Procrastinet

PANIC! (Pre-Bird Flu Edition)

filed under: Stuff to worry about

I'm currently researching a future post which will throw my hat into the ring of the H5N1 Avian Flu Pandemic demi-panic (hee hee). As I emailed to my brother, an infectious disease specialist, I'm trying to calibrate between:

a) Make our peace with God;

b) Take some sensible, non-hysterical precautions (buy a hand-crank radio, some canned goods, a Nanomask, etc.);

c) Stay calm, do nothing and feel haughtily superior to everyone who's freaking out about it;

d) other

Once I've made my pick, I'll write all about it. I haven't been able to get my full apocalyptic breakdown-of-life-as-we-know-it panic on since Y2K, and I'm jonesing.

For now, however, this will do JUST FINE. I read about this at BoingBoing last week and I've been throwing up slightly on a regular basis ever since.

Basically, ice in the arctic is melting. There's always an oscillation, as it melts in the summer and re-freezes in the winter, but now there's less in the summer. For the last four years there have been record lows - like, less by an area the size of Texas kind of lows.

This is scary because: part of how the arctic stays frozen is that energy from the sun hits the ice and snow that's already up there and bounces right back off of all that whiteness, adding little heat to the area. When there's less ice, there's less white. When there's less white, there's more dark, which ABSORBS the heat rather than bouncing it off into space. Which heats things up and makes less ice. Feedback loop! Rinse, repeat.

So: it's possible we'll cross a climatological tipping point, and that by the end of this century there will be no summer ice in the arctic. Which will do all sorts of nasty things, including possibly raising sea levels worldwide by 30+ feet. Which is a drag, but imagine our equity when our Park Slope apartment is WATERFRONT!

Go read the piece at BoingBoing, and follow the links in it, if you'd like to help your ulcer along. This is the best summary of the panic, including the money quote:

The demon in me wants to say: Party and make merry. No need now to worry about Kyoto, recycling your aluminum cans, or using too much toilet paper, when, soon enough, we'll be debating how many hunter-gathers can survive in the scorching deserts of New England or the tropical forests of the Yukon.

The good parent in me, however, screams: How is it possible that we can now contemplate with scientific seriousness whether our children's children will themselves have children?

For a rosier take on the situation, the New York Times (registration required) has an extensive article about the developing gold rush in the newly iceless arctic. In short: yeah we'll all die in like a century or two but in the meantime MAN are some people gonna get filthy stinking rich...

Posted by rjt at October 10, 2005 12:19 PM