Evidence points to climate change catastrophe unless we get 'all hands on deck'

Evidence points to climate change catastrophe unless we get 'all hands on deck,' scientists warn.

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Scientists warn about the impending problem of global warming. These scientists’ expertise come from their first hand experience with climate change but for some reason, we’re just not listening. For example, news surfaced today that Jason Box, a professor in glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, posted to hisTwitter account that “If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re f’d.”

The statement isn’t just a comment on possibilities. It’s based on actual findings from a recent study led by a group of scientists from Stockholm University which found that “methane plumes were escaping from the sea-floor.” What’s happening right now is “damn scary,” said Box, “The trajectory we’re on is to awaken a runaway climate heating that will ravage global agricultural systems leading to mass famine [and] conflict.” This is serious.

His statements are described as “unequivocal.”

And sure, sure, at this point it may very well feel as though we are just being hit over the head way too many times to the point that we are becoming concussed. It certainly seems as if we’re concussed. As we walk in a fatigued daze and trip over ourselves, dizzy with the world around us, it becomes easy to think, “Ah! There it is -- yet another message about global warming and the doom that may very well overtake us -- but it’s not probable.”

Box relates on his blog that global warming and doom are more than probable.

We have been too long on a trajectory pointed at an unmanageable climate calamity; runaway climate heating. If we don’t get atmospheric carbon down and cool the Arctic, the climate physics and recent observations tell me we will probably trigger the release of these vast carbon stores, dooming our kids’ to a hothouse Earth.

We have to do something and it’s going to require “all hands on deck,” he said. “We simply MUST lower atmospheric [greenhouse gas] emissions.” If we continue on in the same trajectory, terrible consequences are likely.

*originally published on the now defunct Examiner.com