Destination: Extinction

Patrick Cornell DeBoard lived in Bellinghham for a while. He was residing in Northhampton, Vermont when he submitted this article.

We are roughly 250 years into the Industrial Revolution, and it is abundantly clear to all human beings capable of basic reading ability that the consumption of fossil fuels is heating the planet up. It is also clear that a very slight increase in global average temperature is capable of upsetting all the intertwined eco-systems of the planet, from frozen tundra to glaciers to oceans to fresh water sources to wind and ocean current patterns, and more.

The evidence is indisputable that the arctic ice will probably be totally gone this summer, for the first time, and that the blue ocean will absorb the sun’s rays, and heat the arctic region 10-12 degrees warmer than normal. That’s this summer, 2014.

The ice pack on Greenland has lost its footing on the bedrock under it because of the melt water that has eaten through the ice and created river systems of melt water between the ice and the melt water. The ice is sliding into the ocean as I type, and its speed has been increasing steadily over the past decade.

The Antarctic is also breaking up. Ten years ago the Larsen-B shelf came apart over a 3-4 day period, and other shelves are being eaten up by melt water in the same manner. The Antarctic ice is anchored to bedrock several hundred yards below the surface of the ocean, and it is unknown exactly how many shelves will break up and become part of the ocean before the entire Antarctic breaks free from its sub-surface footing. When the Greenland ice and the Antarctic ice become part of the oceans, worldwide ocean levels will rise roughly 25 feet.

Positive Feedbacks

This sort of bad news has been readily available for decades. The really bad news concerning the feedback systems has been available the past ten years. The feedback systems, I’m talking about the positive feedback systems, are those that accelerate global warming and climate change.

For example, when ice turns into water, it absorbs rather than deflects the heat energy of solar rays. Therefore, the arctic no longer deflects 80 percent of solar heat back into space because it is no longer bright white and acting like a mirror. Instead, it absorbs 80 percent of solar heat because it is blue water. That raises the local temperature and contributes to global warming. It also tends to melt any residual ice and delays the formation of new ice in the winter season.

Other positive feedbacks are the southward march of the freeze line that converts frozen tundra, for example Siberia, into peat bogs that will release methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There are other feedbacks concerning methane reserves and clathrates at the ocean bottom that are being activated by the one degree of warming of the planet that has already occurred since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Methane is a greenhouse gas whose effect on global warming is about 34 times stronger as a heat-trapping gas than is carbon dioxide.

Affluence

Climate change is a huge problem that threatens the life-coddling environment of earth, but the bigger problem is human ignorance and apathy. The Industrial Revolution’s hype and hypesters dangle promises of affluence and convenience-rich materialism before the collective nose of humanity, and humanity wants it. Like the dumb donkey, they plod after that carrot, keeping their eyes on it, and ignoring everything else.

The industrialists understand human nature to a degree, and they exploit humanity’s greed and self-interest with planned media assaults against critical thinking, altruism, and other sundry items such as “the brotherhood of man,” the common good, ecological respect, taking care of the earth that provides our sustenance, and doing unto others. And the human race, as a rule, swallows the whole thing.

The argument that humanity is too stupid to figure it out is a weak one, I know it, yet that’s the way it seems to me. I do allow that there could be, probably are, in fact, other factors. We are dumbed down by the “educational system” that does not teach students how to think critically. Thus as “adults” we continue on in non-thinking acceptance of whatever printed or visual material is presented to us. The material is presented by industrialists who are getting rich off our mindless drudgery at “work,” in a system designed to feed the super-rich elite at the top of the whole scheme.

The system of economic activity resolves around the use of fossil fuels, which of course is damaging the planet’s ability to provide for human living conditions, as we have known it this past 10 thousand years or so. We need to stop using fossil fuels, and live differently, but that would require that we think about it, talk about it, and come up with something that we want to do.

Since we don’t actually do any real thinking, we cannot talk about that of which we think. And since we can’t speak of that of which we don’t think, then we cannot have a dialogue about how to live differently. Instead, we spend our days wondering which tattoo would be cool and other such stupid things, because that’s who we are. We’re stupid, and we’re hot on the trail of extinction.