Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Scientists analyzing more than three decades of weather data for the northern Alaskan outpost of Barrow have linked 7C rise to the decline in Arctic sea ice, reports Climate News Network. This has major implications for wildlife, indigenous cultures, and the planet’s ecosystem.
Dahr Jamail’s essay illustrates how scientists are starting to acknowledge that the startling environmental changes happening worldwide, including massive ice melts, extreme weather such as super typhoons, wildfire, heat waves, and droughts, as well as the growing acidification of ocean waters, could result in massive species extinctions, including us.
Ice is melting in the Arctic at one of the fastest rates in human history. Researchers and climate scientists monitoring ice melt in the Arctic have started using the ominous term “death spiral” to describe what’s happening at the top of the world.
The health of the world’s oceans is deteriorating even faster than had previously been thought, a report warns. “We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change. The next mass extinction may have already begun.”
Dr. James Hansen: We can fix this. The answer is a price on carbon. We must make the price of fossil fuels honest, reflecting their cost to society including the economic devastation wrought by storms like Sandy, the toll on farmland and ecosystems, as well as priceless human lives.
It’s like a Gary Larson cartoon. Fires, floods, and droughts keep coming and we laugh them off, though the joke might be on us. We must all make positive personal and political contributions to solving the climate crisis before it’s too late.
Inuit communities, elders and hunters, speak regarding social and ecological impacts of a warming Arctic and their conception of poles shifting, winds different, stars unrecognized. A Labrador Inuit Aurora Borealis myth illuminates their traditional connection with the stars.