Didn’t see that coming
Talk about ironic. Wise people stashed an emergency supply of seeds in a vault buried in permafrost within the Arctic Circle, in case humanity ever needed it. Only it turns out the permafrost isn’t perma. We done melted it.
It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.
The vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and contains almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an important food crop. When it was opened in 2008, the deep permafrost through which the vault was sunk was expected to provide “failsafe” protection against “the challenge of natural or man-made disasters”.
But since then we have learned just how damn fast permafrost can melt.
But soaring temperatures in the Arctic at the end of the world’s hottest ever recorded year led to melting and heavy rain, when light snow should have been falling. “It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,” said Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government, which owns the vault.
It never is in our plans. It was not in our plans to destroy the climate we evolved in by driving around in our awesome cars and flying around on our awesome planes, but it happened anyway. We clearly don’t know enough to live the way we do.
The meltwater didn’t actually reach the vault (this time), and the seeds are safe for now. But scary warning is scary.
But the breach has questioned the ability of the vault to survive as a lifeline for humanity if catastrophe strikes. “It was supposed to [operate] without the help of humans, but now we are watching the seed vault 24 hours a day,” Aschim said. “We must see what we can do to minimise all the risks and make sure the seed bank can take care of itself.”
They don’t know if last year’s high temperatures on Spitsbergen were a one-off or the new normal.
“The question is whether this is just happening now, or will it escalate?” said Aschim. The Svalbard archipelago, of which Spitsbergen is part, has warmed rapidly in recent decades, according to Ketil Isaksen, from Norway’s Meteorological Institute.
“The Arctic and especially Svalbard warms up faster than the rest of the world. The climate is changing dramatically and we are all amazed at how quickly it is going,” Isaksen told Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.
They’re digging trenches to divert meltwater away from the entrance tunnel, and…hoping for the best.
Shame on you. You think that had something to do with global warming? But global warming is just a hoax!
This is one reason why I refused to teach my Environmental Science class online this fall. Too many updates needed what with the new administration and all that…I talk about what the EPA does, may have to change that to did. Now I will need to add this tidbit when I talk about the Global Seed Vault…it’s easy enough to update in face-to-face lectures, but lots more work to keep up online.
I really believe human civilization is doomed. My latest play (being produced in July in Lincoln, yea!) ends with cockroaches creating a new world after humans destroy everything, and fixing the world around the needs and desires of cockroaches.
iknklast, I’m only an hour from Lincoln, but sadly it’s Lincoln, Lincolnshire, UK, which I’m guessing is the wrong Lincoln (Nebraska?). Shame, because that sounds like it could be a good play.
Well, you say sadly, but the Lincs one is very nice. (I’ve never been to the Nebraska one – or if I have it was only passing through.) Would visit again.
Acolyte, it is, indeed, Lincoln, NE. The play is about colony collapse disorder, and one of the first theatre professionals to do a reading confessed that he didn’t care at all about the environment, didn’t see it as important, and this play made him care. Anthropomorphic bees and cockroaches can do a lot more than all the charts and graphs I could have shown him.
Good job!
It’s dismaying and infuriating that human power structures still allow the influence of pathological individuals who have ended up in critically sensitive positions to distort and pervert those structures to the detriment of everyone and everything. Even worse, it seems to be be a fatal part of our make-up that some non-trivial percentage of humans will follow such pathological individuals, whatever they do, however they do it. It’s not like we haven’t had plenty of warning: if the last century of human history did not teach us this, then nothing will. Human society is an ongoing, full scale version of a combination of the Stanford Prison Experiment and the work of Stanley Milgram. Combine these tendencies with our species’ advanced technological capabilities and you’ve got a great recipe for ecocide.
Cockroaches or social insects like ants or bees might be less inclined to be as directly destructive to their own kind as we are, but still might screw up on the whole idea of ecosystems and the biosphere. If the needs and desires of (INSERT SPECIES NAME HERE), narrowly construed, are the sole factor in decision making, then (INSERT SPECIES NAME HERE) is likely to be as beneficial to the whole in the long run as any other cancer.
Until recently, humanity didn’t really have any crises that demanded immediate attention such that deliberation and consensus building could not have been used. The dictators’s “emergencies” requiring immediate action and accompanying demands for more and wider powers did not really exist. Ironically, denialists believe they are staving off such dictatorship in their bold, libertarian resistance of reality. By preventing timely, meaningful action in mitigating anthropogenic climate change, they are counting on the tender mercies of the court of natural selection. This is not likely to end well for us, as the laws of physics, chemistry and biology are going to be even less forgiving and more draconian than mere human governments. They don’t care what we “believe” or don’t. There are no mitigating circumstances. Sentences handed down are the mandatory minimum. But then again, we cannot plead ignorance of the law, nor is this our first offence….
As a species, we seem to be as unprepared to exercise responsibly the power we have taken into our hands as Trump is to handle the power he as an individual has been given. We might be laughing at him, shocked and appalled, but he and his supporters are as human as the rest of us. We are told that Trump is “learning” on the job, but so are we all.We have failed to build effective safety measures against the worst known aspects of our species’ character. Earth can no longer afford our learning curve. Our blundering ignorance and arrogance make us a danger to all species on this planet. Our careless use of the power we wield will probably be our own undoing, but I feel much more anger, sadness and remorse for the helpless, blameless species we have already drivent to extinction and those additional ones that are likely to be taken down by us in our rush to oblivion.
The New Philosopher on nature (“What if trees could sue?”, Winter 2016/2017) has a striking example of life mattering: “A master of all creatures, including robins, polecats and humans. An organism renowned for its success in diverting resources to itself, even for tricking hosts into nestling it. (DBC Pierre, “Nature shmature”, p. 47) This is an example of pure identity-mattering (Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Mattering Matters, Free Inquiry. February/March 2017, p. 16). The example is a tumour, as indifferent a life form as you please, “as natural as a sunshower”. The tumour is a metaphor for humans diverting Earth’s resources for themselves leading to the Anthropocene.
An unlikely source from 1966 has a good description of Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD). “No weight of nuclear attack which is at all probable could induce gross changes in the balance of nature that approach in type or degree the ones that human civilization has already inflicted on the environment. These include cutting most of the original forests, tilling the prairies, irrigating the deserts, damming and polluting the streams, eliminating certain species and introducing others, overgrazing hillsides, flooding valleys, and even preventing forest fires.” (L H Wegner; Air Force. Project Rand Quick count: a general war casualty estimation model. IBM-7090 computer model for estimating short-term fatalities and casualties from hypothetical general war nuclear attacks. http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM5115.html; quoted by Eric Schlosser, Command and Control, The Penquin Press, 2013, p. 354) The implication was that nature might find nuclear warfare a relief.
“Earth can no longer afford our learning curve.” [Your Name’s not Bruce? #6] Humans have “ceased adapting themselves to their environment and instead adapted the environment to themselves. In practice what this meant was that almost everything about our bodies–including genes and brains, tools we needed to free ourselves from our Darwinian shackles–was obsolete.” (William Watkin, “The obsolete human being”, New Philosopher, Issue 15, 2nd quarter, 2017, p. 103) We are genetically engineering ourselves (three parent children replacing mitochondrial DNA, using CRISPR gene editing which is based on viral immune systems evolved by bacteria ..).
Ellen LaConte’s approach (in Life Rules) for humans to use to respond to the environmental challenges like climate change is to choose a life form that has evolved survival strategies through major environmental crises as a paradigm: bacteria, responding to environmental disruptions over millions of years based on natural selection and, through the mechanisms of reproduction and death, keeping the solutions which act, genetically, like immune systems in the future. “My latest play (being produced in July in Lincoln, yea!) ends with cockroaches creating a new world after humans destroy everything, and fixing the world around the needs and desires of cockroaches.” [iknklast 1] Life rules as LaConte says.
“The laws of physics, chemistry and biology are going to be even less forgiving and more draconian than mere human governments” [Your Name’s not Bruce? #6] Climate change is “as natural as a sunshower”. Paraphrasing Carse (Finite and Infinite Games), the indifference of nature is a silence so profound that we don’t know what it is silent about, if anything.
“I really believe human civilization is doomed.” [iknklast 1] The Inquisition is a fairly recent example of how human civilization responded to environmental stress. After the Moors conquered part of what is now Spain, Muslims, Jews and Christians flourished in a community following Arabic advances in mathematics and science and appreciation of classical thought following the Axial Age by preserving it in writing. Nature is indifferent to human mattering. Jews were chosen as scapegoats for environmental stresses from a mini ice age, starvation and plague and forced to convert to Christianity, then punished as inauthentic Christians by beheading and quartering as a public spectacle. Finally, Jews and Muslims were expelled by an authoritarian Christian regime. Public beheadings and forced migration motivated by religious beliefs: today’s headlines.
There is rational thought (E. O. Wilson, Diana Beresford-Kroeger, …) and action (local, community, co-operative) appreciating nature of complex systems (LaConte; Lawhead arXiv 1502.01476, …), the sort of message iknklast conveys in her face-to-face lectures.