Blog@GraceJunction

Konrad Steffen, climatologist who settled in Greenland’s icesheet in 1990, was only hoping to gather more insights into the processes that drive-and are effected by-changes on ice bodies of Greenland, that hold roughly 8% of world’s freshwater supply!

Today his Swiss Camp serves as eyes and ears for climate scientists worldwide. ‘Koni’ as he is called by his friends, personally customised and deployed much of the instruments that tell the scientific world, hour by hour and year by year about these ice sheets.

Greenland’s icesheets are very crucial, and kind of a barometer for the rest of the world because of its sensitivity to climatic changes and because of the tremendous influence it has on the ecological cycles in the Northern Hemisphere.

The news from Greenland however is not heartening. Koni and his team now have found that the global warming reports stated through the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC) is profoundly understated! At the current rate of melting, sea level will rise by one meter in the next 93 years i.e.2100, which is higher and faster than the most pessimistic forecasts made so far.

However the whole thing is more complicated than we can imagine.Rising air temperatures over Greenland have already brought more fog, snow and spring rain. This in turn causes more melting of the ice cap, which sends more fresh water into the ocean, disrupting currents and bringing more warm water to the bays, which breaks up more sea ice…and so it continues in an ever warming cycle. And there can be no exact prediction about the rate of melting.

Presumably, the US and the Netherlands et cetera will be able to cope with the sea level increases by building new systems, but hundreds of millions of coastal dwellers in Indonesia, Bangladesh and western coast of sub-Saharan Africa and also the dwellers in the mega deltas of the Nile and the Brahmaputra could become refugees as their coastlands and banks get inundated and the number of displaced people globally could be as high as one billion!

Tata (Indian Auto major) is coming out with ‘Nano’ ( a car worth less than 3000 USD) and millions more are going to get affordable cars into their homes. Other car companies are following suit. All this and much more will mean a greater build up of the greenhouse gases and a rapid meltdown of the ice sheets. Alternative and non-conventional sources of energy have been found but they still can’t match up to the amount of energy that this planet needs.

Now most people will say that man will find a way around this problem. Surely he can. Maybe he will build cities like the “Sky City” in Tokyo and shift the entire population into them! These towers are being engineered to withstand floods, earthquakes, and even airplane attacks. Maybe man will do all that but my contention is that he will find more ingenious ways to endanger his kind much before we have a waterworld here.

We will never perhaps reach the stage where we will see a mutant with webbed feet and gills (as the “Mariner” (Kevin Costner) in the Waterworld movie), because, man’s limitless and ethically and morally starved experimentations and ambitions will surely short circuit the very existence of “life” on this planet let alone ice caps and sheets.

But that would have been the case had it only been a self-generated and undestined planet. Had it all been an accident. It surely isn’t so. There definitely are deep and widespread patterns across nature and certainly prophesies across history. Some may ignore the so called doomsday prophets, but then I think ‘Koni’ is one of them!

Perhaps, time to say like the ‘Mariner’ when he says that he doesn’t belong to the dry land and the oceans call out to him! Is anybody hearing what the oceans are saying? I hear their roar.

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Tags: , , brahmaputra, Climate change, coastal areas, crude, deltas, doomsday prophets, fossil fuels, Global Warming, greenhouse gases, Greenland, ice caps, ice sheets, IPCC, kevin costner, Konrad Steffen, mariner, melting, nano, nile, non-conventional energy sourcs, sea level, sky city, swiss camp, tata, Tsunami, water world

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 9:37 am and is filed under Accidents, Articles, Deadlines, Geo, New Findings, Purpose of Life, Science & Religion, Troubles & Problems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.