While Trump Fiddles, the Planet is Burning

PRESIDENT TRUMP LIKES TO refer to journalists, at least those who do unflattering stories about him, as “among the most dishonest human beings on earth.”

Now the folks at the National Geographic Society have joined the brutal attack on our poor aggrieved President, by pushing more of damned science! In fact, if you watch a lot of Fox News, you might believe the Society has been peddling fake news since its founding in Washington, D.C., on January 27, 1888.

In other words, the swamp needed draining as far back as the first administration of Grover Cleveland.

Seriously—and this is serious—National Geographic magazine has run several stunning articles about climate change. Crisis on Ice can be found in the July 2017 issue. It’s well worth your time to read; especially in view of the news from Antarctica yesterday.

A 1 trillion ton iceberg, composed of enough water to fill Lake Erie twice, and roughly the size of Delaware, just separated from Larsen Ice Shelf (far left, gray, on the map below). 

In other words, as National Geographic has been trying to make clear in recent years, news from the region is grim. It’s likely to grow grimmer while Trump fiddles, a la´ Nero, as the planet burns.

THE ARTICLE IN QUESTION OPENS with a focus on the Pine Island Ice Shelf, bordering the Amundsen Sea (above, lower left). By Antarctic standards, Pine Island is tiny. But in 2015 and 2016 a chunk of shelf shattered and a 225-square-mile piece floated out to sea. That’s a large iceberg, roughly the size of Manhattan, but not what worries scientists most. 

Shelves of floating ice in the Antarctic hold back massive glaciers, almost like brakes on giant frozen 18-wheelers. Behind Pine Island you have the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, twice the size of Texas and two-and-a-half miles thick. Ice shelves act like floating dams, braced against isolated mountains and resting on ridges of rock just below the ocean’s surface and, reports National Geographic, these dams “are starting to fail.” Scientists worry—because they have ample evidence to worry about—because the Pine Island Ice Shelf, “about 1,300 feet thick over most of its area” thinned “by an average of 150 feet from 1994 to 2012.”

“These are the fastest retreating glaciers on the face of the Earth,” says Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. And to make the “fake news” even “faker”, National Geographic notes that Dr. Rignot “has studied the region for more than two decades.”

Unfortunately, President Trump has surely never heard of Rignot, or bothered to read National Geographic. He isn’t much of a reader and he’s proud of that fact. As for science, he gets all he needs straight from Ainsley Earhardt on his favorite show, Fox and Friends. Rignot? In Trump World, and for viewers of Fox News, he’s a schmuck, an elitist egghead. Ainsley? Now, Ainsley, you can trust! 

Before she graduated from the University of South Carolina, she married the star quarterback and was a member of the Homecoming Court.

So take that, loser scientists!

Who are you going to believe? Some leggy blonde, like Earhardt (right), or a glaciologist?

IF WATCHING FOX NEWS hasn’t already melted your brains (pun intentional) and you still believe in measurable facts, Rignot says the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is only a matter of time. It might not happen for 500 years. That would give humanity time to adapt. Or, it might occur in less than a century. “We have to get these numbers right,” he warns. “But we have to be careful not to waste too much time doing that.”

Rignot is backed up by the work of other scientists with “fake” Ph.D.’s in other “fake” fields of research. In 2012 a team led by glaciologist Martin Tuffer of the University of Alaska landed on the Pine Island Ice Shelf and set up camp for several weeks. Pine Island is an unstable place and no one had ever dared camp there before. Tuffer’s team “wanted to bore holes all the way through the ice shelf, so they could measure the heat eating at it from the seawater below.”

Again, the right wing might answer: Hey, we’ve got Alex Jones on our side! Jones doesn’t buy climate science crap, insists 9/11 was an inside job, and says no kids were gunned down at Sandy Hook. 

President Trump is a big, big fan.

Jones aside, what did Tuffer and his team discover while camped for weeks on the ice, with all their drills and their ice cores and their faith in science? In a little more than a month “the ice under their boots thinned by another seven feet.”

Most of us surely failed to notice, but interest in the region picked up in 1994 after the U.S. icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer reached the front of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, perhaps only the second vessel ever to manage. The Palmer remained for only twelve hours, when floating ice began to hem the vessel in. During that narrow window instruments lowered into the sea located a current streaming out from under the ice, water slightly less salty, as ice above created by thousands of years of snow falling and compacting and never melting began slowly melting away. 

Even worse, members of the expedition found evidence of salty, warmer water flowing down a canyon on the sea floor 3,000 feet below. This warm flow, sinking to the bottom because high salt content made it denser than less salty, fresher water flowing out, was undercutting the glacier itself.

Many miles inland, the warmer water, which originated in the South Pacific, was striking the “grounding line” where the massive glacier rests on the seafloor. According to yet another glaciologist, Adrian Jenkins, back in Cambridge, England after sailing on Palmer, the melt rates they found “were just crazy.” 

According to his calculations, the ice under the sheet was losing the equivalent of 13 cubic miles per year and near the grounding line, thinning by 300 feet annually. “It was just beyond our concept that a glacier would melt that fast,” he told National Geographic.

Jenkins and Stan Jacobs, an oceanographer aboard the Palmer, tried three times to return for further study. Not till January 2009 did they manage. This time they found melt rates had increased by 50 percent. They brought along a robotic submarine and unleashed it. Sonar images revealed an ice sheet slashed by upside-down channels, one 600 feet deep, all “carved, like rock canyons on land, by flowing water.”

IF ALL OF THIS SOUNDS OMINOUS, Trump—who can’t tell the difference between weather and climate—might counter once more. He might turn for support to the Koch brothers, who made their pile of loot by peddling coal and oil. According to Scientific American magazine, Charles and David Koch have been hard at work for years, funding scientists who leave no stone unturned to uncover “proof” that the planet’s climate has never been better. And we all know business leaders would never lie or pay others to lie for them merely to keep the cash flowing into their coffers!

(See: GlaxoSmithKline, Deutsche Bank, Volkswagen, Enron, Bernie Madoff, Martin Shekreli, Don Blankenship.)

Meanwhile, scientists keep tabulating and worrying. According to National Geographic, “Large swaths of West Antarctica are hemorrhaging ice these days.” Average annual temperatures on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula have risen five degrees Fahrenheit since 1950. Winters “have warmed an astonishing nine degrees. Sea ice now forms only four months a year instead of seven.” As sea ice breaks up, glaciers in the area have accelerated “two, five, even nine times their original speed. They’re relatively small glaciers and won’t raise sea levels much—but their acceleration has reinforced concerns that the same thing might happen to much larger glaciers along the Amundsen Sea.”

Ian Howit of the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center explains how warmer water, only 4 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit above freezing, flows under the ice. It doesn’t sound like much. But the 3,000 cubic miles of warmer water each year release “an amount of heat that exceeds the output of a hundred nuclear power plants, operating 24/7.” Crumbling ice shelves, says Helen Fricker of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, “are the canary in the coal mine. It’s time for us scientists to stop being so cautious,” and sound the alarm. 

“Maybe you don’t care much about that [rising sea levels] for 30 to 40 years,” Rignot adds, “but from 2050 to 2100 things could get really bad, and at that point listening to scientists is irrelevant.”

“For now,” National Geographic warns, “the best estimates suggest that Antarctica will sweat off enough ice to raise global sea levels by 1.5 to 3.5 feet by 2100, depending on how quickly humans continue to pump out greenhouse gases. Throw in Greenland and other rapidly melting glaciers round the world, and sea level could plausibly rise three to seven feet by 2100.” And it could be worse.

(Stop and think about that a moment: How old will your children or their children be in 2050 or 2100?)

SO, LET’S GIVE THE LAST WORD to Don Blankenship—not Don Blankenship, the crooked coal mine operator (linked above)—but another glaciologist working at the University of Texas. He and a team are studying threats to the massive Totten Glacier, larger in area than the State of California. Totten sits on high ground along the east Antarctic coast, and so until recently was believed secure. The Australian ice breaker Aurora Australis reached the front of Totten for the first time in 2015. Already, there was evidence of powerful currents of warm water undermining the ice. If Totten collapsed it might raise sea levels round the world as much as 13 more feet.

“The fuse is lit,” Blankenship grimly explained. “We’re just running around mapping where all the bombs are.”

As for our President? He doesn’t seem to care. As far as most of us can tell, he probably spends his mornings in the White House glued to Fox and Friends, checking out Ainsley Earnhardt’s very shapely legs.