After a disaster happens, we want to know; could it have been avoided and who is to blame? Many times, the answer is YES! There was a person, actually many people who spotted a looming crisis and tried to warn those in power but are so often are swept under the rug. They are bullied and told to not cause a problem. We see it today even from our politicians (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgTxGOrXqRQ). This post is about the psychology of warnings; why some get heard or ignored.
In Alaska there is a climate scientist named Chris Hiemstra (https://www.arcus.org/researchers/39265/display ). One of the many startling facts his research has found is the Alaskan permafrost is melting. The definition of permafrost is any soil, ice, or rock that is frozen for more than two consecutive years. All the plants and animals that have lived in Alaska for the past 10 of thousands of years. After they have died and fallen to the ground they froze. Permafrost is made up of layer upon layer of this organic frozen material. There is a place where we can see what is happening deep inside the permafrost.
It is a tunnel that is hundreds of feet long. It is built into the side of an Alaskan hill. Chris is a research scientist at the Army Corps of Engineers where he works at the Cold Air Regions Laboratory out of Fairbanks. He has spent a lot of time in this tunnel and he has found something that is quite startling.
There is 40,000 years of earth history frozen in time. If we were going to the tunnel we would walk through a set of gates then over to a wood cabin to get hardhats. Then we had over to a non descriptive wooden shed where a sign says, “US Army Corps of Engineers,” and below it is a yellow warning sign to watch our step. Inside it is pitch black. At the far end of the tunnel is a door that leads into the actual tunnel. Chris turns on the lights. The lower down we go or another words the further back in time the older the sediment. We see things that are unfathomable. For example, a 43,000-year-old Willow tree. It looks like it had just fallen last year. The cold temperatures and its ability to freeze time. The aroma is quite pundit.
The smell is from the organic matter that is coming back into our atmosphere. All around it smells like spoiled food in a freezer and it is unpleasant but what it ought to be is terrifying. Something is happening that has consequences for the entire planet. The organic matter (e.g., fungi, plants, animals) is thawing. As it thaws, it decays, as it decays, it releases extraordinary amounts of carbon into our atmosphere. The carbon is in the deep freeze and what happens to that carbon a reader might wonder. The carbon goes back into the atmosphere to form CO2.
The CO2 then causes climate change. The vicious cycle has already started, as the planet warms, the permafrost thaws in all those dead animals, plants, and fungi begin decomposing and the more decomposition which means more carbon into our atmosphere which means warmer temperatures even more melting of the permafrost. Which follows a disaster!
Fires have burned, since September of 2019, the size of at least 27 million acres of Australia. It is one of the country’s worst fire seasons on record. That’s an area larger than Portugal, and more than 14 times the area that burned in California in 2018, the state’s most destructive year for wildfires. in Australia. The smoke is making its way around the world. Australia’s bushfires have released 400 megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.
At the rate arising we are going to have 60% of all the glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica nearly 11,000 glaciers will be gone nearly 50 years (https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glaciers/quickfacts.html). The emotion we have towards climate change is futility. We can see this disaster unfolding before our very eyes but no one seems to be listening or are worried about the wrong things.
- How did I do?
- What should we do?
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A Side Note: Donald Douche Bag Trump!!
If you are worried about climate change then please view my paper on it http://chadfrancour.com/the-topic-of-climate-change/
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