Failure™ Magazine

A World Without Ice

Why ice matters—and how humans are upsetting the delicate geological balance between Earth and this critical component of our environment.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Science & Technology

How long before we begin to see climate refugees?
There are already climate refugees—those who are already feeling effects of changes in the hydrological cycle, particularly the changes that are leading to more severe droughts. And within a decade or two, we will see refugees leaving areas that depend on melting ice atop high mountains for part of their agricultural and domestic water. When the water supply disappears, or is greatly diminished, people are forced to move.

Another category of climate refugees are those that must abandon their homes because of rising sea levels. Particularly vulnerable are the people that live on low-lying islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans, where higher sea level is already damaging coastal infrastructure and degrading fresh water aquifers. A rise in sea level of only one meter would displace more than 100 million people worldwide.

What impact has the U.K. climate data scandal had in terms of public perception about climate change?
The impact on the scientific underpinnings of climate change is insignificant. There is more than ample redundancy of evidence, from many lines of inquiry pursued by diverse groups of climate scientists worldwide, to continue to support the principal conclusions about Earth’s changing climate and the likely causes and consequences. The discrediting of any single piece of evidence or any single research group does not change these bedrock conclusions.

But where Climate Gate has done some damage is in the political arena, where it has hardened the positions of the climate-change deniers. But the road towards getting a significant climate bill through the U.S. Senate—and then through a Conference Committee to reconcile it with the Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House of Representatives in 2009—has probably become rougher and steeper.

Henry Pollack’s ‘World Without Ice’ Web site

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