Antarctic ice station likely to float away

[Boomer]

Antarctic ice station likely to float away
Monday, June 28, 2004

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Britain's Antarctic ice station has a design problem few architects can have envisaged when it was built -- within a decade it is likely to float away.

The existing base is built on an ice shelf which is likely to break off into the sea if global warming continues at its current rate.

So now the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has appealed for designers to come up with a replacement.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/06/28/britain.antarctic.reut/index.html

[havocmom]

1. So who ya gonna believe...

a bunch of seasick scientists watching the Antarctica disappear below their horizon, or the junta spin masters and corporate execs selling fossil fuels from the safety of their offices who insist there is no problem with global warming? </sarcasm>

[beyurslf]

2. Well the executives of course.

They have our best interest at heart and those scientists are just pushing propaganda to further their own interests. I mean, surely a CEO wouldn't do anything to harm me.

[havocmom]

3. yer so cute... wanna buy some swamp lan....

err, prime investment speculative property?

Sure, those pesky scientists have an agenda. We can't believe a thing they say... CEOs are capitalists and therefore good, honest, decent people who want everyone to prosper....

Seriously, I hear you, beyurslf. How in the world do we get through to people that this planet is the only life raft we have and we need to look beyond next quarter's reports when we make life and death decisions? I am not young, but I have friends who are. I would like for their children to have a future and I don't know how to get people to wake up to the dangers we face.

[Boomer]

4. I'm not all that young either...

So I must confess to a certain measure of guilty relief when I hear time-lines that give us another 20-25 years before disaster truly strikes. By the time I'm 75 I'll be quite willing to gracefully bow out of a Mad Max world.

Only trouble is, I don't really believe that we have two decades of comfort left. I think the worst-case scenario estimates are probably too optimistic, because researchers and scientists are constantly reassessing and going "Ooops, (fill-in-the-blank) is happening sooner than we expected." C02 is rising higher than expected, glaciers are melting faster, droughts are more intense, extreme weather is growing, fish populations are crashing, etc. etc.

All our clever little computer models still aren't powerful enough to grasp the entire complex web of Gaia, and I just have this sinking feeling that when we reach some critical point of overstressing too many different factors, that a massive cosmic breaker switch will flip.