The Thin Ice Of Modern Life

By Cernig

"If you should go skating
On the thin ice of modern life
Dragging behind you the silent reproach
Of a million tear-stained eyes
Don't be surprised when a crack in the ice
Appears under your feet." (Thin Ice - Pink Floyd)

Well, the thin ice of modern life is no longer a metaphor:

Dramatic evidence of the break-up of the Arctic ice-cap has emerged from research during an expedition by the Canadian military.

Scientists travelling with the troops found major new fractures during an assessment of the state of giant ice shelves in Canada's far north.

The team found a network of cracks that stretched for more than 10 miles (16km) on Ward Hunt, the area's largest shelf.

The fate of the vast ice blocks is seen as a key indicator of climate change.

One of the expedition's scientists, Derek Mueller of Trent University, Ontario, told me: "I was astonished to see these new cracks.

"It means the ice shelf is disintegrating, the pieces are pinned together like a jigsaw but could float away," Dr Mueller explained.

When the ice packs are melting at record rates, denialist reports funded by the energy lobby really don't have a solid empirical underpinning. That debate is over. There's a debate now about what can be done to ameliorate the effects of global warming - and even some who have previously been denialist have joined it. That's good.

The next debate - the one the U.S. is very late to - is how climate change will affect geopolitics and foreign policies worldwide. The BBC article I cited above notes that:

The Canadian military's expedition was billed as a "sovereignty patrol", the lines of snowmobiles flying Canadian flags in a display of control.

Canada, Russia, Norway and other arctic nations have been busy laying claim to vast swathes of Arctic seabed - - and the resources they hold. Canada has said it will consider any Northern passgae as sovereign and charge shipping to pass through. All these nations are beefing up their arctic-warfare military abilities. The UK is claiming seabed around it's South Atlantic territories, believing that global warming will make their riches exploitable in the not-too-distant future. Global warming will cause shortages and surpluses of food and water in already unstable regions, will cause population migrations straining inadequate infrastructures to breaking point, and will upset the current worldmap of who is resource rich and who is not.

But I've yet to see any of the US presidential hopefuls' plans for dealing with these challenges. In this respect, denialists have done America a massive disservice by retarding the climate change debate in the US to the detriment of the nation's national interest and national security.