Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Researchers Tally the Global Cost of Melting Permafrost

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Researchers Tally the Global Cost of Melting Permafrost

Click here to access article by Tim Radford from Climate News Network based on a study by two scientists at Cambridge University, Chris Hope & Kevin Schaefer, published in Nature Climate Change (a science journal behind a paywall).

Although the emphasis in Radford's report is on the dollar costs, the social costs are much more striking to me. Presumably the researchers thought that by emphasizing dollar costs, they could more readily catch the attention of our capitalist ruling class.

The two scientists report in Nature Climate Change that if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise as they are doing now, the thaw of the permafrost and the loss of the ice caps could release 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon now locked in as frozen organic matter.

What would follow would include a higher chance of catastrophic floods, wind storms, heat waves and drought, the accelerated melting of the Greenland (and West Antarctic) ice sheets, rising sea levels, the loss of agricultural land and rising energy demand as more and more people began to depend on air conditioning.

This brief summary doesn't begin to capture the devastation in the lives of people impacted by these natural disasters resulting from human-caused climate destabilization.