ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

A new study by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program finds that the water melting from Greenland’s ice sheet has increased by 30% over the last decade.

The study estimates that, as a result of the melting, sea levels will rise by 0.5 to 1.5 meters by 2100, threatening coastal cities and flooding island nations. That amount of sea level rise is double that estimated by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007. The IPCC estimate did not incorporate sea level rise due to the melting of the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets.

Lead author Dorthe Dahl-Jensen of the University of Copenhagen said in a press release:

Greenland’s Ice Sheet is the single largest body of freshwater ice in the northern hemisphere. It contains around 3 million km of ice and, if it were to melt completely, this would cause global sea level to rise by roughly 7 meters . . . . Already now we are seeing how the areas experiencing surface melt are expanding northwards and that the periods of melt in southern Greenland are getting longer. The development in the last decade has taken scientists by surprise and it is still uncertain how the ice will react to future climate change.

The Summary – The Greenland Ice Sheet in a Changing Climate: Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic (SWIPA) 2009 is available at the AMAP website, as is the full Science Report.

Another new study published in the journal Nature adds further support to the AMAP results. The research team reconstructed the sea levels in the last interglacial period, around 125,000 years ago, at which time polar temperatures were around 3-5C warmer and equatorial sea-surface temperatures were around 2.5-3.5C warmer than today. The results showed that sea levels around the world during the last interglacial were between 6.6m and 9m higher than today, which implies significant melting of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets.Even as the AMAP study is being released in Copenhagen, the climate talks, with less than two days to go, are blowing up. Even though the targets on the table are so weak and full of loopholes as to make the proposals meaningless, negotiators have given up on a replacement for Kyoto. The only remaining hope is that they will be able to come to a “politically binding” agreement to serve as a foundation for a legally binding agreement to be negotiated later.

The world’s poorer countries are blaming the world’s rich countries – and capitalism itself – for destroying the world, while rich countries are refusing to change targets that clearly fall short of what’s needed.

George Monbiot at The Guardian writes that the talks at Copenhagen are bigger than climate change – it’s a battle to redefine humanity.

This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us.

And, as the words and stance of the world’s poorer nations show, it’s about fairness. Global warming cannot be addressed without addressing the issue of fairness. Sharon Astyk writes that people will even act against their best interests – even if it means their own destruction – if they perceive they are being treated unfairly:

I think it enormously unlikely that we will respond to climate change as we must. But if we do, it will only happen if people see themselves as part of a story in which the distribution of discomfort and trouble is done fairly, and they are ensured a fair share. Fairness may not be logical, but it is essential.

The “cult of economics” that dominates our political ideology assumes that people always always rational, always act for their own gains, that markets are always efficient, that economics doesn’t have anything to say about equity or fairness – and that nothing is wrong with any of this, ever.

The situation we find ourselves in demands unselfish behavior and acts, toward a common good; which in turn require redefining prosperity and a wholesale reworking of the globe’s economic system, including its goals and its metrics.

It should be obvious to everybody that an economic system that results in wrecking Earth’s climate and destroying Earth’s ecosystems – squandering humankind’s “natural capital” in pursuit of growth – has failed to produce prosperity. We desperately need another model.