The Silence After the Big Arctic Melt
Like the silence after a tremendous avalanche, the question that has yet to be asked (and really must be, if global warming is the catastrophic reality that many people assume) is, so what do we do? That point is emphasized in a recent report that Arctic melting seems to have crossed into a “new normal”:
The report, written by 121 scientists from around the world, said statistics point to a shift in theArctic health in 2006. That was right before 2007, when a mix of weather conditions and changing climate led to a record loss of sea ice, from which the region has never recovered. This summer’s sea ice melt was the second worst on record, a tad behind 2007.
“We’ve got a new normal,” said co-author Don Perovich, a geophysicist at the Army Corps of Engineers Cold Research and Engineering Lab. “Whether it’s a tipping point and we’ll never recover, who’s to say?”
Perovich gives hope to those who wish to arrest the trend toward a warming planet, but if there really is such a thing as a “tipping point,” shouldn’t we begin to figure out the “what then” now? Global-warming skeptics would have significantly less fodder if public resources and headlines not only described the looming catastrophe but began the conversation about how to deal with it.