Greenland Weeps

Unmoved by mere human economic crises, unbothered by cameras and studio lights, with little more than a handful of cryscientists in witness, Greenland weeps and moans:

Off in the distance, huge boulders of ice break off of the imposing Ilulissat glacier, more commonly known by its Greenlandic name Sermeq Kujalleq, creating a thunderous roar as the glacier recedes in one of the planet’s most striking examples of global warming. “The ice in some places on the coast is now melting four times faster than before,” says Abbas Khan, a Dane who studies the movements of Greenland’s glaciers at the Danish Space Centre.

When and if Greenland collapses, sea levels will rise between 15 and 20 feet. Barrier islands gone, major cities like New York, New Orleans, Miami, Tacoma, and many more inundated. It may take centuries, or it might be happening before our eyes. The date of reckoning is debatable, but the cause is no longer in dispute:

What is “kind of scary” is that the worldwide emissions growth is beyond the highest growth in fossil fuel predicted just two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Ben Santer, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Under the panel’s scenario then, temperatures would increase by somewhere between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4 to 6.3 degrees Celsius) by the year 2100. If this trend continues for the century, “you’d have to be luckier than hell for it just to be bad, as opposed to catastrophic,” said Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider.

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