While the president rages, the world melts
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Version 0 of 1. As President Trump spent another week rage-tweeting, the world continued to warm, and the consequences became ever-clearer — and more alarming. A consortium of 89 scientists released in the journal Nature on Tuesday a study showing that Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is losing seven times as much ice now as a quarter-century ago. At times, climate deniers insist that the Earth’s ecosystems are so vast that humans could not affect them as drastically as scientists insist. So try to imagine the size of these shifts: Greenland has lost nearly 4 trillion tons of ice since 1992. Scientists fear Greenland has shed nearly 400 billion tons this year alone. Greenland’s melting has already driven up sea levels by more than a centimeter, with much more to come. Each centimeter makes a difference, equating to about another 6 million people suffering from annual flooding. Using precise satellite measurements, the consortium found that Greenland’s contribution to sea-level rise tracks the high-end, bad-case scenario scientists previously projected. That formerly high-end scenario predicts that Greenland could cause 16 centimeters of sea-level rise by century’s end. Factoring in the new information, scientists warn that 400 million people could be in danger of yearly flooding by 2100. With the bad-case scenario now the realistic one, experts will likely have to adjust upward their estimates of a bad-case scenario in future decades. Observers across the planet are finding all too often that predictions of warming’s effects were too conservative rather than too alarmist. Also on Tuesday, the federal Arctic Report Card found that thawing permafrost may already be emitting massive amounts of greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere. As melting proceeds, microbes break down dead plants and animals previously trapped in the permafrost, releasing carbon dioxide and methane in the process. This is one of the perilous feedback loops that scientists feared, as warming promotes thawing permafrost and thawing permafrost promotes more warming. It is unclear how bad Arctic greenhouse gas releases will get, and how quickly — but this is more bad news. Even when humans finally stop pumping greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere, the legacy of humanity’s reshaping of the planet will manifest for decades and centuries. Amid these discouraging developments, the European Union this past week formally adopted the goal of producing no net carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, a target scientists have counseled world leaders to meet. “Our goal is to reconcile our economy with our planet, and make it work for our people,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Imagine those words coming from Mr. Trump — or almost any Republican. Unfortunately, Americans have to look across an ocean for global leadership on one of the world’s most pressing issues. Read more: The Post’s View: There’s an effective and progressive solution for climate change. Why won’t Democrats embrace it? Letters to the Editor: The public needs to know the details of climate change The Post’s View: World leaders are failing our future generations on climate change Eugene Robinson: We’re losing our climate battle. We have no one but ourselves to blame. The Post’s View: No one should want their children to live in this ‘bleak’ future |