A Quote by Lester R. Brown
Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it.
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Rising sea levels will result in tens to hundreds of millions more people flooded each year with a warming of 3 or 4°C. There will be serious risks and increasing pressures for coastal protection in South East Asia (Bangladesh and Vietnam), small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and large coastal cities, such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Calcutta, Karachi, Buenos Aires, St. Petersburg, New York, Miami and London.
For me the most important issue is climate change because it in some ways trumps every other issue. Everything else we care about falls by the wayside if the Greenland ice shelf falls into the sea. And if suddenly sea levels rise 21 feet, everything we hold near and dear ceases to exist.
Ice in the West Antarctic and over Greenland, i.e., ice that's over a rock at the moment, that will raise the level of the sea as it slides into the ocean, putting at risk everyone and everything that lives on the coasts, and that includes an enormous percentage of the world's people.
A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm. It will actually do net good [...] rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland's ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.
For several days in July of 2012, Greenland surface ice cover melted more than at any time in 30 years of satellite observation. During that month, an estimated 97% of the ice sheet thawed.
If the river has a soul, it's a peaceful one. If it has a lesson to impart, that lesson is patience. There will be drought, it says; there will be floods; the ice will form, the ice will melt; the water will flow and blend into the river's brackish mouth, then join the ocean between Lewes and Cape May, endlessly, forever, amen.
Much of the attention on oceans has portrayed oceans as a villain. Warm water strengthened Hurricane Katrina that pounded Louisiana. Rising sea level will flood islands and coastal areas. Or, we're talking about new opportunities like a new shipping lane in the Arctic because of melting sea ice. These may be the obvious problems, but they're probably not the biggest ones.
People travel and hunt on the sea ice - in Alaska, they hunt in skin boats for bowhead whales; in Greenland, they hunt with dogsleds. The ice is their highway. The ice is also the ecosystem in which marine mammals and terrestrial animals such as polar bears exist.
If our government won't spend the money to protect New Orleans sufficiently today, what are the chances we will spend the money to protect dozens of coastal cities post-2050, once everyone knows that sea levels will keep rising and intense hurricanes will occur relentlessly?
The Antarctic ice sheet has reached record levels in the midst of so-called climate change and global warming. It's the same thing at the North Pole. Arctic ice sheet levels are at record levels. The North Pole is supposed to have been melted by now, according to Algore.
Are we likely to see rising sea-levels? Not in our lifetimes or hose of our grandchildren. It is not even clear that sea-levels have risen at all. As so often in this domain, there is conflicting evidence. The melting of polar or sea ice has no direct effect.
If this ice melts in Greenland it can shut down the Gulf Current.
The state of our civilization manifests itself both in the non-problems that terrify us beyond all reason - rising sea levels - and in the real problems we pay no heed to [population decline]...In reality, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it's uninhabitable
When I wrote a long story about the retreat of sea ice, I made clear it could go the other way for a while, and that doesn't mean we don't know that a warmer world will have less sea ice. It just means there's a lot of variability and people can pay too much attention to the big swings in one direction or the other.
In coastal waters rich in runoff, plankton can swarm densely, a million in a drop of water. They color the sea brown and green where deltas form from big rivers, or cities dump their sewage. Tiny yet hugely important, plankton govern how well the sea harvests the sun's bounty, and so are the foundation of the ocean's food chain.
I think it's very important, and I think that what young people will learn from my experience is that even presidents have to do that and there are consequences when you don't. But I also think that there will be a box score, and there will be that one negative, and then there will be the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times when the record will show that I did not abuse my authority as president, that I was truthful with the American people.
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