and Siberia, creating lakes and releasing methane. Once they get under way, permafrost melting, the release of methane and CO2, and rising temperature create a self-reinforcing trend, what scientists call a “ positive feedback loop.” The risk is that the release of a massive amount of methane into the atmosphere from melting permafrost could simply overwhelm efforts to stabilize climate.

Another unsettling development is the effect of atmospheric brown clouds (ABCs) consisting of soot particles from burning coal, diesel fuel, or wood. These particles affect climate in three ways. First, by intercepting sunlight, they heat the upper atmosphere. Second, because they also reflect sunlight, they have a dimming effect, lowering the earth’s surface temperature. And third, if particles from these brown clouds are deposited on snow and ice, they darken the surface and accelerate melting. These effects are of particular concern in India and China, where a large ABC over the Tibetan Plateau is contributing to the melting of glaciers that supply the major rivers of Asia. Soot deposition causes earlier seasonal melting of mountain snow in ranges as different as the Himalayas of Asia and the Sierra Nevada of California, and it is also believed to be accelerating the melting of Arctic sea ice.

In contrast to CO2, which may remain in the atmosphere for a century or more, soot particles in ABCs are typically airborne for only a matter of weeks. Thus, once coal-fired power plants are closed or wood cooking stoves are replaced with solar cookers, atmospheric soot disappears rapidly.

If we continue with business as usual, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) projected rise in the earth’s average temperature of 1.1–6.4 degrees Celsius (2–11 degrees Fahrenheit) during this century seems all too possible. Unfortunately, during the several years since the IPCC study was released, both global CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentrations have exceeded those in its worst-case scenario. With each passing year the chorus of urgency from the scientific community intensifies. Each new report indicates that we are running out of time. For instance, a landmark 2009 study by a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that the effects of climate change will be twice as severe as those they projected as recently as six years prior. Instead of a likely global temperature rise of 2.4 degrees Celsius, they now see a rise exceeding 5 degrees.

Another report, this one prepared independently as a background document for the December 2009 international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, indicated that every effort should be made to hold the temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Beyond this, dangerous climate change is considered inevitable. To hold the temperature rise to 2 degrees, the scientists note that CO2 emissions should be reduced by 60–80 percent immediately, but since this is not possible, they note that, “To limit the extent of the overshoot, emissions should peak in the near future.”

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change sponsored an analysis of some 40 scientific studies that link rising temperature with changes in ecosystems. Among the many changes reported are spring arriving nearly two weeks earlier in the United States, tree swallows nesting nine days earlier than they did 40 years ago, and a northward shift of red fox habitat that has it encroaching on the Arctic fox’s range. Inuits have been surprised by the appearance of robins, a bird they have never seen before. Indeed, there is no word in Inuit for “robin.”

Douglas Inkley, National Wildlife Federation senior science advisor, notes, “We face the prospect that the world of wildlife that we now know—and many of the places we have invested decades of work in conserving as refuges and habitats for wildlife—will cease to exist as we know them, unless we change this forecast.” Unfortunately, this observation holds true for humans as well. If we cannot quickly reduce carbon emissions, it is civilization itself that is at risk.

Adapted from Chapter 3, “Climate Change and the Energy Transition,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available online at www.earth-policy.org/books/pb4.

Additional data and information sources at http://www.earth-policy.org/.

ERICE, Italy—If you think of Earth’s poles as fraternal twins, the Arctic has been the wild one in recent years, while the Antarctic has been a steady plodder. Withered by summer heat, Arctic sea ice has shrunk to record low coverage several times since 2005, only to rebound to within 95 percent of its long-term average extent this winter. By comparison, Antarctica, with some 90 percent of the world’s glacial reserves, has generally shed ice in more stately fashion.
   
However, emerging evidence from an Antarctic geological research drilling program known as ANDRILL suggests that the southernmost continent has had a much more dynamic history than previously suspected—one that could signal an abrupt shrinkage of its ice sheets at some unknown greenhouse gas threshold, possibly starting in this century. Especially troubling, scientists see evidence in the geological data that could mean the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which holds at least four-fifths of the continent’s ice, is less resistant to melting than previously thought.
   
ANDRILL, a collaboration among scientists from Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the U.S., obtained the evidence from a 3,734-foot-long core extracted in 2007 from the seafloor on the southern McMurdo Sound, near Antarctica’s Ross Island.
   
A prior core, extracted from the McMurdo Ice Shelf between October 2006 and January 2007, indicated that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has frequently advanced and retreated. As ANDRILL scientists met here April 6-11 to integrate core results, the geologists and climate modelers pondered the hints of dynamism observed in the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet.
   
Contrary to what climate simulations suggest, David Harwood, the program’s co-chief scientist, says, “nature seems to give us a record that the ice sheets are coming and going.”
   
The southern McMurdo Sound core yielded clear evidence of some 74 cycles of ice sheet buildup and retreat during a 6-million-year stretch starting in the Miocene Epoch some 20 million years ago. The unexpected ice-sheet dynamism has ANDRILL climate modelers considering what input or software adjustments would make the simulation produce the kind of dynamism seen in the geological record. Their model currently indicates that even if the imperiled West Antarctic Ice Sheet succumbs to current warming trends, the much larger East sheet should stubbornly resist melting. According to the simulation, the East ice sheet melts only when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are at least eight times higher than preindustrial levels. The ice sheet’s so-called hysteresis, or resistance to change, is now in doubt.
  
Modeler and geologist Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says the policy implications are grim. “Our models may be dramatically underestimating how much worse it’s going to get,” he says, noting that many population centers worldwide are within a few meters of sea level. Looking at signs of meltwater in the early Miocene, DeConto says, “we’re seeing ice retreat faster and more dramatically than any model predicts.”
  
Antarctica’s ice sheets contain roughly two-thirds of the world’s fresh water. A meltdown of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet alone would boost sea levels by an estimated 20 feet, but if the East sheet were to also succumb, along with the Greenland ice sheet, sea levels could rise by more than 200 feet. This would be catastrophic for major population centers near sea level, such as New York City, much of Florida and nearly all of Bangladesh. No one expects the ice sheets to disappear overnight—even the worst timelines span centuries—and uncertainty about their fate remains, but radar altimetry from NASA satellites indicates that melting is under way in some parts of the East sheet, as well as in much of the West sheet. Researchers say the effects of melting ice sheets could be apparent within a lifetime as undersea currents are disrupted and weather patterns shift.
  
DeConto’s collaborator, climate modeler David Pollard of Pennsylvania State University, says the answer to the puzzling disparity between model predictions and the core data could lie in an erroneous assumption about Antarctica itself. For example, Pollard says, some parts of the land underlying the East ice sheet might be much lower than currently believed. In that case, if warming oceans strip away the surrounding ice shelves, significant chunks of the ice sheet could slide into the ocean. Subglacial lakes, which form as glaciers slide over depressions, may have an underappreciated role, he added. DeConto says polar stratospheric clouds also need further study. There are indications, he says, that they act as infrared reflectors, which might contribute to ice sheet melting in ways not yet accounted for in models.
  
Whatever the cause, the key evidence for ice sheet dynamism in the Antarctic comes from the core’s lithographic record. Sedimentologists have studied its facies, the visible characteristics that distinguish each stratum, for indications of how warm or cold the surrounding environment was. The McMurdo Sound facies repeatedly vary from “ice proximal,” where fractures, scraping and larger grain size indicate a glacier rumbling by, to “ice distal,” where laminated sediments and marine fossils speak of lapping waves in an ice-free marine environment.
  
Numerous other lines of evidence from the core support the idea of wide climate swings in Antarctica’s past. There are spikes in the amount of pollen found within the core, for example, indicating flowering plants nearby. Levels of various organic molecules repeatedly rise and fall in the column, showing that microorganisms and shellfish flourished in the warmer periods and receded during cold times. The presence or absence of clasts—chunks of sedimentary rock carried along and deposited by glaciers—also indicates a fluctuating Antarctic climate. Co-chief scientist Fabio Florindo of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology notes that surges of magnetic mineral in the core may also mark warming trends. Reviewing the record, sedimentologist Christopher Fielding of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln says that in its warmest periods Antarctica must have resembled Patagonia today, where winters average a few degrees below freezing and summertime highs occasionally reach 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
  
However, Fielding, DeConto and others agree the core data is not conclusive. The McMurdo Sound core offers a pinhole view of East and West Antarctic Ice Sheet behavior, but at the price of extreme difficulty of interpretation. Scientists expect that firmer answers will emerge from other Antarctic research, including a hoped-for third ANDRILL project planned for Coulman High, also in the vicinity of Ross Island.
  
Harwood, a University of Nebraska geoscientist, says there is already evidence enough for policymakers to take action against global warming in hopes of preventing a dramatic Antarctic meltdown. “This core is going to be studied for the next 20 to 30 years,” he notes, but already, he adds, the Miocene-age evidence it contains strongly suggests that it would be a mistake to count on ice-sheet stability in the Antarctic. “We see two or three periods of ice-sheet collapse, including one that looks abrupt, with very rapid deglaciation.”
Source Scientific America

The report represents another step in a series of actions/statements taken on the climate change by the EPA. This EPA has certainly proved to be more active than previous administrations on this issue. They have labeled CO2 as a gas that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act because it is a significant greenhouse gas. New vehicle emissions standards have been established as well as greenhouse gas standards for such vehicles. On April 15, the EPA published the National US Greenhouse Gas Inventory. The Climate/Energy Bill currently working its way through the Senate has been heavily influenced by EPA actions and consultations. And now a report is issued regarding the indicators of climate change.

“These indicators show us that climate change is a very real problem with impacts that are already being seen,” said Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. “The actions Americans are taking today to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions will help us solve this global challenge.”

The following are some of the key climate change indicators.

- Greenhouse gas emissions from human sources are increasing. From 1990 to 2008, emissions have grown by 14 percent in the US.

- Average temperatures are rising. Seven of the top ten warmest years on record for the continental US have occurred since 1990.

- Tropical cyclone intensity has increased in recent decades. Of the ten most active hurricane seasons, six have happened since the mid 1990’s.

- Sea levels have risen between 1993 and 2008 at twice the rate of the long-term trend.

- Glaciers are melting and their loss of volume has accelerated over the last decade.

- The frequency of heat waves has steadily risen since the 1960’s. The percentage of the US population experiencing heat waves has also increased.

Collecting and analyzing environmental indicators can help in understanding the causes of climate change as well as predict what the future will bring. Understanding this is critical in devising strategies to avoid the worst effects of climate change as well as devising strategies for adapting to a different climate. The EPA’s report primarily describes trends within the United States but also includes global trends to provide a basis for comparison.

The report includes some very sobering statistics of how climate change is affecting a range of things like temperature, precipitation, sea levels, and extreme weather. Knowing these trends now can greatly help in the future as we grade ourselves on efforts that we undertake to address climate change.

Source Environmental News Network

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In recent years scientists have learned that liquid water lurks under much of Antarctica’s massive ice sheet, and so, they say, the potential microbial habitat in this watery world is huge. If the methane produced by the bacteria gets trapped beneath the ice and builds up over long periods of time — a possibility that is far from certain — it could mean that as ice sheets melt under warmer temperatures, they would release large amounts of heat-trapping methane gas.

Jemma Wadham, a geochemist at the University of Bristol in England, described the little-known role of methane-making microbes, called methanogens, below ice sheets on March 15 at an American Geophysical Union conference on Antarctic lakes.

Her team took samples from one site in Antarctica, the Lower Wright glacier, and one in Greenland, the Russell glacier. Trapped within the ice were high concentrations of methane, Wadham said, as well as methanogens themselves — up to 10 million cells per gram in the Antarctic sample and 100,000 cells per gram in Greenland. That’s comparable to the concentration of methanogens found in deep-ocean sediments, she said. The species of microbes were also similar to those found in other polar environments, such as Arctic peat or tundra.

The team then put scrapings from both sites into bottles and incubated them with water to see which microbes might grow. For the Antarctic samples, Wadham said, “nothing happens for 250 days and then bam! You get tons of methane.” The Greenland samples haven’t been growing for as long and so far don’t show much signs of giving off methane — but perhaps they just need more time, she reported at the meeting.

Other researchers have also recently found methanogens in icy settings. Mark Skidmore, a microbiologist at Montana State University in Bozeman, reported at the conference that his team has found methanogens in the Robertson glacier in the Canadian Rockies. “It underscores the importance of subglacial methanogenesis,” Skidmore said.

The studies flesh out a picture of Antarctica as a much more dynamic and watery environment than the frozen, static one once envisaged. At least 386 lakes have been identified buried beneath the ice sheet, scientists from the University of Edinburgh reported at the meeting. Plans for major drilling projects are underway for several of them.

Images: 1) NASA. 2) Zina Deretsky/NSF. 

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The amphipod—a shrimp-like creature—was caught on video swimming 600 feet below the ice, where the NASA team expected to find no higher life form than some microbes. 

“We were operating on the presumption that nothing’s there,” NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler told the Associated Press. “It was a shrimp you’d enjoy having on your plate […] We were just gaga over it,” 

The bright orange 3-inch Lyssianasid amphipod was precocious enough to land on the NASA camera’s cable. 

The team also pulled up a tentacle which they believed belonged to a foot-long jellyfish—another animal they never expected to find in the hostile environment. 

One of the questions related to this discovery is where do these species find food to survive on? 

Whatever the answer turns out of be, researchers say that if higher life forms such as amphipods and jellyfish are capable of surviving in this hostile environment, it bodes well for discoveries on distant worlds.

Video of amphipod beneath Antarctic ice produced by the Associated Press.

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The reality of that welcome to us would be our reply, “I’m not getting on this flight!”

Yet we are all in fact on that flight with climate change and the plane has taken off.

Much has been promoted in the media lately that climate change science is somehow conspiring to concoct data and the conspiracy theories abound from ‘Climate Gate’ and timeframes for the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas. There has been little said to the fact that the glaciers in the Himalayas will in fact disappear. This is a forgone conclusion with climate change. That plane will crash. As we watch impassively at the Arctic thaw and the recent reports of glacial melt and iceshelf collapse in Antarctica, we can see too that this plane is flying on one engine. As we observe species extinction reports and look at the lonely figure of the polar bear on the ever shrinking ice flows that they depend on for their very existence, we can see their plane has crashed and is slowly going down.

There is accelerated thawing of the permafrost in northern latitudes with recent observations of methane emissions being on a dramatic rise adding further to the possibility that this climatic tipping point has been breached. That plane is on vertical takeoff.

The Foundations main mission is ‘To broaden the understanding of the choices made that impact or increase depletion of finite resources resulting in environmental and ecosystem damage.’ Enshrined in this environmental educational message is environmental and ecosystem damage, so climate change as a direct result of our unsustainable consumption of finite fossil fuels with the resultant pollution of our atmosphere daily of heat trapping greenhouse gases is a part of that massage. This plane also will crash unless we take some immediate action to perform some maintenance. Would you get on that plane if no maintenance had been carried out since it was commissioned?

In the last six months or so, while still reporting the observed effects of climate change that are coming daily, much to the surprise of the scientific community ahead of the date they thought those changes might occur, we have moved the messages more to inevitable finite resource extinction. Yes extinction; because just like the polar bear with climate change and its ecosystem damage, our future relies as much on sustainable resource consumption as theirs does on ice flows. And there is a certainty that can be predicted when this will happen. Maybe we can’t get people to think of the impact their actions today will have on their children and grandchildren in 100 years time when the climate change plane inevitably crashes, but within my lifetime and yours the plane of consumption you and I are sitting on will crash.

Consumption Airlines will crash and it’s time we all thought about getting off the plane. Check the back of your ticket, it’s written there in plain language. If you need further convincing, then see the simple math of when.

Anyway should scientists have to give us the date that the plane will crash? They know it will; it’s only when the impact will take place that is in doubt.

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