Sea Level Rise — Strange Article

You can find it at the link below. It’s not required reading for this article, though it should be required reading for ALL LEGISLATORS world-wide. With a pop quiz on it, even.

That link leads to an article that is — to my mind — strangely written. While presenting some of the most devastating facts so far on climate change, it yet seriously minimizes the impact of it all.

I’ve gotten so used to articles in the last few years that inflate and fear-monger “facts” that this is actually kind off-balancing.

The facts presented are quite serious. Very, very serious. Yet the article says things like “pretty disastrous” and “global average sea level rise of 1 inch [to date, since 1992]”.  The fact is that average sea level rise is meaningless; one needs to address sea level rise at the equator — it’s a spinning ball after all. Tell me how many square miles of land surface have vanished since 1990 — that would be an interesting stat that might put it in perspective for the general public, maybe even for legislators.

The article mixes very grim facts with seriously understated phrases. One could argue that they are being “neutral” in their reporting. This is not neutral, however. The way it’s written minimizes the impact of the facts, instead of placing the facts in correct contrast. That is not neutral.

But here’s the most serious flaw in the article: it never mentions the most important consquence of all, that, since the two ice flows mentioned contain 99% of the world’s fresh water (!!) and are melting at ever increasing rates — blah blah, yeah yeah – they NEVER MENTION the change in the ocean’s salinity that represents. Very serious. Far more important than vanishing square miles of land.

Change in salinity == change in ocean currents == massive change in global weather.
At the least.(2)

This means the climate change thingie is moving much faster than the “scientists” thought it would, which many of us knew but the world at large has been oddly reluctant to acknowledge, and this article really isn’t helping as much as it might have.

Still, maybe being written so ativan-cautiously  (that is, written like the author is under seriously calmative drugs) will make it readable to those who still seriously wish to deny there’s a problem. Stating things as they actually, dispationately seem to be hasn’t worked; maybe seriously understating it will let them accept some “new facts”(1).

Yet the understating of the consquences of those facts has serious problems in itself, such as minimizing how seriously we are running out of time to minimize(3) the coming changes.

1. Actually, these are not new facts. There’s nothing new or surprising mentioned in the article. It was all predicted decades ago and is proceeding apace as predicted. When are the world’s leaders going to sit up and take notice? Wars, inflation, profit addiction, cyber-warfare, AI… none of that matters a whitt right now compared to what’s happening to the planet itself. Hello? Don’t you get it yet?

2. If you don’t follow that you might review the movie The Day After Tomorrow (Dennis Quade) which was a very accurate climate change movie. I heard an interview with three world-renouned climatologists when that movie was first released, two of whom said, “very accurate” and the third said “good, but it will actually be worse than that.” The only flaw in the movie, they said, was the speed with which the changes took place, but given it was a movie such things can be forgiven… they said. (I say differently, but that’s me.)

3. Note: minimize the effects. They can no longer be stopped, but we can still minimize it. 50 years ago was when we could have taken action to stop it all. Too late. I have found articles going back even 70 years talking about how “Humans seem to actually be changing the climate!” Gadzooks. That was when it could have been stopped. Now we can only hope to preserve the Earth as a livable habitat both for Humans and for the uncountable trillions of other living creatures subject to Humanity’s bad bahaviors.