Green Options

A plethora of corroborative data shows that this year’s sea ice levels in the Arctic are the lowest seen in 800 years.

The new research, published in the journal Climate Dynamics, doesn’t specify a cause or reason for the retreat, but it does note that if sea ice melt continues at this level, it’s likely that the North Pole will be completely ice-free during the summer months within a few decades.

According to research based upon sea ice models from the IPCC report, Antarctica’s iconic Emperor Penguins could face extinction by the end of the century due to habitat loss.

By comparing observations spanning 43 years of population dynamics against models which project the declining levels of Antarctic sea ice, the study predicts that the giant penguins will be too slow to adapt to changes wrought by global warming.

The startling prediction is being called a conservative estimate by researchers, who claim that the data has as much as a four-in-five chance of being accurate. This number is particularly high because individual Emperor Penguins are long-lived and, as a result, biologically slow learners. Thus, they are unlikely to shift their breeding patterns fast enough to match the rapidly changing climate.

Sometimes life imitates art. In Karen Dionne’s new thriller novel Freezing Point, melting icebergs are viewed as both the solution to the global water crisis and the source of man-made apocalyptic horror. In reality, giant melting icebergs raise global sea levels and unleash frozen methane gases into the Earth’s atmosphere.

According to recently discovered NASA satellite data, more than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003 and have caused alarming global climate changes.

So melting icebergs are not just the stuff of fiction. Yet, one hopes that what transpires in Freezing Point (think toxic drinking water, corporate monopolies of icebergs and large-scale eco-terrorism) never becomes reality.

In our conversation, Karen Dionne, who wrote a Huffington Post column titled “Can a Novel Change the World?”, spoke with me about the power of the written word, killer rats, and environmental activism:

How did you become interested in the global water crisis?

My interest in water issues goes back pretty far. My husband and I were part of the “back to land” movement in the ‘70s. We wanted to not be so dependent on the system, so we lived in nature, grew our own food, got our water from nearby wells. I remember reading the book Silent Spring and one thing I took away from it is that there is no pristine place left on earth. I learned that DDT was showing up in bird eggs and that toxins were everywhere. For my generation, it was an awakening of how severe the problem was. So I’ve always been concerned about what man is doing to the environment.

The Arctic is heating up in more than one way, as we saw last week when Russia planted its flag on the seafloor below in an apparent move to establish a claim to the ample oil and gas reserves buried beneath.

What’s disastrous for polar bears and Inuit subsistence hunters is emerging as a potentially huge — and destabilizing — fossil-fuel rush for the nations bordering the Arctic Ocean as the polar ice melts.

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